For whatever reason - and I've felt it too - there's a sense that things have shifted against Harris. Some of that is just the flood of polling and the tendency to focus on the ones that scare you. Some of it, I think, is the nonstop flood of fundraising emails that scare you into giving money.
I think the final thing is that we haven't had anything like the debate, where you can clearly point to Trump's manifest decline. There hasn't been that story that shows Harris surging ahead.
This is weird, because Trump continues to say awful, awful things, he continues to stay both deeply stupid and plainly false things. We have the revelations from Bob Woodward's new book that Trump sent scarce Covid testing machines to Putin during the 2020 chaos and lockdowns.
The basic dynamic is that Trump does and say so many things that you can't actually focus on one of them, but the Covid machines should be a line of attack that hits along multiple axes. There's the self-dealing, the closeness with Putin, the botched Covid response.
A quick check of the Times 2024 page shows zero stories on this (the front page dominated by Milton, of course). The WaPo - which has a relationship with Woodward - does not have the story on their campaign page.
This is journalistic malpractice.
We have so many breathless horserace stories and campaign strategy stories, but the fact that Trump gave scarce medical resources that hospitals were clamoring for in the middle of the 2020 lockdowns should be the lead in every newspaper. It's not even a story!
If we slip into fascism, it will be because of a fundamentally broken new media unable to give the American people the most important information about their political future.
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