More polls, Biden's sinking. A Sienna/NYT poll has Trump leading Biden 48%-43%. I think there's others that aren't as bad, but none of them are good.

The far right's winning in France, too. The only brightish spot is that Rishi Sunak looks like he's losing, but only because the UK is finally sick of his party's stupidity.

Too bad Stamer's political project is just "we'll be like the Tories, but better".

For now, the swing state polls are stabilized; and from what I'm reading, a lot of the chattering class and political insider types are being deeply shocked when they go out to talk to actual Democratic voters. Said voters are tending to stake out the position 'we nominated him, who the hell do you think you are?' on the subject; and it's apparently not what was expected.

Besides, now the GOP has formally trotted out the first racist/sexist attacks on Harris as a presidential candidate; and the Democrats still beating the 'get rid of Biden because whatever' horse are kinda stuck explaining how openly playing into the hands of the Republicans and their press, who are dying to make that their campaign, will improve things.

Stabilized isn't recovered, Trump's still ahead and the Democrats need a deus ex machina at this point. The time for the Democrats to have picked a younger candidate was months ago, now they're stuck with Biden unless Democratic Congresscritters and big donors abandon him en masse within the next three weeks. Seems like they're pretty screwed either way, either Biden dodders towards November, or they break down into a big screaming match over who to replace him with. If the Democrats make it out of this one, it'll be such a narrow miss.

And honestly, unless both Clarence Thomas and Thomas Alito die of heart attacks within the next 4 years, I don't know how the US is going to reverse this march towards authoritarianism. You know Biden's not gonna pack the court. I think the best we can hope for is some kind of holding pattern until Trump kicks the bucket. He's never going to jail at this rate. Then the world's going to have to brace for whatever demagogue the GOP throws up to replace him.

Well, it won't be our first civil war.

For what it's worth, I doubt strongly that someone tried to shoot Trump with a Republican rifle (AR-15) for political reasons yesterday. I'd cheerfully bet my own money that one of Trump's millions of hanging offenses against his fellow man nearly caught up to him in Pennsylvania. I tend to doubt we'd ever find out just which one it was, though.

Edit: one hears that the shooter was denied admission to his high school rifle team (apparently they have one) because he was judged so dangerously bad at aiming on a 50 foot range with a .22 rifle. So he climbed up on a roof with his father's AR-15 to try to shoot Trump at (checks notes) 145 yards. That's got to be the most MAGA male thing I've heard in months.

Every time you think things couldn't get worse... Seriously, of all crazies to shoot at Trump, it had to be the one with bad aim. We now have the worst of both worlds; Trump is a martyr, and he's still alive. At least the shooter wasn't an obvious left winger or a Muslim because then we'd have a bunch of revenge hate crimes on top of everything else.

Trump's full MAGAttery VP pick JD Vance won't do anything to help him win over independent voters, if anything, he's going to be the attack dog while Trump pretends to be above it all (for about two weeks, you know he can't shut up). But the thing that's making me twitchy is that this is how authoritarians choose proteges - people who don't have any political accomplishments or support base outside of the big guy's coattails. Vance is a suck-up.

And maybe Trump's thinking he doesn't need to win independents because he's planning to cheat. He has the Supreme Court in the bag already. What's anyone gonna do? Sue him?

Welp. Biden has withdrawn from the race. Going to be interesting from here on out.

I dare say it already was interesting. But suddenly and dramatically, Trump is the very model of the incompetent and senile old man in the race (the Modern Major General being otherwise engaged). This has the potential for some amusement.

Looks like the Democrats are unifying behind Kamala Harris and she's brought in $80 million in donations already. (Not sure how much of that was money that would've gone to Biden anyway if he hadn't flamed out at the debate). But seeing the Democrats actually get their stuff together for once is a rare treat.

The Trump campaign seems to be wigging out in a way that suggests they were not prepared for this.

Well, the Trump campaign has finally settled on their answer: they got nothing. They dropped $12 million on an ad campaign in the swing states that simply attack Harris for being female and liberal; which is to concede that they can't campaign against her at all, and can only win with a base turnout strategy.

Which, btw, is impossible: so look for even more massive election fraud and lawfare from the GOP going forward, because they have an election they can't possibly win to steal or Trump's going to die in prison.

In passing: Trump just proved that he has nothing to do with Project 2025 by firing the guy who was officially in charge. Go ahead and take a second with that. I'll wait.

In other news, it seems the 'senile imbecile convict/didn't actually write in his book that he had sex with a sofa' campaign is having problems with being called 'weird'. They'll probably try to solve it by getting rid of the guy who didn't actually write in his book that he had sex with a sofa, largely because no one believes he wouldn't. Still, that'll be extremely awkward for the senile imbecile convict; so it's still up in the air exactly how it'll play out.

Can Trump actually dump Vance after the convention? I thought the point of a convention was to confirm the candidates. I mean, Trump sure managed to find the world's only married incel to be his running mate, the man's a phony and a creep. But it tracks because his sole hiring criteria was willingness to abase oneself for Trump, which is exactly how dictators choose deputies, and strongly suggests to me that he's planning another coup.

How much chaos can Trump actually cause if his MAGA-nut county election officials refuse to certify the votes?

The convention doesn't mean anything, the party doesn't mean anything; neither of these have any standing under the Constitution. What matters is when the various States require official notification of the slate. Until then it's just extremely politically awkward, after that it becomes legally very tricky bordering on impossible.

As to the latter? Widespread violence is certainly on the menu; everything short of that is to be expected unless the Democrats win big and/or simply start arresting all the Republicans involved (incumbent Governors and Presidents have the power to do that, at least on paper).

So it's absolutely in the realm of possibility for say, Georgia governor Brian Kemp to screw with the election results in the wider Atlanta area?

That much isn't hard. The governor of Texas stole many tens of thousands of Democratic votes by just refusing to supply enough voter forms to Harris county; so presumably something similar could happen in Atlanta. Though the current governor of Georgia is mostly interested in committing election fraud for his own benefit, not Trump's.