CHRIS CRUCIAL: Kamala ≠ Joe 💔

PLUS: The Trump blacklist!

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1. Harris breaks with Biden

A week ago, Vice President Kamala Harris went on “The View” and was asked if she would have done anything differently than President Joe Biden over the last four years.

“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris responded.

Which, well, terrible.

On Wednesday night, in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Harris finally did what she should have done last week — or even sooner.

“My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden's presidency,” Harris told Baier. “Like every new president, I will bring my life experiences, my professional experiences, and fresh and new ideas. I represent a new generation of leadership.”

This is, in a vacuum, a very good answer. Because Biden is not at all popular. And neither are many of his policies — especially on issues that voters say are most important to them: Immigration and the economy.

Of course, presidential campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum. Harris DID say she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden just a week ago. It, rightly, got a lot of attention.

The question for me is a) whether undecided voters saw “The View” clip b) whether undecided voters will see her (much better) answer on Fox News and c) whether, if they did see both interviews, there is any cognitive dissonance there.

Because there’s no way Harris thought last week that she wouldn’t change a thing about the Biden presidency and this week she is her own person who is going to be totally different than the Biden presidency.

The big takeaway — for me at least — is that Harris is now on the right side of the Biden question. I think she needs to repeat the line she used with Bret at every single rally, townhall and media appearance between now and the election.

She will lose if people — especially undecideds — see her as a continuation of Biden’s policies. She will win if she is able to create enough distance between herself and the incumbent that voters don’t feel like they are getting more of something they simply do not want.

I will be back tomorrow with all the lines you need to see from Harris’ interview with Fox News. Stay tuned!

2. Donald Trump’s blacklist

In preparation for a possible second term in the White House, close allies of Donald Trump are building a list of people who they will absolutely not be hiring, according to Politico.

Consider:

The lists of undesirable staffers include people linked to the Project 2025 policy blueprint; officials who resigned in protest of Trump’s response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol; and others perceived as disloyal to the former president, said two former Trump officials familiar with the discussions…

…The effort is the latest indication that a second Trump administration could have a starkly different personnel makeup than the first in positions ranging from the most senior aides to lower-level appointees. The former president and his allies have long stressed the value of loyalty among staffers, and they appear eager to avoid the leaks and staff churn that plagued Trump during his first term.

And who is leading this effort for the former president? This guy:

Yup! Don Jr.!

In one way, if I am being honest, this is smart. “Project 2025” is politically radioactive. Trump and his campaign have tried their best to run from it. And keeping people who are tied to it away from a Trump White House is a smart strategy. (Doing so, of course, does not mean that the Trump White House won’t seek to implement elements of “Project 2025.”)

In another way, this is in keeping with what we know about the outlines of a second Trump term: That he wants ONLY loyalists in key (and even not-so-key) jobs. Trump has already proposed a purge of the civil service — replacing nonpartisan bureaucrats with people who will do what he says without questioning.

Seen in that light, this staff blacklist makes perfect sense. And is confirmation that the right way to think about a second Trump term is to assume that he will pick up right where he left off in January 2021.

3. Anti-Allan Lichtman

American University professor Allan Lichtman gets a LOT of attention for his 13 keys, which, he says, have predicted 9 out of the last 10 presidential elections correctly — including Donald Trump’s 2016 win.

Lichtman even parlayed the keys— a series of yes/no questions about the state of domestic and foreign affairs among other things — into a fancy video on the New York Times in which he unveiled that the keys said Kamala Harris would win in November.

I have always been slightly skeptical of Lichtman’s certitude — mostly because some of his keys feels decidedly subjective to me. (One example: “Challenger Charisma” is one of Lichtman’s keys. But how, objectively, does he judge whether a candidate is charismatic?)

Suffice to say that I like Allan but am at least somewhat less-than-certain that his “keys” are the perfect prediction device.

I am not alone. Gilad Edelman, writing in The Atlantic on Wednesday, makes the case that Lichtman’s certainty — and track record — is rightly viewed with some major-league skepticism.

Here’s the key bit:

Lichtman insists that voters don’t change their minds in response to what the candidates say or do during the course of a campaign. This leads him to make some deeply counterintuitive claims. He has written that George H. W. Bush’s attacks on Michael Dukakis in 1988—which included the infamous Willie Horton ad—accomplished nothing, and actually hurt Bush’s subsequent ability to govern, because he already had enough keys to win and should have been focused on his policy agenda. He implies that JFK, who edged out Richard Nixon by less than two-tenths of a percentage point in 1960, would have won even if he had had the personality of, say, his nephew Robert, because he had eight keys in his favor in addition to charisma. And this past summer, Lichtman told anyone who would listen that Joe Biden should stay in the race, despite his difficulty completing a sentence, because replacing him on the ticket would mean the loss of the incumbency key. If Democrats persuaded Biden to drop out, he wrote in a July 3 op-ed, “they would almost surely doom their party to defeat and reelect Donald Trump.” (He changed his mind once it became clear that no one would challenge Harris for the nomination, thus handing her key 2.)

Arguments such as these are hard to accept, because they require believing that Lichtman’s “pragmatic electorate” places no stock in ideological positions or revelations about character and temperament. Lichtman is unperturbed by such objections, however. All arguments against the keys fail because they suggest that the keys are in some way wrong, which they plainly are not. Lichtman has written, for example, that the infamous “Comey letter” did not tip the 2016 election to Trump, as poll-focused analysts such as Nate Silver have “incorrectly claimed.” How does Lichtman know the claim is incorrect? Because the keys already predicted a Trump victory. The proof is in the fact that the system works. This raises the question of whether it actually does.

Agreed.

Whether you live by the keys or think they are bunk, the piece is worth your time.

4. Me + Tony

Every other week, I appear as a guest on “The Tony Kornheiser Show” podcast. We don’t do ANY politics. Instead we talk about the stuff that really matters — like colonoscopies and baseball playoffs.

I was on today. Check it out here.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“JD Vance is a venture capitalist cosplaying as a cowboy. I don't even know what a venture capitalist does.” — Tim Walz

ONE GOOD CHART

Economists don’t believe a recession is at all likely in the next 12 months, a major change from a year ago. The Wall Street Journal talked to more than five dozen — and charted their predictions.

SONG OF THE DAY

Panda Bear is part of a band called Animal Collective. He also makes solo music. He has a new album coming out next year — and in advance of it he released a new song called “Defense” with critics’ darling Cindy Lee. Check it out!

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