“THE MORNING MEETING” DAYBOOK
THURSDAY, JULY 25, 2024
Join “The Morning Meeting” LIVE at 9:00am ET this morning by Zoom for 25 minutes here.
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DAYBOOK, all Eastern Time except as noted
* Joe Biden
* Kamala Harris
* Hakeem Jeffries
9:45am: Holds weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill.
* Douglas Emhoff, Donald Trump, and JD Vance have no public events at this time, with the next Trump/Vance public event not scheduled until Saturday.
“The Morning Meeting” topics:
* Kamala Harris and the teachers union.
* The confidence gap and the enthusiasm gap.
* The opportunities and challenges of incumbency.
ESSENTIAL READING
* Associated Press on the TV wars:
Just days into her new role as the Democratic Party’s likely presidential nominee, Kamala Harris is already facing a wave of Republican-backed attack ads questioning her personality, her progressive record and what she knew about President Joe Biden’s decline.
But for now, at least, Democrats have yet to engage in the summertime advertising fight. And in a sharp reversal from much of the year, Republicans are suddenly dominating the airways.
Overall, Trump and his allies are outspending Harris’ team 25-to-1 on television and radio advertising — more than $68 million for Republicans compared to just $2.6 million for Democrats — in the period that began on Monday, the day after Biden stepped aside, through the end of August, according to an AP analysis of data compiled by the media tracking firm AdImpact.
The stunning disparity reflects actual spending for this week and reservations for subsequent weeks, which will almost certainly change in the coming days. But for now, the numbers highlight a dangerous imbalance for Democrats at the very moment that millions of voters are re-shaping their opinions of the vice president, who has spent much of the last four years in Biden’s shadow.
* New York Times new story (free link) on the whole ballgame – the contest to define Kamala Harris for swing voters in battleground states:
For the first time since Donald J. Trump was indicted in the spring of 2023, he has lost his grip on the news cycle and — temporarily at least — his message. Instead of commanding morning-to-night media attention, the former president and his allies suddenly find themselves reacting to their opponents.
It’s an unfamiliar experience for Mr. Trump, who has monopolized America’s televisions, newspapers and smartphones for more than 12 months through indictments, primary victories, 34 felony convictions, an assassination attempt and a Republican National Convention at which he was celebrated as a quasi-religious figure.
In the three days since President Biden announced he was quitting the 2024 race, Mr. Trump has entered foreign territory. He has been largely crowded out from “earned media,” or organic news coverage that spreads rapidly among voters and costs campaigns nothing to produce. And his message has been, for the moment, scrambled as Democrats have replaced an old, frail white man with a younger Black woman who is campaigning energetically and giving new life to the Democratic base….
And some Trump campaign officials have telegraphed plans to “Willie Horton” Ms. Harris. It’s a reference to an infamous ad that Republicans used in 1988 against the Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis that roiled politics for decades. Mr. Horton was a Black prisoner in Massachusetts who raped a white woman while out on furlough, and the ad stoked racial fears and made Mr. Dukakis seem soft on crime.
In the case of Ms. Harris, the plans are to attack her record as a prosecutor in California, as well as her support for bail for people arrested during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, according to people briefed on the discussions.