Welcome to Thunderdome. So after all that, the rumors of huge celebrity appearance or endorsements — Beyoncé! Taylor Swift!!! George W. Bush!? — what Democrats delivered in Chicago was a convention that just felt like a box-checking exercise.

There were no huge surprises. There was no over-the-top Hollywoodland display. The biggest name to show up was Oprah. The parties were decidedly lackluster. The off-air logistics were a disaster. The mood was one of nervous energy, with many partisans content to sit in their seats looking at their phones for five hours while smart Democrats roaming the halls admitted that they were concerned things were about to get, as the Obamas said, tough.

Without the injection of some new moment of excitement, people were left with what they had before: a candidate who has won no primaries in either of her runs for the presidency, anointed and approved from on high as the champion “for the people” chosen by everyone other than “the people.” Winning primaries isn’t just a relic of a pre-internet media age, it’s also the process by which candidates hone their message for a broader audience. Harris hasn’t done that — and her seventeen seconds talking about border policy last night do not inspire confidence that she’s capable of talking about the biggest issues on the minds of voters.

In the absence of a major boost, the race stays what it is: effectively a dead heat, with battlegrounds where the competition is as close as ever. This sets up a date with danger at the debate stage, where in just a few weeks Harris will face her greatest test and Donald Trump will have to show whether he can best not just one Democratic presidential candidate but two in the same cycle.

For Trump and J.D. Vance, it’s important they stick to a line of attack that does not allow Harris and Tim Walz to frame themselves as they attempted to in Chicago — as candidates of change. Democrats have run the country from the White House for twelve out of the past sixteen years, and yet they are trying very hard to depict themselves as the underdog candidates of dramatic change in a moment when Americans are very down on the direction of the country. Republicans can’t allow them to get away with it — and that will take more than a reliance on their standard talking points; it will require getting under both their untested candidates’ very thin skins.

RFK set to end his campaign

The RFK experiment is coming to an end.

The end of Kennedy’s campaign would mark the latest twist in the 2024 campaign, just a month after Harris took the baton from Biden and revived Democrats’ fortunes for November. Kennedy, despite his family’s star power, is currently polling in the low single digits, after he failed to ignite broad momentum for his candidacy. But in a close election, even one or two percentage points could swing competitive states and determine the outcome.

In a Wall Street Journal national poll of the contest released in late July after Harris entered the race, Kennedy received 4 percent support. That was down from 7 percent in early July — when Biden was still in the contest. Meanwhile, Harris has reversed or narrowed Trump’s leads in key battleground states where Biden had trailed, and she now leads in national polls. She speaks at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night.

A Kennedy departure would likely help Trump, pollsters say. Many disillusioned Democrats who initially said they might back Kennedy already moved to Harris after Biden dropped out. That left mostly dissatisfied Republicans in the Kennedy column — and they may be more inclined to pick Trump over Harris if Kennedy now exits. 

For more, read my analysis at The Spectator — and listen to my discussion with Freddy Gray on Americano.

The GOP’s unity movement

The ascension of Kamala Harris and her selection of Tim Walz has accomplished one thing at least: it’s driven moderate Republicans toward Donald Trump, most recently the much-maligned Georgia governor Brian Kemp:

The frosty relationship between Georgia governor Brian Kemp and former president Donald Trump may be getting a little bit warmer.

Speaking on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News on Thursday evening during the final night of the Democratic National Convention, Kemp says the Peach State cannot afford another four years under a Democratic president.

“We gotta win. We gotta win from the top of the ticket on down,” the Republican governor told Hannity.

Kemp says things would be even worse with a Harris-Walz win than they were under President Joe Biden.

“We need to send Donald Trump back to the White House. We need to retake the Senate. We need to hold the House,” Kemp said. “We need to hold the legislative majorities we have in the great state of Georgia.”

Kemp says the GOP in Georgia has been working hard to ensure the base shows up on Election Day.

“We cannot take this for granted. We got to get the vote out,” Kemp said.

There were multiple speakers at the DNC who presented themselves as Republicans for Harris, but it’s notable how none of them were surprises, instead turning to the likes of Adam Kinzinger. If things were going the way Democrats wanted, they’d have Nikki Haley on that stage — but they don’t, and it’s easy to see why.

Defining Kamala down

The great Thomas Sowell with a message of urgency for the GOP:

Against this background, why is this election even close? Some Republicans may say that it is because the media are on the side of the Democrats and suppress or distort the facts accordingly. Others may say that the universities have become indoctrination centers, promoting the kind of ideologies that favor the Democrats’ agenda.

But, even if we concede all that, the fact is that a similar situation existed back in the days when Ronald Reagan won two consecutive presidential elections by landslides. How did he do it?

He did it by addressing the voting public as if they were adults who could understand an issue — if you explained it to them in plain English, instead of in political jargon or snappy quips.

There are some Republicans today who seem to understand that. But they are not running in this year’s presidential election. Perhaps they may run in 2028. But there is such a thing as a country declining to the point of no return.

Four more years of disastrous Biden-Harris policies, at home and abroad, can take us past that fatal point.

Many Republicans seem confident that they will win this year’s election. But just a couple of years ago, they were equally confident that they would win control of both houses of Congress in a “red wave.”

The public’s positive reactions to Vice President Kamala Harris’s first statements after becoming the Democrats’ nominee seem to be played down by Republicans — as if it were a sort of honeymoon response that will automatically evaporate as the truth comes out.

Election officials in some states will begin mailing out ballots less than a month from now. If the Republicans do not discredit what she claims within that month, the votes she gets then will be fixed — even if Republicans completely demolish her claims later on.

One more thing

One of the underlying storylines of this convention was the Democrats who are urging caution at odds with those who are talking “landslide” — really. Those who I spoke with who were waving the sword of joy and victory were overwhelmingly focused on vibes, while those who were pumping the brakes were focused on basic polling data. As Politico notes: “Officials with the top pro-Harris super PAC said their polling ‘is much less rosy’ than public surveys. Other Democratic pollsters noted that — even if their polling is right — Trump still maintains a lot of advantages… A poll commissioned by the Democratic messaging firm Navigator Research and unveiled during the convention showed Harris and Trump essentially tied across the swing-state map. And the candidate characteristics that are best correlated with voters’ preferences — whether a candidate is up to the job, has the right vision and is a strong leader — generally favored Trump in the survey.”

So we’ve got vibes versus fundamentals, people. Who ya got?