DL Open Thread: Monday, August 5, 2024

Who Will It Be?  Who Do You Want It To Be?  I want it to be that folksy Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz.  I think it will be Joel Shapiro.  So that James Carville can gloat about owning the libs.  I hate that beady-eyed sumbitch.  This is the Open Thread, so predict away!

Bangladeshi PM Resigns, Flees.  Ahead of protestors:

Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country Monday afternoon, ending a 15-year rule that has faced violent opposition in recent months.

According to local Bangladeshi news agencies, Hasina escaped her residence minutes before it was stormed by protesters. She left for India and was accompanied by her younger sister Sheikh Rehana on the helicopter, local media reported.

Not knowledgeable at all about this.  If you are, please share your thoughts.

Josh Marshall’s Take:  I’m not a big poll guy, recognizing that, at best, they’re barely accurate snapshots in time.  But I am a big Josh Marshall guy (and TPM supporter):

The short version is that Harris is now slightly but measurably ahead in the Blue Wall states. She remains behind but now only barely in the southern tier states of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. The margins in both directions are mostly between one and two points. Those are nominally margin of error numbers. But when they’re based on multiple polls they become a bit sturdier than that. (I’m following 538’s averages on this. They have Nevada tied.)

What this means is that Harris now has very small leads in the states she needs to win the election. Just as critically she’s now in shooting distance in all of the southern tier states, now including North Carolina. Together these represent a pro-Harris shift of 3 to 4 percentage points which is more or less matched by the shift at the national level.

Harris’s net favorability has soared. On July 4th, her net favorability was -17.4 percentage points. Today it’s -6.7 percentage points. I suspect not only the direction but the fluidity and dynamism of those numbers scare the Trump campaign far more than the horse race numbers I mentioned up top. Trump’s favorability also improved after the assassination attempt and his convention. But much more modestly and the positive movement appears to halted.

Trump just isn’t the candidate he was eight years ago or even four years ago. He didn’t need to be as long as he held that small but persistent lead over Biden. But battling back is a different thing than coasting. As I noted when things seemed much worse for Democrats, having all lived through the historic presidential campaign month of July 2024 we’d be fools to assume that the remainder of the campaign will be a straight line from today to November 5th. But the sense of panic you now see in the Trump campaign is that they fear they’re going to get swamped by the Harris surge and that there won’t be enough time to shift the dynamic of the campaign. They’re right to be worried.

RFK Jr. Still Not Weird Enough For You?  He’s determined to change that opinion:

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted in a video posted to his social media Sunday that about a decade ago, he dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park to make it look like it got hit by a bicycle.

In the video, in which actor Roseanne Barr also appears, Kennedy tells a story of driving in upstate New York when a woman driving in front of him hit a cub bear and killed it. He said he pulled over and put the bear in the back of his van to eventually skin the bear “because it was in very good condition” and put the meat in his refrigerator.

After he put the bear in his van, he went hawking with friends and he didn’t have time to go to his home in Westchester and put the bear away. Instead, he was due for dinner in the city. The dinner went late and he had to go to the airport, but the bear was still in his car.

“I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,” he said.

The presidential candidate said at the time there had been a series of bicycle accidents in Central Park because of the new bicycle lanes. A few people who were with him, who Kennedy said had been drinking, thought Kennedy’s “redneck” idea to put the bear in Central Park was a good idea, along with an old bike that was also in his car.

“I said let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike.