Attention to the Unseen

Doug Sosnik writes: Unless the basic contours of the race change and some of the Sun Belt battleground states become more competitive (which is unlikely), Mr. Biden’s only viable path for winning is to carry Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Each of the three states poses particular challenges for Mr. Biden. Current polling shows him trailing Mr. Trump by as many as five points in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and more narrowly in Michigan. The deficit in Pennsylvania must be particularly disconcerting…

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  Dan Pfeiffer, who was a senior advisor to President Barack Obama, in conversation with Jon Favreau, who was Obama’s former director of speechwriting.

The New York Times reports: Some major Democratic donors have told the largest pro-Biden super PAC, Future Forward, that pledges worth roughly $90 million are now on hold if President Biden remains atop the ticket, according to two people who have been briefed on the conversations. The frozen contributions include multiple eight-figure commitments, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the situation. The decision to withhold such enormous sums of money…

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John Hendrickson writes: Vice President Kamala Harris seemed to have one goal at a campaign rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, yesterday: Prove she’s ready to square up to Donald Trump. Harris said Trump’s name 15 times in fewer than 20 minutes, and you could hear the disdain in her voice each time. “As Trump bows down to dictators, he makes America weak,” she told the crowd. She scoffed that Trump has “embraced” Russian President Vladimir Putin. She warned of Trump’s…

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Axios reports: Current and former Biden aides are worried that the president is surrounded by a shrinking group of “yes” men and women who block negative information from getting to him. Why it matters: Biden’s already small inner circle has shrunk further since the June 27 debate that has jeopardized Biden’s re-election campaign. Democrats inside and outside the White House tell Axios they’re worried that Biden isn’t receiving a 360-degree view of his — and his party’s — perilous political situation. In the two weeks since Biden’s disastrous debate,…

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Politico reports: The influential youth green group Sunrise Movement is calling on President Joe Biden to drop his reelection bid to “protect” his climate legacy. Sunrise’s Executive Director Aru Shiney-Ajay on Friday cited low enthusiasm for Biden among young people, which she said in a statement has continued to drop since his disastrous debate performance last month, and urged the president to “pass the torch to a new nominee.” “Another Trump presidency would cause catastrophic and irreversible damage to our…

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NBC News reports: Several of President Joe Biden’s closest allies, including three people who are directly involved in efforts to re-elect him, told NBC News they now see his chances of winning as zero — and the likelihood of him taking down fellow Democratic candidates growing. “He needs to drop out,” one Biden campaign official said. “He will never recover from this.” For two weeks, Biden has struggled to stabilize his campaign following a late-June debate debacle. His ongoing clean-up…

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Politico reports: President Joe Biden is quickly losing access to the money he will need to stay in the presidential race as a growing number of prominent Democratic officials and donors call for him to drop out. Money has started to dry up following his disastrous debate with former President Donald Trump, when the president struggled to respond to his opponent’s barrage of verbal attacks and gave incoherent answers, said six Democratic advisers and operatives who work with major donors….

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Jonathan Martin writes: Fearing a floor revolt against his nomination, President Biden’s aides are telephoning individual delegates to next month’s Democratic convention to gauge their loyalty to the president, according to three delegates who received a call this week. After a round of introductory questions confirming each delegate was still planning on going to Chicago and asking if they had served as delegate before, the Biden aide making the calls got to the point, the Democratic activists recalled to me…

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CNN reports: Donald Trump has lately made clear he wants little to do with Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican president that has attracted considerable blowback in his race for the White House. “I have no idea who is behind it,” the former president recently claimed on social media. Many people Trump knows quite well are behind it. Six of his former Cabinet secretaries helped write or collaborated on the 900-page playbook for a second Trump term…

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In an editorial, the New York Times says: Next week, for the third time in eight years, Donald Trump will be nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate for president of the United States. A once great political party now serves the interests of one man, a man as demonstrably unsuited for the office of president as any to run in the long history of the Republic, a man whose values, temperament, ideas and language are directly opposed to so much…

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Tim Alberta writes: The outcome of the presidential campaign, Republicans believed, was a fait accompli. “Donald Trump was well on his way to a 320-electoral-vote win,” Chris LaCivita told me this past Sunday as Democrats questioned, ever more frantically, whether President Joe Biden should remain the party’s nominee in November. “That’s pre-debate.” LaCivita paused to repeat himself: “Pre-debate.” This could be interpreted as trash talk coming from a cocky campaign: If you thought Biden was in trouble before he bombed…

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