THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

Two major new polls of the presidential race released over the weekend show fresh gains for Kamala Harris—and illustrate how she is now putting the Sun Belt states fully in play. That gives her multiple routes to an electoral college victory over Donald Trump. So is Harris on her way to reversing Trump’s gains among Latinos and young voters? What does a winning Harris coalition look like, anyway?...

Because Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is under a month old, Democrats see next week’s nominating convention as a unique opening to do more than usual to define her in the minds of swing voters. But there’s another opportunity here as well: A successful convention will deeply rattle Trump, and when he fears he’s losing, he does himself tremendous additional harm. We talked to veteran journa...

In some good findings for Kamala Harris, the Cook Political Report’s new polls find her leading Donald Trump or tied with him in six of the seven key swing states. Other polls show her doing surprisingly well among key demographics like noncollege whites and Latinos. So far, despite GOP attacks on Harris as a crazy leftist, she appears to be widely perceived as broadly acceptable. We talked to Ree...

In recent days, Fox News personalities have begun urging Donald Trump to get more “disciplined.” Many seem to fear Trump is in trouble, as evidence mounts that his sleazy, racist attacks on Kamala Harris are backfiring. Yet Trump’s Fox allies aren’t telling him to stop smearing Harris with falsehoods; they’re just telling him to adopt a more civil tone in doing so. We talked to Steve Benen, author...

To defeat Donald Trump, Kamala Harris must do far better among young voters than President Biden did. Guess what: An important new poll of young voters finds that Harris’ entry has dramatically shifted their preferences in her favor and against Trump. Which confirms a larger story: The Democratic-leaning constituencies who had drifted toward Trump now may be swinging to Harris, exposing a weakness...

Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that Donald Trump is deeply unsettled about Kamala Harris’s successful launch, even as polls show her edging into a small lead. His anger has led him to escalate the private conspiracy-mongering about Democrats supposedly cheating in the election. We talked to Amanda Carpenter—a leading Never Trump conservative and an editor at Protect Democracy—about...

With Republicans running from Donald Trump’s ugly attack on Kamala Harris’ blackness, new reports paint a picture of a party that is deeply worried about Trump’s chances. Meanwhile, Trump is raging about another piece of bad news for him: that reporter Evan Gershkovich is getting released from Russian captivity. We talked to Stuart Stevens, an operative with extensive experience in Republican poli...

Donald Trump’s public statements about Kamala Harris are getting weirder. After Harris had a huge showing at a Georgia rally, he erupted, claiming that “Crazy Kamala Harris” had relied on a concert to draw the crowd. Then, speaking to black journalists, Trump melted down spectacularly while suggesting that Harris had long disavowed her black identity. The connecting thread here: the Trump-MAGA wor...

Donald Trump’ campaign just rolled out a new multimillion dollar ad campaign that blasts Kamala Harris on immigration. Oddly, it does so in part by mocking her dancing. That might seem like typical MAGA buffoonery. But underlying the link that the ad draws between Harris’s dancing and her handling of immigration is a bigger argument that demands a serious Democratic response. We talked to Douglas...

According to a new report, many allies of Donald Trump and other Republicans are now sharply second guessing his choice of J.D. Vance as running mate—and Vance’s bizarre public moments are driving the panic. Will Vance enable Democrats to make a strong case against MAGA-style culture-warring – one built on demonstrating just how deranged and offputting to most Americans it has truly become? We cha...

Donald Trump took his authoritarian threats in a dark new direction during two new public appearances. He suggested our next election might be our last, reiterated in advance that the election will be rigged against him, and admitted all the post-assassination “unity” talk was nonsense, openly declaring: “Maybe I’ve gotten worse.” We talked to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of the “Lucid” newsletter and t...

In recent days, Donald Trump and MAGA media figures have ramped up the attacks on Kamala Harris’s laugh, her personality, and her temperament. That’s vile stuff, but MAGA’s strategy also suggests an inability to entertain a remarkable possibility: What if Harris’s laugh and energy are actually well suited to this moment in American politics? Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, co-founder of the progressive...

A vile quote from J.D. Vance just surfaced in which he described Kamala Harris and other Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies,” and spun out a whole theory based on this absurdity. Then Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg sharply dressed down Vance for poking his nose into other people’s family decisions. With this response, Buttigieg showed that Vance has invited a much larger national...

This week we learned that Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance repeatedly suggested in 2016 that he believed Trump committed sexual assault. Vance has since softened his views, but this saga captures the essential Vance: He knows exactly what he has now attached himself to, but sees Trump as a vehicle to accomplish some truly radical societal transformations. We talked to tech writer Gil Duran,...

Ever since President Biden suspended his campaign, Fox News and right wing media have been scrambling madly for an effective attack on Vice President Kamala Harris. They’ve ridiculed her laugh. They’ve mocked her as a product of DEI. They’ve attacked her as too soft on crime and too tough on crime. All of which gets at a larger story: Kamala Harris is very hard for the right to pigeonhole. We talk...

At a rally in Michigan over the weekend, Donald Trump uncorked one of his longest rants ever in praise of the world’s autocrats, strongmen and dictators. He hailed Xi Jinping of China as “brilliant” for controlling 1.4 billion people “with an iron fist,” and described Xi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban as “tough” and “smart.” We talked to Rick Wilson, the prominent Never Trumpe...

Today’s pod tackles a subject of profound importance: The sheer, inexplicable weirdness of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. There’s Representative Matt Gaetz’s bizarre speech, in which his face was so taut that one Republican derided him as an “AI sex doll.” There are all the ugly “Mass Deportations Now!” signs, the cultish rituals in which attendees treated Trump as their MAGA God...

Surprise, surprise: The Republican convention is turning into a festival of media bashing. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene did something that deserves special attention: After fielding a question about J.D. Vance that displeased her, Greene erupted, repeatedly dressing down the reporter in strikingly vicious terms. Arizona senate candidate Kari Lake, meanwhile, used her convention speech to ...

Now that Ohio Senator J.D. Vance is Donald Trump’s running mate, everyone is combing through his old quotes, and a striking one has surfaced: in 2016, Vance warned that Trump threatened to take the white working class to a “very dark place.” In short, Vance once understood that MAGA ideology, at its core, is really, really toxic. And that’s a big political vulnerability. We talked to Sarah Longwel...

In the days after the horrific effort to assassinate Donald Trump, MAGA figures have widely sought to exploit this moment of national crisis, by arguing that Democrats invited or even encouraged the shooting. The leading proponent of this absurd claim is Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, and on Tuesday, Trump announced that Vance will be his running mate. We talked to Alex Shephard, a senior editor at The...

At the time of this recording, we know little about the attempt to assassinate Donald Trump. He was hit in the ear, but thankfully doesn’t appear seriously injured. The 20-year-old gunman has been identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks. He was registered as a Republican but donated $15 to a progressive group in January 2021, and we know nothing of his motive. Political violence is absolutely unaccept...

In recent days, Donald Trump has angrily claimed he knows nothing about Project 2025, the blueprint his allies are drawing up for an authoritarian second term presidency. But CNN is now reporting that at least 140 people from the Trump administration have a hand in the Project 2025 plan. And NBC News has unearthed video showing that Trump expressly praised the plan’s creators for their work in 202...

With President Biden forcefully declaring that he isn’t leaving the presidential race, the latest polling looks frightening. The Cook Political Report just released new polling averages showing Donald Trump leading Biden nationally by three points. FiveThirtyEight’s averages also look grim. New swing state polls show Trump dominating. But Ron Klain, the former White House chief of staff to Biden,...

Although the Democratic Party remains mired in infighting over President Biden’s disastrous debate performance, congressional Democrats now appear increasingly convinced that he will survive as the nominee. They seem resigned to this even as many appear convinced he will lose to Donald Trump in November. What happened here, exactly? We talked to The American Prospect’s David Dayen, who has a good...

On Monday, we learned that the committee for the 2024 Republican convention is debating a new platform, proposed by Donald Trump, that purports to soften the party’s positions on abortion and same sex marriage. This will be widely interpreted as a savvy effort to woo swing voters and suburban women. But what if it’s really an expression of fear that the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the horrors i...