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There are still a few tried and true rules of politics even in a two-realities, up-is-down, down-is-up election cycle: It’s the economy, stupid; if you’re explaining, you’re losing; and if you’re having fun, you’re winning. Oh, and if given the choice between attacking auto workers or not attacking auto workers, it’s better to choose not attacking autoworkers, particularly when you’re trying to win battleground Michigan.
Donald Trump ran afoul of all of those rules today — even at a time of a much discussed vibe shift in his favor.
Welcome to the first edition of 2024’s “Who Won the Day?” which originally appeared in POLITICO in 2008 and was revived in 2011. Now that we’re in the final sprint of the general election, we’re dusting it off. We’ll call each day for one of the two major party tickets — or perhaps even a statewide elected or bit player who made a dent in the conversation.
Today, it’s Kamala Harris, mostly because her opponent ceded ground. While the vice president was treading on Trump’s media territory — going onto conservative-friendly Fox News — the former president opened the work week in a snit. He’s posting to Truth Social after midnight and attacking outlets like the Wall Street Journal (“What does the Wall Street Journal know?” he asked at an event with the Economic Club of Chicago. “They’ve been wrong about everything.”) and Fox News (“Does Ian Sams, Lyin’ Kamala’s Special Advisor, own FoxNews?,” he wondered today). He also canceled an interview with CNBC.
On top of that, his campaign and its allies spent a lot of time explaining. He sent his surrogates on a mind-bending mission to spin his comments about using the military to address political dissent. Even Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, once considered a potential Trump running mate, said “we’re not going to have” the U.S. military deployed inside the country, breaking with Trump.
And instead of driving a sunny economic message tying Harris to inflation, he spent today in Chicago suggesting that auto workers assemble parts “out of a box” and that “we could have our child do it.”
That won’t help any momentum Trump has with rank-and-file union members in the so-called pop states of the upper Midwest.
It all added up to a case study in what has been a feature of much of Harris’ hundred-day campaign: She has a good day when Trump self-immolates reflexively.
We ask ourselves every night: Who won the day? Now we’ll tell you — every weekday.
