There were two major events in the presidential race this week, but we are left wondering if either one of them is going to make much of a difference one way or the other. Perhaps we're getting a bit jaded by it all....

The first was the one-and-only vice-presidential debate, held on CBS this Tuesday. Republican JD Vance faced off with Democrat Tim Walz, and it was watched by 43 million people as it aired. The second was the public release of a document prosecutor Jack Smith had previously filed with the court in Donald Trump's January 6th case. It laid out Smith's basic case, in great detail (165 pages' worth).

In a normal campaign season, either one of these would have been impactful, perhaps shifting the polling in significant ways. But in our hunkered-down tribalistic politics, the needle barely quivered. Maybe we're all getting a bit jaded?

There were two other rather large events that could affect politics this week: the massive damage Hurricane Helene did -- especially in the Appalachian Mountain region -- and an East Coast dockworkers' strike. The first shouldn't really have been political, and the second was over almost before anyone was aware it was happening.

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The makeup of next year's incoming Senate is anybody's guess, at this point. Republicans could wind up winning control, Democrats could wind up maintaining their control, and it all might come down to who wins the White House (since the vice president would break a 50-50 tie for control). From the way things look, there are a handful of states which will determine who winds up with a majority.

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After what were arguably the two most consequential presidential debates since at least the Nixon-Kennedy debate (which launched the era of televised debates), last night's vice-presidential debate was pretty... well, normal. It harkened back to the age before Donald Trump entered the political scene, when two candidates would debate political issues without getting overly vicious or personal in their attacks, in the hopes of presenting themselves to the public as acceptable leaders of the country. That was really the striking takeaway from last night -- a return to normalcy, in the midst of yet another Trumpian rollercoaster of a presidential campaign. In fact, this normalcy stuck out as completely abnormal to the bizarre political landscape Trump has dragged us all into for the past nine years.

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While waiting for tonight's vice-presidential debate I find myself reflecting on a question I've been occasionally wondering about over the past few years: what will a post-Trump Republican Party look like? We'll all be seeing one possibility tonight, as JD Vance takes the stage to debate Tim Walz. Because whether Donald Trump wins or loses the presidential race this time around, Vance seems poised to perhaps move into a sort of "MAGA heir apparent" role within his party. After all, Trump picked him to put on the ticket, which is more than anyone else can say (other than Mike Pence, of course, but the less said about him the better). But he'll likely have some challengers for the mantle of party leader once Trump somehow exits the scene.

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Tomorrow night might be the last big television event of the 2024 presidential race. JD Vance and Tim Walz will debate each other, and since Donald Trump is so far resisting the idea of having a third presidential debate, this may be it for face-to-face encounters between the two campaigns. So I found myself wondering what I would ask the two candidates, if I had the chance.

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Donald Trump got his start in politics by infamously pushing the "birtherism" lie about Barack Obama. Now he's pushing what might be called a "burgerism" lie about Kamala Harris -- that she somehow just made up the fact that she worked at McDonald's back when she was a student. It's all a measure of the desperation Trump finds himself now wallowing in, since to date none of his attacks against Harris have even come close to landing.

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Republicans have a problem with women. Their problem is basically that more and more women don't want to vote for them. By increasingly-wide margins, in fact. Some Republicans have now begun to realize this, and they are desperately trying to woo these women back to their side of the aisle. This is not going well, to put it mildly.

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Donald Trump (rather infamously) never admits he's wrong. Even on things that are easy to disprove with incontrovertible evidence, Trump will still insist he is right. He will construct an alternate reality inside his own head where he is proven to be right and all those who disagree are proven to be in some giant conspiracy against him, and he will go right on insisting that up is down, or that night is actually day. He never backs down and certainly never apologizes -- no matter how much harm his lies may cause.

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CNN just published a bombshell report with details of the online past of the Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina, the current Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. Much of their reporting dealt with Robinson's history on a pornographic site, which is in keeping with previous reports that Robinson was a regular at video porn shops in the town where he lived in the 1990s and 2000s. But what's much more concerning than his apparent sexual tastes and habits is what he had to say on plenty of other subjects. An argument can be made that a person's private sexual habits aren't really germane to their fitness for office, but it's a whole lot harder to say the same thing about someone who openly supports bringing slavery back.

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Sadly, that is not the title of an upcoming episode of The Simpsons. Instead, it is how the citizens of an Ohio town are now feeling, due to the stochastic terrorism coming from the very top of the Republican presidential ticket. People in Springfield are scared because these nationally-known politicians are lying about them, demonizing them, scapegoating them, and dehumanizing them. This is a perfect recipe for some hotheaded deranged individual to commit a random act of violence against them, which is precisely why they are so scared right now.

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