A program note is necessary, to begin with here. I almost wasn't going to even bother with the whole "Electoral Math" series this year, because it would have been so depressing to try to cheer President Joe Biden's chances on while watching Trump flip state after state. So up until very recently, I hadn't even started collecting the data or doing the charts or anything.

Of course, that all changed three weeks ago.

So welcome back to our Electoral Math column series again! This marks the fifth presidential election we will have provided this service, I should mention. This year, for obvious reasons, we are only going to track the data from late July onwards. Our charts will begin two days after Joe Biden exited the race, or Tuesday, July 23rd. This was the point where Donald Trump hit his maximum in state-level polling and things looked the grimmest for the Democrats. But, of course, that would all soon begin to turn around....

Because now the race is Vice President Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump, and everything has changed as a result.

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Two more states -- Missouri and Arizona -- have now certified the signatures required to place abortion rights on their ballots in November. This brings the total for this election cycle up to eight states, although the possibility of the ballot measures having a meaningful impact on the other races on the ballot realistically only exists in three of them. So far, abortion rights have an unbroken 7-0 record of winning, even in some very red states, so it will be interesting to see if that continues or not. But beyond electoral geekiness, if any of them win it will be a victory for women's rights and freedom over government interference in the most personal of medical decisions.

Democrats, of course, are optimistic. Up until Roe was tossed out by the Supreme Court, abortion ballot measures were exclusively put on ballots by the forced-birth side of the issue. More and more onerous (and medically-unnecessary) hurdles were enacted to discourage women from exercising their rights, and "trigger bans" were voted on even with Roe in place, just to be ready for the moment it was overturned. That was then... but this is now. Now, abortion rights are being placed on the ballot mostly by groups who want to either enshrine the right into the state's constitution or overturn Draconian state laws that are now in place. And in the few cases where the forced-birth side has placed ballot measures before the voters that would remove abortion rights, they have lost (Kansas and Kentucky, most notably). The tide has turned, obviously.

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The past three weeks have been filled with optimism -- for obvious reasons -- so I thought I'd write a truly optimistic column today. Democrats are now feeling very enthusiastic about the chances for victory in November, and the polls are starting to back this feeling up. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are now leading by four points in each of three critical battleground states (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) according to one prominent poll, and the national polling has also taken a turn for the better, with Harris beating Trump regularly (by a margin of around three points, give or take). So I'm just going to assume for the sake of argument here that Harris goes on to win the presidential election (yes, I realize this is an enormous assumption to make, but as I said I'm in a rather optimistic mood). My question is whether such a victory can not only defeat Donald Trump but also Trumpism itself.

If Harris does win, it will be a triumph of cheerful good feelings over gloom and doom. That's important, because even Joe Biden's win over Trump in 2020 didn't have this exact dynamic working for it. If Harris wins, it will represent a huge mood shift in the country at large, to put this another way. But will that be enough for the fever in the Republican Party to break?

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We will admit, right here up front, that we did not think up today's headline ourselves. It came from an extra-snarky press release from the Harris/Walz team. Following Donald Trump's bizarre appearance before the news cameras yesterday, the Harris camp put out a press release titled: "Donald Trump's Very Good, Very Normal Press Conference." The subtitle was: "Split Screen: Joy and Freedom vs. Whatever the Hell That Was."

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Donald Trump seems to be getting a little nervous. He has had to watch, for the past three weeks, while the political media paid a whole lot more attention to Kamala Harris (and now Tim Walz) than they were paying to him and his rather unimpressive running mate, JD Vance. And it wasn't just that his opponents were getting all the press, it was that they were getting good press. Trump, meanwhile, had planned on coasting and taking it easy for a few weeks after the Republican National Convention.

Instead, Trump is now faced with Harris and Walz barnstorming the battleground states all week long, while Trump has a single rally scheduled in... Montana? No wonder the Democrats are getting better press! And it's beginning to get under Trump's skin. Today, he hastily threw together a press conference, because he knew that would at least get his campaign some media coverage. The only truly newsworthy thing that emerged from it (Trump lying his face off about this, that, and the other doesn't count) was when he announced that he will, after all, be showing up for the scheduled presidential candidate debate on ABC next month. Earlier, he had backed out of the debate, perhaps confident that he wouldn't even need to bother. Now, he's proposing two more debates, in addition to the ABC event. He now knows he needs the free television coverage, after watching the debut of Harris and Walz for the past few weeks. And right around the corner is the weeklong coverage the Democratic National Convention will generate.

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You may not have seen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz in action yet. This is understandable, since it was only yesterday that he was named to the Democratic ticket as the vice-presidential nominee. But even if you haven't seen any clips of him yet or watched that blowout Philadelphia rally yesterday, don't worry -- you already know him.

You've already seen him dozens (if not hundreds) of times. He is straight from "Central Casting," and he has been portrayed by many a character actor in many a show or movie, for many a decade. He is the dad in pretty much every sitcom ever set in the Midwest. He is Coach, urging the team on to victory but still championing sportsmanship. He is the kindly school principal. Or maybe the beloved mayor. Or maybe he sells appliances or shoes or used cars or tractor parts. Whatever actual profession is written into the script for him, he is always essentially the same guy: a decent, hardworking, upstanding American. A role model others look up to. A small-town gem. He's Richie Cunningham's dad, to put this another way.

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In a little over two weeks, the Democratic Party has gone from "Biden/Harris" to "Harris/Walz," as their ticket has now been completed with Vice President Kamala Harris's selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. But what's more astonishing than the lightning-fast schedule for all this unfolding is how utterly seamless it has all been. The party quickly unified behind Harris after President Joe Biden announced he was dropping his campaign, and from all indications today it looks like the party will further unify around the choice of Walz to round the ticket out. There are no simmering "Hillary Clinton supporters versus Bernie Bros" bad feelings tearing the party apart; instead, all the various factions seem content with the way things have worked out. That is an incredible accomplishment, for Democrats. Both progressives and centrists lined up to endorse Walz after this morning's announcement, with no hesitation.

As I wrote yesterday, Walz seemed like the best choice to me. Democrats are now on a crusade against weirdness, and Walz is about as normal a guy as you can imagine. He looks comfortable in the shlubbiest of clothing, he looks completely at ease with who he is, and his authenticity is going to go a long way towards perhaps repairing some of the damage Democrats have suffered with the rural, White regions in the country. Walz is from such a region, and it has made him who he is. He is "Minnesota nice" and will be incredibly hard for the Republicans to demonize him in any effective way. He does not look like some rabid lefty with "San Francisco values," to put this another way. He looks like a guy that runs a feed store in Podunk County instead.

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We are now in the homestretch of the frantic and foreshortened race that's underway to become Kamala Harris's running mate. By tomorrow morning, the announcement will be made and then we can all avoid using the word "veepstakes" for another four years (I'm not a huge fan of the word, even though I do have to begrudgingly admit that it is pretty catchy...).

Harris is moving at warp speed in her presidential campaign, which was pretty much required by her later-than-ever-before entry into the race. She's only been at it a couple weeks and has had to take time out of that to figure out who her running mate was going to be (a process that is more normally spread out over many months). This was all likely driven by the initial filing date in Ohio, when candidates for both president and vice-president had to be listed in the official paperwork. That August 7th deadline may or may not exist any more (opinions differ, which inevitably would have led to a court battle), but even if it does the Democrats will be ready to meet it, before they even hold their national convention. Calling the rolls of each state's electors and how they vote during the convention will now be a symbolic and purely-unofficial celebration of something that has already happened.

No matter how we got here though, Team Harris has indicated that the waiting will be over early tomorrow. Then they're planning a joint rally with whomever gets the nod later in the day, in Pennsylvania.

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It certainly already feels like a lot longer, but we aren't even done with the second week of Kamala Harris's presidential campaign. She hit the ground running in a big way and is already doing a fine job of drawing the distinction between her and the bizarreness of the other side. Meanwhile, Republicans are out there insulting "a bunch of childless cat ladies" as well as pretty much every minority group they can think of. Two weeks in, the race is now being defined between the childless cat ladies on one side and the total weirdos on the other. In other words, Silly Season has begun in a big way.

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To dot or not to dot? That is the question....

Since it seems like a week for Silly Season columns, today I thought we'd examine an editorial quandary we've been faced with. Because the Republican vice-presidential candidate presents us with a challenge. He would now prefer to be known as simply: "JD Vance" -- sans punctuation, in other words. So do we respect his wishes or continue (as we started doing when we first wrote his name) with our standard style-guide form: "J.D. Vance"?

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