Nearly everywhere you look across the legacy media landscape this week, you will see the same message being repeated. Replacing Joe Biden at the top of the ticket with Kamala Harris wasn't a disaster for the Democrats. It was brilliant! And Harris is "surging" already. I saw one headline at Bloomberg this morning declaring that Harris has "wiped out" Donald Trump's lead. But how much of that is real and how much is simply the fantasies of the Trump-hating press? Just yesterday, Ed covered the latest Harvard poll showing Trump with a still substantial, if slightly decreased lead. Shortly thereafter, perennial election prognosticator Nate Silver released his own latest assessment. It's true that Harris is doing better than Joe Biden had been performing. (It's difficult to imagine anyone doing much worse.) But only very slightly. In fact, in Silver's model, Trump remains in the low 60s while Kamala Harris is stuck in the upper 30s. (NY Post)

Even after Democrats dramatically moved to re-top their presidential ticket and got an apparent jolt of momentum, famed election analyst and statistical guru Nate Silver still deems former President Donald Trump the favorite.

His election forecast model gives Trump a 61.3% chance of prevailing in the Electoral College, while Vice President Kamala Harris is at 38.1%.

Silver previously pegged Trump with a 65.7% chance of victory over President Biden during his model rollout last month.

In his most recent assessment, Silver included a slew of polling averages that gave Trump slight advantages nationally and in most of the battleground states, albeit not in Wisconsin, where Harris was ahead.

So Nate Silver sees Donald Trump's chance of victory having dropped from 65.7% to 61.3%. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has crept up from the mid-30s to 38.1%. That's still a fairly healthy margin. It's not that it's impossible for this analysis to be wrong, but you have to dig quite a way back into history to find an example of Nate missing a call by anywhere near that much. I see him being cited on CNN nearly as much as he is on Fox News. In that sense, Silver has become the gold standard of election analysis, if you'll pardon the precious metals pun. He doesn't base his forecasts on his own political preferences (whatever those may be), but on the hit-and-miss rates of the other pollsters that he tracks. 

So why has the insertion of Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket failed to produce the Democratic surge that most of the legacy media is desperately seeking to find and trumpet to the world? I'm not sure how much time we really need to invest into answering that question. The position that the Democrats find themselves in today is entirely of their own making, though Joe Biden and his wife bear the brunt of the blame. Biden could have stuck to his guns and ridden this election out to the (likely bitter) end. Alternately, he could have bowed out gracefully at the beginning of the year and allowed his party to hold a fair and open primary. Now the party is stuck with cackling Kamala and a reputation for having destroyed democracy by tossing tens of millions of primary votes cast by their own voters into the trash can.

Let's remember how Kamala wound up in the veep slot to begin with. She was so unpopular that she couldn't even carry the 2020 primary in her home state. She was forced to drop out before the voting even began because her unpopularity was so obvious. While they will never admit it, Joe Biden picked her as a running mate as an insurance policy. Nobody would try to take him down if the result would be a Kamala Harris presidency. To be fair to Scranton Joe, nobody could have predicted how this situation would eventually play out; Biden just assumed that everyone in his party and the mainstream media would continue pretending that he was just fine and was fit and ready to serve another four years. But then the worm turned when the Democrats realized that Biden was about to sink their ship. Unfortunately for them, it took place so late in the game that all of the other lifeboats had already sailed except for Harris.

Now the people assigned to handle Harris' campaign are probably forced to spend the majority of their time trying to train her not to break out into fits of cackling when speaking publicly and burning all of her printouts of Venn diagrams. Strategizing about policy concerns is probably not high on the priority list because Harris obviously plans to stick with all of Joe Biden's disastrous policies. How could she not, given that she was his second in command when all of those failed policies were put into place? This race is still far from over and much work remains to be done, but I certainly don't envy the position the Democrats find themselves in today. This is shaping up to be a truly unique moment in American political history.