New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) is expected to appoint his former chief of staff, George Helmy, to replace Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) for the remaining four and a half months of his term, according to a person with direct knowledge of the decision.

Menendez, a three-term senator, previously announced that he would resign from office effective Aug. 20, after being found guilty of 16 criminal counts of bribery, obstructing justice, acting as a foreign agent for Egypt, extortion and conspiring to commit those crimes.

Murphy is expected to call Helmy on Thursday with the offer to fill the vacancy, the person with knowledge of the decision said. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss deliberations that have not been publicly announced.

Helmy, 44, is a veteran of New Jersey politics. He served as an aide to Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and later worked as a member of senior staff for Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.).

After serving as Murphy’s chief of staff for more than four years, Helmy left the New Jersey governor’s office last year to serve as executive vice president and chief external affairs and policy officer at RWJBarnabas Health, a large health-care system in the state.

He is also a commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Helmy, who grew up in Jersey City, received his bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University and a master’s degree from Harvard University.

Upon Helmy’s exit from the governor’s office last year, Murphy praised his outgoing chief of staff as someone who had “put his heart and soul into serving the people of New Jersey.”

“I don’t know where we would be without George,” Murphy said at the time.

Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), who won the Senate Democratic primary for Menendez’s seat, had indicated that he would accept the temporary appointment to the Senate if the governor asked. The governor’s wife, Tammy Murphy, who dropped out of the Senate race before primary votes were cast, took herself out of consideration for the temporary Senate appointment.

If appointed by Murphy as expected, Helmy will occupy the Senate seat until Menendez’s term ends in early January. Helmy will be succeeded by the person New Jerseyans elect this November to a full six-year term.

Kim, the Democratic Senate candidate in New Jersey, will face hotelier Curtis Bashaw, the Republican, for the full six-year term.

There was a reason that Republicans entered last month’s convention with a sense of confidence. Polling showed Donald Trump with consistent-if-narrow leads nationally and in swing states. The Democrats were demoralized, unhappy about their presumptive nominee and fretting about the prospect of Trump returning to office. Both candidates were generally unpopular, with a significant number of voters turning to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a possible alternative.

Then, immediately after the convention, President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy. Vice President Kamala Harris earned his endorsement and locked up the support of their party. And just like that, the entire shape of the campaign shifted.

That’s reflected in polling released on Wednesday from Pew Research Center. Harris leads Trump by 1 point, a 5-point shift in the Democrats’ favor since Pew’s July poll. That’s driven in part by a huge surge in enthusiasm among Democrats for their new candidate.

In July, Pew found that only 43 percent of Biden supporters said that they strongly supported the incumbent president. Now, more than 6 in 10 Harris supporters say their support is “strong.” Across demographic groups, that enthusiasm has jumped by double-digit margins.

White Harris supporters are 21 points more likely to describe their support as “strong” than White Biden supporters were last month. Harris supporters under 30 are 26 points more likely to describe their support as “strong.”

There’s also been a surge in motivation. In July, 63 percent of Biden supporters said they were “extremely motivated” to cast a ballot. This month, 70 percent of Harris voters say the same thing, with a 13-point increase among Black supporters of the Democratic candidate and a 19-point increase among those under 30.

At the same time, though, motivation among Trump voters has also increased. Last month, an equivalent 63 percent of supporters of the Republican nominee said they were “extremely motivated.” Now, 72 percent do. Among Hispanic Trump supporters, the percentage who described themselves as “extremely motivated” jumped 15 points.

There is one noteworthy gap: 61 percent of Harris supporters under the age of 30 say they’re extremely motivated to cast a ballot, compared to 42 percent of Trump supporters in that same age range. Should the gap persist, it’s potentially quite significant. Polling continues to suggest that results in swing states will be close, meaning that voter motivation could play a big role in the outcome, driving more or less turnout. If younger Trump voters — of whom there are fewer — are less motivated to vote, that’s an advantage for Harris.

The increase in motivation seems to suggest that voters are suddenly viewing the race as real or contested in a way they didn’t last month. If you think Trump is going to win in a walk or if you are exasperated about Biden, you might not be too worried about voting. But if you suddenly think your party can win — or might lose — that changes.

It also clearly undercuts Kennedy. Last month, Pew found him getting 15 percent of the vote. Now, he’s in the single digits.

When they asked people who’d preferred Biden, Trump and Kennedy last month who they back now, nearly two-thirds of Kennedy voters had shifted to one of the major-party candidates. By a 2 to 1 margin, they preferred Harris.

This also reflects a shift we noted on Wednesday, that fewer Americans view both candidates negatively. Kennedy was appealing in part because a lot of people who might be expected to back Biden were unenthusiastic about doing so. Now, they’re enthusiastic about Harris.

Here’s where we offer the perennial caveat: All of this can change. We will note, too, that it is not uncommon for the nature of a race to shift as Election Day draws closer and people are paying more attention. But this year it is obvious that the midsummer shift in the race is more dramatic than it usually is.

The result is a more engaged and motivated electorate — and one that is for now less likely to return Trump to the White House.

Former Donald Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway offered a recipe this week for Trump’s struggling 2024 campaign: “The winning formula for President Trump is very plain to see: It’s fewer insults, more insights and [a] policy contrast.”

Fellow former Trump adviser Peter Navarro echoed that. “When Trump attacks [Vice President Kamala] Harris personally rather than on policy, Harris’s support among swing voters rises — particularly among women,” Navarro said.

Trump is not listening.

At a rally Wednesday in Asheville, N.C., Trump called Harris “crazy,” “stupid” and a “lunatic,” adding that “she’s not smart, she’s not intelligent.” He repeatedly derided her laugh, including saying that it’s “career-threatening. That’s a laugh of a person with some big problems.”

And while the event was billed as a speech on economic policy, Trump made clear that wasn’t really his preferred topic.

“They wanted to do a speech on the economy,” Trump said, suggesting this wasn’t his idea and adding: “Today we’re going to talk about one subject. And then we’ll start going back to the other, because we sort of love that.”

He mused at another point: “They say it’s the most important subject. I’m not sure it is.”

Recent days have featured a familiar sight: a coterie of Trump allies taking to broadcast outlets such as Fox News, seemingly to send a message to Trump — in the apparent belief that this is how you get through to the cable-news-junkie former president. They’ve practically begged him to change it up. They’ve sought to push him away from talk of crowd sizes and personal attacks on Harris, and toward policy.

But whether because he refuses to or he can’t, that message is going unheeded by the “audience of one.”

And the contrast continues to loom large as Trump prepares to hold another news conference Thursday in New Jersey.

The pleas have gone well beyond Conway and Navarro. For example:

• Former Trump primary opponent Nikki Haley said Trump is “not going to win” by talking about things like crowd sizes or Harris’s race and intelligence. (Trump has repeatedly suggested that Harris has hidden her Black identity, despite all the evidence to the contrary.)
• Another former Trump primary opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy, called for a reset and a “stronger focus on policy.”
• Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) urged Trump to “stop questioning the size of her crowds” and focus on Harris’s record.
• Fox News host Sean Hannity said “we don’t have time for” Trump’s attacks on Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R).
• Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said of Trump’s focus on crowd sizes: “So stupid. Just focus on the damn border.”

Trump hasn’t repeated his ridiculous claim Sunday that Harris’s crowd in Detroit was “A.I.’d” and “nobody was there.” But in both an event on X on Monday and speaking to reporters Wednesday, he played up his own crowd sizes.

“We have the biggest crowds ever in the history of politics,” Trump said Wednesday. “We have crowds that nobody’s ever seen before. And we continue to have that.”

Trump has continued to attack Kemp, despite many in his party urging him to ease off a feud with the governor of such a vital swing state.

Despite GOP concerns over his previous attack on Harris’s racial identity, Trump re-upped that attack in a news conference last week.

“I think it’s very disrespectful to both, really,” he said. “Whether it’s Indian or Black, I think it’s very disrespectful to both.”

And despite many Republicans and Trump allies urging him to focus more intently on Harris’s record, Trump has generally spoken only in platitudes about how Harris is bad, without keying on specific policies she advocated — including liberal ones she took during her 2020 presidential campaign.

Indeed, Trump often appears more focused on his former opponent, President Joe Biden, than Harris. A transcript of Trump’s X event Monday with Elon Musk shows Trump referenced Biden by name 21 times and Harris by name only eight times.

Trump’s campaign has thus far shrugged off the calls for a change in approach. Top adviser Chris LaCivita on Fox News on Wednesday avoided directly responding to Haley’s criticism when prompted. But he suggested that the problem was more about the media not covering it when Trump does talk about policy.

GOP vice-presidential nominee JD Vance was more defiant Wednesday.

“To the people who say that Donald Trump should do something different, they had an opportunity to make Donald Trump do something different by challenging him over three separate primaries — every single one of which he won,” Vance told reporters. “So I think that Donald Trump has earned the right to run the campaign that he wants to run.”

Vance insisted that he and Trump are talking about policy, but he added that “we’d much rather have an American president who is who he is” and “who’s willing to offend us” and “lets the American people see exactly who he is.”

There’s a lot of truth in those statements for the Republican Party. Trump is indeed who he is, and he’s demonstrated very limited ability or willingness to adjust his approach. And Republicans have clearly made the decision to own that Trump, for better or worse.

It’s just that it’s mostly been for worse throughout Trump’s time in politics, and the 2024 campaign isn’t looking great either.

NEW YORK — Lawyers for Donald Trump this week asked a judge to delay sentencing scheduled Sept. 18 for the former president on his criminal convictions on 34 counts of falsifying business records until after the election in November.

The sentencing in the case involving hush money payments to an adult-film actress is set two days after New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan is to rule on whether a U.S. Supreme Court decision that broadly defined presidential immunity should influence Trump’s conviction.

Trump’s attorneys wrote in a letter to Merchan dated Wednesday that the short turnaround between the justice’s Sept. 16 immunity decision and the sentencing puts Trump’s team in an unfair position that would hamper his ability to pursue appeals or other legal avenues.

Trump, the Republican nominee for president, was originally supposed to be sentenced July 11. Merchan postponed the date to give the defense time to argue that the conviction and the indictment should be thrown out because the process was poisoned by evidence related to the former president’s official White House acts.

Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove said the timeline set by Merchan means that the prosecution will likely file a damaging sentencing memo around the time of the immunity decision even though there’s a chance the guilty verdict will get tossed out.

“The requested adjournment is also necessary to allow President Trump adequate time to assess and pursue state and federal appellate options in response to any adverse ruling,” Blanche and Bove wrote, adding that a day “is an unreasonably short period of time” for Trump to begin appeals or other legal maneuvers if Merchan rules against him on immunity.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office declined to comment Thursday.

A jury found Trump guilty in May of attempting to cover up the nature of hush money payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in the lead-up to the 2016 election while his campaign was scrambling to mitigate the impact of other sexual scandals.

Daniels was paid $130,000 to keep quiet about her claim that she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006 at a celebrity golf tournament where the pair where photographed together. Trump denies that an encounter occurred.

Blanche and Bove have argued that much of the prosecution’s case relies on documents and testimony that is out of bounds given the standards that the Supreme Court set in its July 1 opinion. Prosecutors have said that the case is strong enough without those aspects to hold up a conviction on which Trump faces up to four years in prison.

Trump’s attorneys have said Trump’s election obstruction case in D.C. shows that Merchan’s timeline is problematic. In that case, which was the impetus for the Supreme Court ruling, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan is not expected to set a schedule for new motions related the high court’s ruling until Sept. 5, making it essentially certain that a trial would not take place before the election.

The lawyers wrote that “setting aside naked election-interference objectives, there is no valid countervailing reason for the Court to keep the current sentencing date on the calendar. There is no basis for continuing to rush.”

PHOENIX — Mark Meadows, who was Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, has asked that the Arizona election-subversion-related prosecution against him be moved from state court to federal court — the same legal maneuver he unsuccessfully tried in a separate election interference case in Georgia.

The U.S. District Court in Arizona has set a Sept. 5 hearing to consider his request, which argues that he was acting as a federal officer and that his actions were within the scope of the president’s chief of staff.

“Mr. Meadows has the right to remove this matter because he has a federal defense of Supremacy Clause immunity to the State charge and Congress has provided that federal courts are the appropriate forum to adjudicate such issues,” his attorneys said in a July 26 motion. “The conduct giving rise to the charges in the indictment all occurred during his tenure and as part of his service as White House Chief of Staff.”

Meadows lawyer George J. Terwilliger III echoed that sentiment Thursday, saying in a statement that “the Constitution and laws as passed by Congress dictate” the case should be considered by the federal judiciary. The function of federal officials, “let alone a White House Chief of Staff, are not subject to supervision and control by state authorities,” Terwilliger said.

A spokesperson for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D), who brought the case against Meadows, declined to comment.

Meadows has pleaded not guilty to nine felonies related to his alleged role in trying to subvert Joe Biden’s win in Arizona after the 2020 presidential election. He is one of 18 defendants indicted in April by a state grand jury, which determined that the defendants engaged in crimes including conspiracy, forgery and fraud when they tried to deliver the state’s 11 electoral votes to Trump instead of Biden.

Some grand jurors wanted to indict Trump, according to a motion filed last week by state prosecutors, who urged the grand jury not to indict him. Trump was described in the indictment as an unindicted co-conspirator.

Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to Trump’s 2020 campaign, reached a cooperation agreement last week that allows her to avoid jail time. Another defendant — Loraine Pellegrino, a GOP elector and political activist — saw most of the charges against her dismissed last week after she pleaded guilty to a lesser misdemeanor charge.

In the final days of Trump’s presidency, Meadows was among those close to Trump who allegedly evaluated a plan for how legislatures could overturn the will of voters through appointing alternate slates of Trump electors. Rep. Andy Biggs (Ariz.) was among the GOP members of Congress who communicated with Meadows about a version of such a strategy, according to text messages obtained by a U.S. House committee that investigated the origins of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Meadows was charged last year in Fulton County, Ga., with criminally conspiring to try to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss in that state and solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer for his involvement in Trump’s January 2021 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) during which Trump tried to pressure the official to reverse Biden’s victory. The latter charge was dismissed this year, with the judge overseeing the case saying the indictment lacked “sufficient detail.”

Meadows testified in federal court that he had no role in the effort. Prosecutors in Georgia, however, have introduced evidence that showed Meadows in December 2020 emailing about the elector plan with a longtime Trump campaign aide.

In July, he took his fight to try to throw out the charges against him in Georgia to the U.S. Supreme Court. He asked the justices to overturn a lower-court ruling that rejected claims that his alleged conduct was tied to his official federal duties. His request came after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a lower-court ruling that found Meadows had not proved that his alleged conduct, charged as part of a sweeping criminal racketeering case, was related to his official duties as Trump’s most senior White House aide.

Meadows’s petition to the Supreme Court sharply criticized the 11th Circuit decision, describing it as “the first court ‘in the 190-year history of the federal officer removal statute’ to hold that the statute offers no protection to former federal officers facing suit for acts taken while in office.”

Holly Bailey contributed to this report.

Former president Donald Trump’s campaign is bringing on new staff — including his controversial 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski — as it continues to adjust to facing his new Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

In addition to Lewandowski, the campaign is adding Tim Murtaugh, the communications director from Trump’s 2020 campaign, as well as three former officials from a pro-Trump super PAC: Alex Pfeiffer, Alex Bruesewitz and Taylor Budowich.

“As we head into the home stretch of this election, we are continuing to add to our impressive campaign team,” Trump’s co-campaign managers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, said in a statement Thursday. The five hires, they added, “are all veterans of prior Trump campaigns and their unmatched experience will help President Trump prosecute the case against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the most radical ticket in American history.”

The hires were first reported by Politico.

Trump has been annoyed for weeks at the direction of his campaign, even though many of the major errors have been made by the candidate. He has called allies asking if he should replace anyone, The Washington Post has reported.

Some 2016 alumni have voiced dissatisfaction with Wiles and LaCivita, suspecting them of controlling access to the former president and excluding or impugning longtime loyalists such as contributors to the Project 2025 policy blueprint. LaCivita has dismissed those detractors as a distraction.

Trump has publicly stood by Wiles and LaCivita, telling the New York Times on Friday he was “thrilled” with them.

Lewandowski sought distance from Trump after 2020 and toyed with working with other Republicans but came back around as it was clear Trump was going to be the nominee, people who spoke with him said. They requested anonymity to share private conversations.

Lewandowski has been in and out of Trump’s orbit since serving as his first campaign manager in 2016. Trump fired Lewandowski as he entered the general election that year, months after Lewandowski was accused of assaulting a reporter at a campaign news conference in Florida.

Lewandowski became a political commentator, including for CNN, and later joined a pro-Trump super PAC while Trump was in the White House. He was removed from the super PAC in 2021 after a donor accused him of repeatedly groping her and making unwanted sexual comments at a charity event in Las Vegas.

Trump has increasingly spoken with Lewandowski in recent weeks to discuss his campaign, including staffing and strategy, according to a person familiar with the conversations. In the same period, Trump has been sounding out associates on his campaign leadership and the possibility of making changes or bringing on additional advisers.

Budowich comes to Trump’s campaign after leading MAGA Inc., the main pro-Trump super PAC in recent years. Pfeiffer was communications director for the super PAC.

Bruesewitz is known for his large following on X, where he regularly churns out posts promoting Trump and attacks his political opponents.

Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.

A lot has changed in the presidential race over the last three weeks, according to The Washington Post’s polling average.

Since President Joe Biden exited the presidential race on July 21 and passed the baton to Kamala Harris, his vice president, the race has effectively reversed itself. It is no exaggeration to state that Harris would be the favorite to win the White House, according to our polling model, if the presidential contest were held today.

Relative to the day that Biden dropped out, Harris has gained two percentage points nationally and, as of Sunday, leads in our national polling average. In swing states, she has gained an average of 2.1 points since June 21 and leads in 2 of 7 of them.

Harris has taken the lead in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and has substantially closed the gap in Michigan, where Donald Trump now leads with less than one percentage point (if this trend continues, we’d expect our average to show a tie in that state in the coming days).

According to our polling model, Harris still trails Trump in the electoral college tally if the election were held today and every state votes as their polling average currently demonstrates. Nonetheless, she would be the favorite if voters today went to the polls because Harris now has more paths to the presidency than Donald Trump — that is, she is competitive in more states that could add up to 270 votes or an electoral college victory.

Our modeling shows that Harris has two paths to possible success: the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and the Sun Belt states of Georgia, Arizona and Nevada (she could win in either region and still claim the White House). Meanwhile, Trump must win both the Rust Belt and Sun Belt to triumph.

It is, of course, important to remember that there are still three months until Election Day and Harris has just recently become the Democratic presidential nominee. Polls are simply a snapshot in time and a lot can change between now and Election Day.

But there’s no question something big happened on July 21.

Before the June 27 debate, the presidential race was pretty easy to describe: Biden was behind, both nationally and in the swing states, but was very slowly clawing his way back into contention. In January of this year, Biden was behind Trump by 1.5 percentage points nationally, according to The Washington Post polling average, which we launched in June but also ran retrospectively. By mid-June, that deficit had shrunk to three-tenths of a percentage point.

What followed the debate were five of the most eventful weeks in recent political history. A catastrophic debate performance, an attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, a vice-presidential pick, the Republican National Convention and, most critically, Biden dropping out of the presidential election and endorsing Harris.

After the debate, Biden’s standing in the polls deteriorated pretty quickly. According to our polling average, Biden dropped by more than one percentage point nationally in just the week following the debate, erasing the progress he had made since the beginning of the year. But more importantly, Biden was behind in every single swing state.

After the debate, our polling average showed Biden’s position in the Sun Belt states deteriorating to the point that Trump was ahead by five percentage points in states like Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina. In Michigan, Biden had slipped behind Trump by more than three percentage points.

But after Harris entered the race in late July, the election was effectively reset. Compared to other polling aggregators and models, The Post’s model took a bit longer to reflect the changes that came with Harris’s candidacy. That’s because we have chosen to use only the highest quality polls for our model, and not many polls that were released in the last few weeks met our standard.

According to our model now, Harris has become the slight favorite. Nonetheless, there are some caveats and cautionary notes — our polling model is only a snapshot in time and also, polls can err as we’ve seen in the last two presidential elections.

On the face of it, Harris’s small lead in the national polls and trends in swing states don’t look like enough for her to be the favorite in the electoral college. According to our model, Trump continues to lead in a majority of the battleground states — and if you count up the electoral votes and award them to the candidates leading in those states, Trump comes in at 283 and Harris at 255. The first to 270 wins.

The reason Harris is now the favorite is because Harris has closed the gap with Trump in Sun Belt states enough to open a second path to the presidency

Because the polls underestimated Trump in the last two presidential elections, we often associate polling errors with a potential upside for Republicans. But it’s important to remember that polling errors can go either way. And a 2012-sized error (not a cycle we usually associate with an error at all) would now be enough to put Harris over the top.

The other, and more crucial, reason that Harris is favored is that her improvement in the polls has opened up a second path on the presidential battlefield and in the electoral college. The polling suggests that, unlike Biden, she is no longer effectively tied to the Rust Belt — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — to hit 270 electoral votes. As of today, Harris is now only a typically sized polling error away from winning key Sun Belt states. Winning all of Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia would also be enough to put Harris over the top and she is continuing to improve her position in those states.

Our model shows that for Trump to win the White House, he would need to notch victories in both the Rust Belt and Sun Belt. But crucially for Harris, she would win by taking just one of those two paths.

For now, that is a game changer.

A large batch of polls this week confirmed Vice President Kamala Harris’s rise in the 2024 presidential race and suggests it has continued. She now leads in the majority of national polls.

There’s a lot to take in, so I thought it’s worth isolating a few findings that stand out to me.

1. Democrats’ big enthusiasm bump — and edge

It’s been evident for a while that Democrats have been injected with huge amounts of enthusiasm since Harris replaced President Joe Biden on the ticket. Call it “vibes” or something else; it’s real. Polls this week reflect that.

While a Monmouth University poll from June showed just 46 percent of Democrats said they were enthusiastic about a Trump-Biden rematch, that number has nearly doubled to 85 percent for the Trump-Harris race. Democrats’ enthusiasm leapfrogged Republicans, whose excitement stayed steady at 71 percent.

In other words, Democrats went from a 25-point enthusiasm deficit to a 14-point advantage, at least on this specific question. (Other polls have tested enthusiasm to vote, which is a somewhat different question, and the two parties have been closer.)

Also notable from the Monmouth poll: Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats say they’re optimistic about the election, compared with about three-quarters of Republicans.

And an AP-NORC poll this week showed that 63 percent of Democrats are excited about a potential Harris administration, compared with 57 percent of Republicans for another Trump administration.

2. Democrats could be getting a Senate bump, too

A big question has been how much Harris’s momentum might filter down to other Democrats this election year — particularly with both the House and Senate very much in play. It wasn’t guaranteed it would help, especially given that Senate Democrats were already overperforming Biden.

Well, we got a big new set of Senate polls from the Cook Political Report on Thursday, and they suggest the Democrats got a significant bump there, too.

Democrats improved their margins by an average of four points across five key Senate races: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They now lead in each race by at least seven points.

Democrats also flipped the generic ballot — where people are asked to choose between a generic Republican and a generic Democrat — in two other states that don’t feature a 2024 Senate race: Georgia and North Carolina.

In total, Democrats actually gained more down ballot than they did in the presidential race in every state except Wisconsin.

We don’t have a ton of other new polls, but the ones we have do suggest some of these races have moved slightly in Democrats’ direction in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

I wrote in my newsletter Wednesday about whether Democrats can dream about actually holding on to the Senate, which will be very tough given how slanted the map is against them with the specific seats that are up in 2024. They basically need to sweep all the races mentioned above, and then some.

It’s worth awaiting more data. But these numbers have to tempt them to dream beyond just the presidential race.

3. The big Walz vs. Vance gap: 14 points

Republicans have exerted plenty of energy going after the new Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), for his record as governor, his military service and other issues. And they’ve had plenty to work with.

But for now, the latest polls show Walz is a popular running mate — and notably, significantly more popular than the GOP’s unpopular VP nominee, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

The current FiveThirtyEight average shows Walz’s net image rating (favorable minus unfavorable) is five points positive, while Vance’s is nine points negative. That’s a 14-point gap.

Vance’s image has continued to decline in recent weeks, and a Fox News poll this week really highlighted the GOP’s problem. The poll was relatively good for Trump (showing him leading nationally by one point) but was one of Vance’s worst to date. It showed his image 13 points underwater: 38 percent favorable, compared with 51 percent unfavorable.

4. The ‘double-haters’ break for Harris

My colleague Philip Bump on Wednesday broke down the evolving picture with “double-haters,” or those who dislike both major-party candidates.

The top finding from the Monmouth poll is that they are a shrinking group, declining by about half since Harris’s entry into the race. While about 1 in 5 voters were double-haters before — a historically high number — it’s now about 1 in 10.

Perhaps more important is the big reason for that decline: A lot of them like Harris. And they’re now ready to vote for her.

Among voters who still dislike both Trump and Biden, 53 percent say they’re voting for Harris, while just 11 percent say they’re voting for Trump.

Previously, those double-haters had been more evenly split between Trump and Biden. Harris winning them over is a big boost for her.

5. Other states could come into play

For almost the entirety of the 2024 campaign, we’ve been focused on a static array of swing states and Senate races. But it’s fair to ask whether we should widen our gaze a bit.

A couple of states that new polls suggest we should keep an eye on:

• North Carolina, which has been regarded as a perhaps unlikely Democratic target. The Cook poll showed Harris leading there by one point (within the margin of error). We don’t have much high-quality recent polling, but the polls we do have show a tight race. And Biden lost the state only by a little more than a point in 2020.
• Florida, where polls in recent days have shown Harris within two to five points. Also, on the Senate front, a Suffolk University poll this week showed Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) 14 points underwater (35 percent favorable versus 49 percent unfavorable), even as other Republicans including Trump were in positive territory. Scott’s advantage on the ballot has been similar to Trump’s.

The Secret Service has approved a new security plan to better protect former president Donald Trump at outdoor campaign events, including the use of bulletproof glass to shield him onstage, a Secret Service official confirmed.

The effort comes after the Secret Service urged the Trump campaign to temporarily pause having Trump appear at outdoor rallies, after a gunman fired multiple shots at the Republican nominee at an outdoor fairgrounds in Butler, Pa., on July 13.

Trump was wounded and has not appeared at an outdoor campaign event since the attempted assassination, which is considered the Secret Service’s most serious security failure since John Hinckley was able to shoot and nearly kill President Ronald Reagan outside a Washington hotel four decades ago.

The plan to erect bulletproof glass to surround Trump at outdoor events is a major enhancement in the Secret Service’s standard security planning for candidate campaign events, according to the Secret Service official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security measures. Such sheets of ballistic glass are normally only provided for presidents and for vice presidents when deemed necessary at outdoor appearances, an extra layer of security organized and coordinated by the Department of Defense to shield the nation’s top two leaders. Vice President Kamala Harris, who is the Democratic nominee challenging Trump, would be given such protection if warranted, officials said.

The Defense Department partners with the Secret Service to bolster security for the sitting president and vice president, the official said, but does not help protect candidates for president. The Secret Service generally prefers indoor events for presidents and vice presidents, reducing the need for such glass.

“Former presidents and candidates don’t normally get bulletproof glass or support from DOD,” the official said. “This glass needs to be brought in on trucks and vans.”

With the goal of better protecting Trump, a Secret Service official said, the agency has begun positioning caches of ballistic glass around the country in various locations, where government personnel can easily access it for Trump campaign events.

The Secret Service will also be adding other technical security assets that have not normally been provided for presidential candidates, a Secret Service official confirmed, but they declined to describe those tools. These technical security measures could include the use of drones.

The Secret Service public affairs office declined to comment on the change. The new development involving the use of bulletproof glass was first reported this afternoon by ABC News.

Former Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle had met with the Trump campaign in the wake of the July 13 shooting, recommending he temporarily stop holding outdoor events and proposing the agency craft a new security plan for his campaign appearances.

Trump has wanted to do at least some outdoor rallies again, including one in Butler, Pa., Trump aides told The Washington Post. Advisers have not finalized a date, and the service has asked for several weeks to plan for any such event. But Trump had made clear he did not want to go outside again without the protective glass, an adviser said.

Cheatle resigned a day after she testified before Congress about the shooting, amid bipartisan calls among lawmakers for her resignation and broad internal agency disappointment with her leadership and handling of the crisis. Acting head of the Secret Service, Ronald Rowe Jr., continued and finalized the new security plans for Trump and use of ballistic glass and other measures, an official said.

Trump’s campaign team is still eyeing indoor venues for many of his campaign events, out of an abundance of caution, according to Trump advisers. These advisers have told The Post they think indoor events will create fewer challenges for creating a security bubble around Trump.

LARGO, Md. — President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, touting their efforts to lower prescription drug prices for Medicare recipients, hosted their first joint appearance since Biden ended his reelection bid, a policy event that quickly took on the tone and feel of a campaign rally.

Biden and Harris announced agreements on lower drug costs for the first 10 medications selected under a Medicare price negotiation program, including those that treat diabetes, blood clots, heart failure, rheumatoid arthritis and blood cancers.

“As vice president — together with Joe Biden, our president — we’ve finally addressed the long-standing issue that for years was one of the biggest challenges on this subject, which is that Medicare was prohibited by law from negotiating lower drug prices, and that cost was passed on to our seniors,” Harris said. “But not anymore.”

The appearance was billed as an official White House policy event, but it had clear political implications, and Biden leaned into them from the first minute of his remarks. “Folks, I have an incredible partner in the progress we’ve made,” he said, adding, “She’s going to make one hell of a president.”

Harris, for her part, spent much of her speech heaping praise on Biden and his leadership. “I can speak all afternoon about the person that I am standing on the stage with,” she said. “There’s a lot of love in this room for our president, and I think it’s for many, many reasons.”

As the crowd chanted, “Thank you, Joe,” the president brought his hand to his chest and nodded.

The event reflected a complex political moment for the Democratic leaders, as Biden seeks to burnish his legacy while also boosting Harris, and Harris seeks to make the case for her candidacy while honoring Biden. The crowd’s preference was clear, as cheers erupted every time Harris’s name was mentioned, while several dozen attendees sought to leave about 15 minutes into Biden’s remarks.

Among the speakers was Maryland Gov. Wes Moore. “You’re going to hear not just from the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, you’re also about to hear from the 47th president of the United States, Kamala Harris,” he said, prompting sustained cheers and screams. The community college venue where the event was held was packed in a way that Biden’s events have rarely been.

Turning to the reason for the event, Biden said he had been fighting since 1973, his first year in the Senate, to give Medicare the authority to negotiate drug prices. If Republicans regained the White House, he added, they would undo the progress his administration had made.

“We finally beat Big Pharma,” he said. “And, might I add, with not one Republican vote in the entire Congress.”

The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022 with Harris casting the tiebreaking vote in the Senate, gave the secretary of health and human services for the first time the power to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over Medicare drug prices. The administration reported Thursday that the program has resulted in about $6 billion in initial savings.

Biden stressed that Project 2025 — a conservative policy blueprint created for the next GOP administration, which Republican nominee Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from — would strip away Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices. “Let me tell you what our 2025 plan is: Beat the hell out of them,” he said.

Harris’s month-old campaign has so far focused on a broad, uplifting message about building a better future, arguing that Trump and Republicans want to take America backward.

Her critics, most notably Trump himself, accuse of her of leaning into partisan rhetoric and the good vibes of a reset campaign while avoiding the details of what she would actually do as president. Harris has not sat down for a formal press interview or news conference, limiting interactions with the media to off-the-record conversations and quick, informal exchanges with reporters.

“We actually have the plans, we have the policies, to accomplish this stuff — that’s a big thing that sets us apart from Kamala Harris and Tim Walz,” Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, said at an event in Pittsburgh earlier in the day.

Thursday’s event was in part a response to such criticism, as Harris spoke in detail about the results of a key administration policy. On Friday, she is expected to begin rolling out her own proposals with a speech on the economy, including a plan to ban “price gouging” for food items amid widespread consumer unhappiness over inflation.

Still, detailed policy proposals often come with political risk. Opponents, journalists and even allies will pore over the details of the proposals, looking for negative economic ramifications, unintended consequences and contradictions with Harris’s past stances. Harris will have to publicly defend her policies, including at a Sept. 10 debate between her and Trump.

In an early sign of the back-and-forth to come, Trump hastily scheduled a news conference at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., for shortly after the Biden and Harris event. He told reporters that some of Harris’s proposals were “communist price controls” that would wreck the economy.

“She wants price controls,” he said in his remarks, which focused on what he described as negative economic indicators since Biden took office, especially inflation. “And if they worked, I’d go along with that. I’d be all for that, but they don’t work. They actually have the exact opposite effect and impact. It leads to food shortages, rationing, hunger, dramatically more inflation.”

As an opening salvo for Harris’s policy rollouts, Democrats see the price reductions on drugs as a potentially winning issue for their candidates across the country, but they face the challenge that few voters know about the issue and the impact of the price cuts will not be felt for years to come.

Democrats have sought to reduce the cost of drug prices in the Medicare program for more than 30 years. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a former presidential candidate, has campaigned on the issue. But the effort faced immense resistance from a pharmaceutical industry with deep pockets, whose representatives argued that forcing down prices would stifle innovation.

The Biden administration said Thursday the renegotiation will reduce the amount of money that many Medicare beneficiaries have to spend out of pocket. The new, negotiated prices ranged from 38 to 79 percent lower than the drugs’ list prices in 2023, they said, and the initiative is arguably the most significant health-care legislation in more than a decade, since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

But the new prices do not take effect until 2026, creating a challenge for Biden and Harris as they seek to make voters aware of major legislation that they say will help them save money.

For nine of the drugs, the negotiations help cut the price by more than 50 percent, officials said. Medicare beneficiaries in 2022 collectively spent $3.4 billion to cover out-of-pocket costs on those drugs, according to a federal analysis released last year. The drugs also represented about one-fifth of the Medicare prescription drug program’s total spending.

Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said Medicare enrollees will save an estimated $1.5 billion in 2026, when the new prices take effect. “For so many people, being able to afford these drugs will mean the difference between debilitating illness and living full lives,” she said on a conference call with reporters.

Medicare plans to target 15 additional drugs for negotiations in 2025 and 2026, and 20 drugs in the following years.

Thursday’s joint event offered Democrats an opportunity to use both the presidential bully pulpit and the spotlight from a national campaign to raise awareness of the issue. Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are embarking on a bus tour through western Pennsylvania over the weekend and plan to hold a rally in Milwaukee next week, before appearing at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

All these events will probably give them further opportunities to stress the issue of drug costs. Biden also frequently touts his measure capping insulin costs for Medicare patients at $35 a month, another program that Harris and Walz are likely to highlight.

Biden, 81, announced late last month that he would not seek reelection to a second term, following a presidential debate with Trump during which he repeatedly stumbled and sometimes had difficulty finishing his sentences.

Biden had been crisscrossing the country to prove that he is up for four more years, but since he stepped aside, he has significantly scaled back his public travel schedule. It remains to be seen how much he will campaign for Harris and how effective a messenger he will be.

The campaign has said that Biden will campaign at some point for Harris in Pennsylvania with Gov. Josh Shapiro, but Biden will not be present on Harris’s bus tour in advance of the convention.

The president will speak at the convention Monday night, and Harris is scheduled to deliver her acceptance speech Thursday, the event’s final night.

Dan Diamond and Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.