At last week’s Democratic National Convention, both Barack and Michelle Obama pitched Vice President Kamala Harris as something of a new standard-bearer for their political movement. It was high praise, yes, but it was also a lot to live up to. The Obama era was inarguably the political high point for Democrats in the 21st century; the potential downside of building someone up like that is that it sets expectations too high.

But it’s increasingly evident that, as Harris’s national poll numbers have crept closer to the kinds of margins Barack Obama racked up, Democrats are indeed feeling some familiar feelings.

Some striking new polling shows the party effectively matching its Obama-era enthusiasm high. Also importantly, it shows Democratic voters’ enthusiasm is suddenly much more geared toward supporting their own candidate rather than opposing the potent boogeyman that is Donald Trump.

Both findings loom large, because they suggest it could be a lot easier for Democrats to get their voters to the polls in the 2024 elections than it has been in the past couple of cycles.

The big new numbers come from Gallup. Its new poll shows that 78 percent of Democratic-leaning voters say they are “more enthusiastic” about voting than in other recent elections. As in other recent polls testing enthusiasm, Democratic-leaning voters have suddenly surged past Republican-leaning ones (64 percent) since Harris’s entry.

The Gallup survey is particularly helpful in that it helps us put that into context, given the company’s decades of polling. And that context suggests Democratic-leaning voters are actually historically enthusiastic.

That 78 percent figure is just one point off the highest number from the Obama era (79 percent). It’s higher than more than a dozen other Gallup polls conducted when Obama was running in 2008 and 2012. It’s also higher than GOP enthusiasm has ever been since 2000.

And that high point for Democratic-leaning voters in 2008 actually came during Obama’s primary contest with Hillary Clinton, in February 2008, not during the general election. In the final month of the general election, enthusiasm among Democratic-leaning voters was generally in the low to mid-70s (the highest being 76 percent).

The margins of error factor in here, but it’s possible Democratic-leaning voters are actually more enthusiastic now than they were when they were sending Obama to the White House.

(It’s also worth noting that this isn’t a convention bounce; the poll was conducted from Aug. 1 through Aug. 20, the day after the convention began.)

The other callback to the Obama era in the new poll numbers is in what this sudden surge in enthusiasm indicates: Democrats feel they are actually voting for something rather than against something.

A new Economist/YouGov poll shows 62 percent of Harris’s supporters say their vote is “mostly for” Harris, while 35 percent say it is “mostly against” Trump. We haven’t seen numbers like that since Trump was elected in 2016.

When President Joe Biden led the Democratic ticket, until last month, the numbers were effectively flipped, with 6 in 10 Biden voters saying they were mostly voting against Trump rather than for Biden. The numbers were similar ahead of the 2020 election, which Biden won.

Harris has also seen significant jumps on this number. The percentage of her supporters saying their vote was mostly about her has gone from 41 percent in late July to 55 percent early this month to 62 percent today.

That 62 percent is similar to where things stood in the final days of the Obama era, when Clinton was leading the Democratic ticket. But it’s arguably more impressive because the Democratic Party has become so defined over the past eight years by its opposition to Trump (who was more of an abstraction back in 2016).

Precisely what motivates voters — whether it’s being for one candidate or against another — would seem somewhat beside the point. The point is that they vote. Biden was elected president, after all, largely based on so-called negative partisanship.

But ideally, you’d want both factors to work together in your favor. And for now, Harris seems to have combined that constant and politically potent Democratic hostility toward Trump with some real and significant enthusiasm for her personally.

Which might help explain why Democrats are as “fired up” and “ready to go” as they ever were with Obama.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s first in-depth interview since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and endorsed her to be the Democratic presidential nominee is slated to air Thursday night.

The program, a prime-time special called “The First Interview: Harris & Walz A CNN Exclusive,” will also mark Harris’s first joint interview with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

What time does the interview start and how can I watch?

The interview is scheduled to be broadcast at 9 p.m. Eastern time on CNN and affiliated platforms, according to the network.

In addition to CNN, the interview will air on CNN International, CNN en Español and CNN Max. It will also be available live for pay-TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN-connected televisions and mobile apps where available, according to the network.

Who will be interviewing Harris and Walz?

Harris and Walz are scheduled to tape the interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Thursday afternoon, during a campaign swing through the battleground state of Georgia.

Bash, a CNN veteran, has conducted several sit-down interviews with Harris in the past. She was one of the moderators of the presidential debate between Biden and former president Donald Trump in June. Biden’s halting performance that night was largely seen as the impetus for the broader conversations within the Democratic Party that led to his decision to bow out of the 2024 race.

What are the stakes?

Harris had faced growing pressure to participate in an on-the-record, in-depth interview — addressing a number of issues, including her major policy pivots — since she emerged as the Democratic presidential candidate last month and formally became her party’s nominee last week.

Harris told campaign reporters nearly three weeks ago that she wanted to “get an interview scheduled before the end of the month.”

The interview will be taped Thursday while Harris and Walz are in Georgia on a two-day campaign bus tour. The peach state was critical in electing Biden in 2020, and Harris’s campaign aims to win the state again in 2024.

After Thursday afternoon’s taping with CNN, Harris is expected to continue campaigning in south Georgia before headlining a rally at night in Savannah.

Former president Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, doubled down Wednesday on telling Vice President Kamala Harris to “go to hell,’ falsely repeating that she had feigned outrage over an altercation between Trump’s campaign and an Arlington cemetery worker when she had not.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Vance defended his attack on Harris — saying “go to hell” is “a colloquial phrase’ — and tied it to broader criticism of the administration’s handling of an Islamic State attack that killed 13 U.S. troops during the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“Don’t focus on Donald Trump showing up to grieve with some people who lost their children. Focus on your own job. Don’t do this fake outrage thing. If Kamala Harris was really outraged about what happened, then she would do her job differently, start a real investigation, and fire some of the people who are involved.”

Vance also referred to a 2020 Biden campaign video that included a photo of Biden as vice president in 2010 in Section 60, the area of the cemetery that includes recent conflicts. However, the photo was taken at an official Memorial Day event, not while Biden was campaigning for president a decade later. The content of the campaign video memorialized soldiers and did not attack his opponent.

Harris, who began a two-day bus tour in Georgia on Wednesday, has not brought up the cemetery visit on the campaign trail. She is expected to sit down for an interview with CNN on Thursday that will air later at night. On Wednesday, Harris campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler told CNN that the cemetery incident was “pretty sad” but “not surprising coming from the Trump team.”

Vance spoke with The Post shortly before remarks at the International Association of Firefighters Convention a day after Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, addressed the gathering as both parties vie for the union’s endorsement. Vance was booed and heckled at some points during his speech by members of the union, which endorsed President Joe Biden in 2020.

Shortly before he arrived in Boston for his speech, the Army released a rare statement defending a staff member at Arlington National Cemetery who found herself in a brief confrontation Monday with two men working for the Trump campaign, saying that she “acted with professionalism” during the encounter and that her reputation has been “unfairly attacked” by the former president’s representatives.

Asked if the campaign should apologize to the worker, Vance said no. He said he hadn’t reviewed the incident but it had been overblown.

“The media and the Democrats have made a scandal out of something where there really is none,” he said before adding, “I don’t know the details of the altercation between the photographer and somebody in Arlington, so I certainly want to understand better before I comment directly on that. But from what I’ve seen, the president was invited.”

Trump visited the cemetery Monday on the third anniversary of the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops. Relatives of two of those service members had invited him to accompany them to their loved one’s graves. His campaign later posted a TikTok video with a montage of wreath-laying at the Tomb of the Unknowns and walking among marble headstones as soft guitar music plays and the former president’s words are heard criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal.

The Army said the campaign was informed in advance of federal regulations barring partisan activity at the cemetery. But at a campaign event on Wednesday, Vance said it should be up to the families who had invited Trump to the cemetery.

Vance has barnstormed in battleground states in recent weeks, speaking to supporters in Big Rapids, Mich. on Tuesday, truckers in Erie, Penn. on Wednesday and Wisconsin voters in De Pere later Wednesday, and emphasizing the campaign’s message that inflation has led to higher costs for workers under Biden. On Thursday, he told firefighters that Trump would close the Southern Border and reduce overdose deaths. He shared his own personal experience watching first responders save his mother from near death after she had used drugs.

While Walz had been booed by some audience members, Vance experienced heckling as soon as he walked onstage.

“Sounds like we got some fans and some haters,’ he said. ‘That’s okay.”

Billy Lynch, a firefighter from Evanston, Ill., heckled Vance when he promised that a second Trump administration would not “sit on our hands while rioters and arsonists burn down American cities like they did to Minneapolis in 2020.” Lynch said Republicans must first acknowledge the damage inflicted on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters overran police officers to try to overturn the election of Biden as president

FORSYTH, Ga. — Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has enjoyed an unusually friendly public rapport in recent days with former president Donald Trump.

After years of heaping insults on Kemp for refusing to help reverse Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, Trump praised the governor on Truth Social this month for his “help and support.” On Thursday, Kemp plans to attend a fundraiser in Atlanta for the Republican presidential nominee, who is locked in a virtual tie with Vice President Kamala Harris in polling of the critical swing state.

But the détente might not last. Kemp is now weighing whether state law requires him to get involved in a simmering controversy around the Georgia State Election Board, whose conservative majority is under fire for approving new rules this month that Trump supports but that state and local officials say will sow confusion, compromise ballot security and potentially enable rogue county boards to block certification of election results in November.

This week, Kemp asked Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (R) for an advisory opinion on what authority he has to address ethics complaints against the state board. Those who filed the complaints have said that state law requires the governor to remove the members if he finds their actions were inappropriate.

The board’s pro-Trump majority has attracted attention in recent weeks for taking up new rules, including one that allows county election boards to make “reasonable inquiries” before certifying an election if they have questions about the outcome. The rule does not specify what a reasonable inquiry is, and it places no limits on the time frame of such a probe or what documents a board can demand before certifying results. Election experts say delays could open the door to efforts to subvert the outcome along the lines of what Trump and his allies attempted in 2020.

Even more concerning to state and local election officials is a rule the board plans to take up on Sept. 20 that would require all counties to conduct hand counts of ballots at the precinct level on election night. If approved, these officials say, the measure could lead to less accurate results and compromise ballot security by requiring more people to handle them.

“We have had so much security training. We have done so many tabletop exercises. We have been told that the number one priority is security,” said Christina Redden, the assistant election director in Glynn County, who along with hundreds of other election officials was gathered this week at an election-security training in Forsyth, about an hour south of Atlanta. “Ballots are going to be vulnerable while being handled by multiple people at the precinct level.”

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), who also attended the training, called the state board “a mess.” “Legal precedent is pretty clear. You shouldn’t change rules in the middle of an election,” he added, citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

State and national Democrats sued this week in state court over the certification rule, arguing that it is intended to allow delays despite statutory language requiring certification to happen within six days of an election.

“Allegations of fraud or election misconduct are then resolved by the courts in properly filed challenges, not by county boards in the counting process,” the suit states.

The State Election Board carries a wide range of responsibilities, including investigating the administration of elections and recommending sanctions or even prosecution for mismanagement or fraud. It also makes recommendations for new laws and writes rules to promote uniformity and integrity in state elections. It is a bipartisan board, with its five members appointed by the governor, the state House, the state Senate and each of the two major parties. Its role has typically been far less prominent than that of the secretary of state or others involved in administering Georgia’s vote.

The ethics complaints center on the rules but also include an allegation that the three conservative members held an illegal meeting last month, at which they deliberated over the certification rule, without posting proper public notice. One of the pro-Trump board members, Janelle King, denied that the meeting was illegal in an interview, explaining that they posted notice of the meeting on the door inside the state Capitol where they met.

“We gave 24 hours of notice. We had a majority of the board present,” King said.

Complicating Kemp’s involvement in the controversy is the fact that Trump has been cheering on the state board’s work, naming each of the three conservatives at his Aug. 3 rally in Atlanta and calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.” He criticized Kemp for not supporting the board’s work, suggesting without evidence that the governor might be opposed to Republicans winning. Kemp has not said anything publicly in support of or in opposition to the state board’s actions.

The remarks prompted renewed fears that if Trump loses Georgia, as he did in 2020, he will again mount a pressure campaign on the officials responsible for fairly and impartially overseeing elections. Trump faces criminal charges both in federal court and in Georgia’s Fulton County related to his efforts to overturn his loss.

One state Republican with knowledge of Kemp’s thinking said he hopes to keep relations amicable with Trump and is not trying to pick a fight with him. The person, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid thoughts, said the governor is simply seeking clarity about state law by asking Carr to weigh in.

“Just as he has in the past, Governor Kemp will always uphold the laws and constitution of our state,” said Kemp spokesman Cody Hall.

A spokeswoman for Carr confirmed that Kemp sought an opinion but offered no further comment. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The public warming between Trump and Kemp has come after several weeks of acrimony between the two men.

Trump’s allies were shocked as they watched from backstage at the Aug. 3 rally as Trump, in addition to praising the State Election Board members, repeatedly criticized Kemp.

Trump called him “a bad guy,” “disloyal” and “a very average governor.” None of the jabs were in the teleprompter or prepared speech, and staff members learned later that he had been given information about Kemp that angered him just before the event, including a report of Kemp’s opposition to what the election board was doing, according to two advisers to the former president.

Kemp had not been invited to the rally, and his team was taken aback by the criticism. The governor was particularly upset by Trump’s criticism of his wife, Marty, a person with knowledge of Kemp’s thinking said. In April, Marty Kemp had told a local TV station that if the election were held then, she would write in her husband’s name for president.

Kemp responded to Trump on X, telling the former president to “leave my family out of it” and calling on him to stop “engaging in petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans, or dwelling on the past.” In addition, some of Kemp’s allies in the state backed out of plans to praise Trump publicly after the event, and Trump campaign aides began receiving a flood of concerned calls.

Polls show Kemp is immensely popular in Georgia. Trump unsuccessfully backed a primary challenger to Kemp in 2022, but the governor won handily and went on to win the general election by more than seven percentage points. Trump allies have been hoping the governor will deploy his formidable ground operation for the former president this year.

The governor already had plans to spend around $2 million from his campaign account on get-out-the-vote efforts, including paid door-knocks and text and mail operations. But the effort is designed to focus on six competitive state House districts in the Atlanta metro region that went for Biden in 2020, according to a person with knowledge of Kemp’s political operation. It’s unclear how much that investment will benefit Trump or whether Kemp’s plans will expand.

In a measure of Georgia’s importance to the presidential vote, Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are touring the state this week.

Trump and Kemp have not talked directly since the days following the 2020 election, despite the joint fundraiser on Thursday.

Trump friend and donor Steve Witkoff and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) brokered the détente, according to two Trump advisers. Both men met with the governor and teed up an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News with the hope that Trump would see it. The goal was for Trump to stop insulting Kemp for the rest of the election, campaign advisers said, and let Kemp help the Republican ticket win Georgia.

During the Fox News interview last week, Kemp spoke about the urgent need to help Trump beat Harris, who was about to take the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “We gotta win from the top of the ticket on down,” Kemp said. Less than an hour later, Trump’s praising social media post landed.

Trump has said that Kemp made the first move toward peace with that interview, but what Kemp told Hannity was not actually new.

“I’ve been saying that literally for over a year now that I was going to support our nominee,” Kemp said during a Thursday morning appearance on “Fox & Friends.” “It’s not about him. It’s about our country.”

When asked whether he will make any public appearances with Trump, he said, “We’ll see how that plays out.”

For now, the governor’s aides say they are grateful for a pause in the hostilities that began after the 2020 election, as are Trump allies.

“The president has some personal disagreements with Brian Kemp, and Brian Kemp has some personal disagreements with the president,” Trump running mate JD Vance said at a rally in Erie, Pa, on Wednesday. “But they are both big enough to put the country over personal interests.”

Dawsey reported from Washington. Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign featured a number of often-bizarre twists and turns. And his exit from the race Friday is coming with yet another. It turns out Kennedy will actually remain on the ballot in three key states: Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

It’s a headache for Donald Trump, whom Kennedy endorsed and whom Kennedy’s supporters tended to favor more than Vice President Kamala Harris.

But how much impact could it have?

To recap, Kennedy said he would withdraw from 10 ballots in more competitive states, while remaining on ballots he qualified for in red and blue states. The idea was that he would still amass votes — he even pitched a rather nonsensical path to being elected president — without hurting Trump.

But in some states, it was too late.

In both Michigan and Wisconsin, a nominated and qualified candidate can’t be removed from the ballot unless they die. And in North Carolina, the State Board of Elections voted Thursday that it was too late to remove Kennedy’s name; many ballots had already been printed, with absentee ballots set to go out next week.

That’s three of the seven states generally regarded as being the most important.

It’s doubtful Kennedy will take anywhere close to the approximately 4 or 5 percent he was polling at in such states and nationally. But small margins could matter greatly in Michigan (which Trump won by 0.2 percentage points in 2016) and Wisconsin (which Trump carried by 0.8 points in 2016 and President Joe Biden carried by 0.6 points in 2020).

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed Kennedy’s supporters favored Trump over Harris, 50-21, in a head-to-head matchup. (The rest supported neither.) The Trump campaign’s polling data showed a similar margin — which it touted when Kennedy suspended his campaign.

So, as a hypothetical, if Kennedy goes on to take 1 percent of the vote in these states and his support breaks down like those polls indicate, it would cost Trump between 0.2 percent and 0.3 percent of the vote against Harris.

That’s similar not just to Trump’s margin in Michigan in 2016, but also to Biden’s margins in Arizona (0.3 percent) and Georgia (0.2 percent) in 2020.

Of course, I’ve just pulled that 1 percent figure out of thin air. Who knows what Kennedy will ultimately get and whether it will break down similarly to the rest of his support? Perhaps Trump-inclined Kennedy backers or Harris-inclined ones will be more likely to vote for a withdrawn candidate (whether as a protest vote or because they don’t know he dropped out).

But there is some — albeit limited — precedent for such candidates drawing small but significant vote totals after dropping out. Perhaps the two best recent comparisons:

• In the 2014 Connecticut governor’s race, independent Joe Visconti withdrew two days before Election Day and endorsed the Republican. He was polling between 3 and 8 percent — similar to Kennedy — and ultimately took a little more than 1 percent.
• In the 2020 U.S. Senate race in South Carolina, Constitution Party nominee Bill Bledsoe dropped out and endorsed Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. But Bledsoe wound up getting 1.3 percent of the vote — after Democrats ran ads elevating his name in hopes of diluting Graham’s support.

A few other recent examples:

• In the 2018 Alaska governor’s race, independent Gov. Bill Walker withdrew and endorsed the Democrat. Walker wound up taking 2.03 percent. (He was, though, an incumbent many had voted for before.)
• In the 2018 special election for Texas’s 27th Congressional District, Republican Bech Bruun withdrew but still took 4.3 percent in a nonpartisan “jungle” primary.
• In the 2022 U.S. Senate race in Alaska, Republican Buzz Kelley took 2.13 percent in the first round of the state’s ranked-choice primary and was one of four candidates to qualify for the general election. But despite soon withdrawing, he actually increased his first-choice votes in the general election, to 2.89 percent. (Ranked-choice voting does encourage votes for minor candidates, by allowing people to also vote for other candidates in case their candidate doesn’t win.)

These last three examples aren’t very comparable, including because the final two were run under unusual voting systems. And a presidential race will earn gobs more attention, which will reduce the possibility that people will go to the polls thinking Kennedy is still actually a candidate.

But some might, and he’ll still be an available protest vote for those who might be inclined to back him. And for a Trump campaign that played up how Kennedy’s exit would be a boon, it complicates things.