Yesterday just after 12:00 midnight ET, the Wall Street Journal posted its lead story for Saturday July 27:

Harris Erases Trump’s Lead, WSJ Poll Finds

According to a new Wall Street Journal poll, the two candidates are effectively tied after President Biden’s exit shakes up race.

It was not simply Biden “exiting” the race. What has led to the perceived renewal of the Democrats’ chances in the fall is the planned smooth accession to power of Vice President Kamala Harris. (Be advised to pronounce her first name correctly, or else: it’s “Comma – lah.”)

The WSJ went on to report that the presidential race being tied now is due to

heightened support for her [VP Harris] among nonwhite voters and dramatically increased enthusiasm about the campaign among Democrats. At the moment, enthusiasm for Harris among Democrats is high.

In the new national WSJ poll, Trump leads Harris by 2%, within the margin of error. Earlier this month, Trump was leading Biden by 6%.

In the short term then, three weeks before the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 19, the party’s ticket – Kamala Harris and an as yet unnamed running mate – has received a bump. She and it may receive another one thanks to the spectacle of the coming convention.

Many people were saying watch out for an October Surprise, but this year it appears to have arrived three months early.

A confidential memorandum sent by President Trump’s pollster to “Team Trump” on July 23, titled “The Harris Honeymoon,” leaked and published by Brian Stelter, cautiously describes what’s happening:

Many of you have heard me refer to the upcoming “Harris honeymoon” that I expect to see in the public polling over the next couple of weeks. . . The honeymoon will be a manifestation of the wall-to-wall coverage Harris receives from the MSM. The coverage will be largely positive and will certainly energize Democrats and some other parts of their coalition at least in the short term. . .

But the fundamentals of the race stay the same. The Democrats deposing one Nominee for another does NOT change voters discontent over the economy, inflation, crime, the open border, housing costs not to mention concern over two foreign wars. . .

So, while the public polls may change in the short run and she may consolidate a bit more of the Democrat base, Harris can’t change who she is or what she’s done. Stay tuned. . .”

The Trump pollster’s view is intended to be reassuring. But I hope that he hasn’t underestimated the role and the power of the MSM to distort Harris’ record, to ignore her faults and failings, and to relegate bad news about her and her record to the memory hole. Since she supposedly amassed enough delegates to coronate her as the Democrat nominee last Monday (July 22), the media has treated her as the Second Coming.

As Trump’s pollster’s memo also said:

Obviously, the situation we find ourselves in today is totally uncharted territory and has no modern historical parallel.

In fact, in the 100+ year history of presidential primary elections intended to democratize the process of  determining a political party’s presidential nominee and over 50 years since primary results became binding, Kamala Harris is the first (at this point presumed) nominee to have not run in any primaries and having received zero votes before her nomination. For a party whose major issue is to “preserve democracy,” this seems rather undemocratic. (Lyndon Baines Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, did not run in the 1968 Democrat primaries prior to his winning his party’s nomination in late August, but that was before primary results became binding.)

As President Trump has been saying during the past week, the abrupt replacement of President Biden with Vice President Harris as the Democrat presidential nominee is the result of a “coup.” And what else can you call it?

Biden received 14 million votes in the Democrat primaries that were held this year. “Disenfranchised” is the only word that can be be used to describe those voters.

The coup was engineered by top Democrat poobahs working behind the scenes with the complicity of the mainstream media. The MSM turned on a dime following Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 27 which in 90 minutes exposed the lie that had been told by the Democrats and the media since 2020 that Biden was O.K.

In fact, as we now know, confirmed by numerous articles and broadcast reports by the MSM between June 28 and July 20, 2024, Biden was seriously impaired physically and mentally for a long time and the deterioration of his health was accelerating at an alarming pace.

Too many leaks to count confirming all of the above were published and broadcast by the MSM until finally, late in the night of Saturday July 20, Biden was forced to order his writers to compose a statement to be issued on X the next day at 1:45 p.m. ET announcing that he was ending his campaign.

MSM reports since last Sunday have confirmed that former president Obama, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and Sen. Chuck Schumer were about to lower the boom on Biden if he did not comply with their covert campaign to off him.

Writing in American Thinker on July 26, Monica Showalter brilliantly described the players who were part of the campaign to pressure Biden and who may have influenced his endorsement of Harris, which was by most accounts not a part of the Obama-Pelosi-Schumer plan.

What we can see here are the outlines of the Democrat factions within its political machine -- the Obama faction aligned with the dirty Chicago machine and its tactics, with Kamala something of a player in good standing for her role in the Jussie Smollett hoax, which was a Chicago op. There also was the Pelosi/Schumer faction, which had previously been the California machine, minus the late Dianne Feinstein, who couldn't stand Kamala and refused to endorse her in 2020. There also is the squad, which is going along with the Kamala train. There also are the Mitteleuropa billionaires Alex Soros and Hansjörg Wyss, the latter of whom is apparently onboard the Kamala train while the Soros group has just forged a royal match with the Clintonistas through the marriage of Alex to close Hillary associate Huma Abedin, whose enthusiasm is less certain, though we know that Kamala and Hillary have also been close in past alliances. There also is the David Brock/ActBlue faction with its vicious games of political muscle seemingly backing Kamala. And don't forget Willie Brown himself, who has just made some maneuvers through his other catspaw, Gavin Newsom, who's also a Getty acolyte.

Propagandists working on behalf of Kamala Harris are trying to introduce her as Obama 2.0: As a “person of color,” she would not only be the first woman president but the first African-American black woman. Except that, like Obama, she is mixed race. And she’s not African-American, either. Her father, Donald Harris, is described as African-Jamaican. Her birth mother was from India. Am I permitted to report this?

Not only is her father a “combative” retired “Marxist” professor of economics, his family owned slaves.

According to an article in The Irish Times (July 23, 2024), “Kamala Harris is a descendant of an Irish slave owner in Jamaica:”

Donald Harris wrote: “My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner. . .

To the objective observer, Harris hardly seems like a candidate for deification.

Dr. Ben Carson, the distinguished neurosurgeon, was a member of the Trump cabinet. He said this past week that we should be prepared to witness the power of the mainstream media work to transform a figure – Kamala Harris – who Carson said was “universally disliked” into a “God-like figure.”

God (the real God) please help us if that succeeds.

Peter Barry Chowka has been reporting on national elections since 1964, starting in high school. Later, he reported from several national political conventions and traveled around the country with presidential candidates. Peter is a frequent invited guest on the BBC, the largest broadcaster in the world (his July 27 appearance is here). He has been a frequent contributor to American Thinker since 2007.