Donald Trump admitted on a podcast that he “lost by a whisker” in the 2020 presidential election, The Independent reports.

“Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to head to her very own debate camp on Thursday,” NOTUS reports.

“She and her team will hunker down in Pennsylvania, the state where her debate with former President Donald Trump will take place next Tuesday, set to fully focus on preparing for prime time.”

“In conversations with nearly a dozen people involved with or aware of the preparations, a set of goals emerged for the next week. The campaign is planning to tune out as much of the outside noise as possible to lock her in, aware of Harris’ relative rust as a debater and her tendency to overprepare and fixate on the details.”

“I’ve been preparing all my life for this debate.”

— Donald Trump, calling into a New Hampshire television station.

I noted last month that this year’s presidential election features the smallest battleground in modern political history.

Jonathan Bernstein has more:

“I think many of us with a sense of U.S. history know that fewer states are competitive now than used to be the case, and some might know that’s especially true of big states. But I’m not sure if people realize that it’s a continuing trend. Folks in the 1990s and 2000s talked as if only Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio were contested, but in fact they were just the largest of a dozen or so contested states.”

A new SurveyMonkey poll finds 50% of Gen Z voters say they’ll vote for Kamala Harris in November, while 34% say they’ll vote for Donald Trump — a bigger gap for the Democratic nominee than some other polls this year but not quite at 2020 levels for the party.

CNN: “For Harris, a stand-in for the former president — wearing his signature red tie — has helped her visualize the scene ahead of time. Trump, meanwhile, has eschewed a sparring partner in the role of Harris, choosing instead to replicate the informal ‘policy time’ that formed his preparation ahead of June’s debate with President Joe Biden.”

Washington Post: Harris to focus on debate prep in Pittsburgh in days ahead of facing off with Trump.

“Republicans are alarmed that Donald Trump’s support among women is deteriorating in the polls and that his efforts to stop the bleeding don’t appear to be working,” The Hill reports.

“While Republicans are no strangers to the gender gap between the parties in presidential elections, they now face a “chasm” between male and female voters.”

“The battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania may be pivotal in the race for the White House, but winning those blue wall states alone do not guarantee a campaign victory without something else: Omaha’s blue dot,” CNN reports.

“Yard signs with blue circles have begun appearing on lawns across town here, a hopeful symbol for Democrats in a sea of Nebraska red, with one of the state’s lone electoral votes likely critical for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump in the closing two months of the campaign.”

See for yourself on the interactive map.

Playbook: “They may have receded somewhat in the public eye, but Trump’s various criminal trials are still chugging forward, with the potential to upend the news cycle in the coming months before the election.”