Nate Silver’s polling average shows Kamala Harris expanding her national lead over Donald Trump, 48% to 43.7%.

This is based entirely on polls conducted before Harris’ speech and before the end of the Democratic convention.

“Independent presidential candidate Cornel West lost a legal challenge Friday in his bid to get on the ballot in the battleground state of Pennsylvania,” the AP reports.

“The momentum of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign helped push the ratings for the Democratic National Convention past the Republican festivities for former President Trump,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“Nielsen data showed that Harris’ well-received acceptance speech was watched by 29 million viewers across 15 networks.”

“The figure is 14% higher than for Trump’s speech, which scored 25.4 million viewers July 19. Harris also drew substantially more than the 24.6 million viewers who watched Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the convention in 2020 and about the same as the 29.8 million viewers who tuned in to Hillary Clinton in 2016.”

Associated Press: “There are just over 70 days until Election Day on Nov. 5, but major dates, events and political developments will make it fly by. Think about it this way: The stretch between now and then is about as long as summer break from school in most parts of the country.”

“In just two weeks, Sept. 6, the first mail ballots get sent to voters. The first presidential debate is set for Sept. 10. Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, is scheduled to be sentenced in his New York hush money case on Sept. 18. And early in-person voting will start as soon as Sept. 20 in some states.”

The Kennedy family released a statement after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Donald Trump:

“We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride. We believe in Harris and Walz. Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

“Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is releasing a new television ad in battleground states with a message aimed at the middle class, in its first major move after the convention,” the Washington Post reports.

“In the ad, titled ‘Opportunity,’ Harris speaks directly to the camera about the importance of lowering costs and taxes on middle-class Americans. It’s a topic voters often list among their top concerns, one that President Joe Biden had struggled to gain credit for even though various economic indicators have improved during his time in office.”

“Special Counsel Jack Smith has decided against seeking a major hearing to present evidence in the election-interference case against Donald Trump before voters go to the polls Nov. 5,” Bloomberg reports.

“The move means that it’s unlikely a so-called mini-trial, which would include evidence and testimony from possible blockbuster witnesses like former Vice President Mike Pence, would take place before the presidential election.”

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign told a Pennsylvania court that he will be endorsing former President Donald Trump, ahead of his own Friday afternoon announcement putting to rest a tumultuous independent presidential campaign,” NBC News reports.

“The filing in Pennsylvania, in a lawsuit related to a legal challenge to his own ballot access in the state, said that Kennedy was withdrawing from the ballot ‘as a result of today’s endorsement of Donald Trump for the office of President of the United States.'”

Remember when Kennedy was a “radical left liberal” and “plant” who was “put in place” to help Democrats?

“A dozen Republican White House lawyers who served in the administrations of then-Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush are endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris in her race against GOP nominee former President Donald Trump,” Fox News reports.

Molly Ball: “Harris’s banner address to the nation at the conclusion of this week’s Democratic convention was a bracingly normal, workmanlike political speech, one intended to communicate not shattering emotion but earthly gravitas. There were notes of optimism and paeans to the middle class, invocations of timeless ordeals and attacks on extremism.”

“A traditional appeal intended to communicate steadiness and trust, delivered evenly before a courtroom-like backdrop of wood paneling and American flags. There were few moments of poetry, just a 59-year-old woman telling a curious nation where she came from and what she hopes to achieve: simple, relatable, without celebrity or glitz.”

The FiveThirtyEight forecast model was relaunched and finds Kamala Harris currently has a 58% chance to win the presidency.

Jonathan Chait: “After Donald Trump’s surprising win in 2016, the Democratic Party was panicked into abandoning the Obama model as a failure. Earlier this month, I examined Kamala Harris’s political challenge through the lens of Obamaism. Could Harris rediscover a winning formula her party had discarded? The convention gives us a clear answer: Yes. She. Can.”

“The Obama recipe has several key components, all of which were vividly present in Chicago. The most obvious may be novelty. Obama promised to turn the page, leaving behind frustrating and tiresome debates of the past, rather than overpowering the Democrats’ adversaries.”

“The convention, accordingly, presented Harris to the country as if she was an outsider. Speaker after speaker hammered this theme.”

“Donald Trump’s busiest week on the campaign trail collided with Kamala Harris’ most politically significant moment, a deliberate move by the Republican nominee to cede as little limelight as possible to his opponent,” Bloomberg reports.

“As ebullient Democrats convened in Chicago for their party’s nominating convention, Trump has spent the week trying to energize his own campaign, with an aggressive schedule taking him to five swing states in as many days, a stop at the US-Mexico border and interviews with major news outlets. That’s a marked shift for the former president, who has previously scheduled one or two public events a week.”

“The frantically arranged week belies Trump’s concerns that he’s lost the ability to drive the news cycle as he did when President Joe Biden, 81, was still running for reelection.”

Jonathan Last: “Consider the following: Democrats featured Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton—that’s all but one of the living Democratic presidential nominees going back to 1992.”

“The Republican convention featured no former presidential nominees. The state of the Republican party is so toxic that previous nominees—even previous presidents—have been unpersoned and read out of the movement.”

“That’s a portrait of two institutions: One institution in harmony with its legacy and continuing to evolve in such a way as to hold its coalition together. The other institution in a state of convulsion.”