Happy Monday, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby.

Like a lot of people who went to the Democratic National Convention last week, I’ve finally made it back home and am desperately trying to catch up on lost sleep.

Tonight, details from our new post-D.N.C. poll in partnership with Echelon Insights, showing that Kamala Harris’s pivot to patriotism is resonating with voters, who now see the Democratic nominee as just as strong and tough as Donald Trump, even as the race remains tight. Still, our poll finds that voters want to see more of Harris, and they really want her to start talking to the media. It’s a juicy poll, so dig in—and stay ’til the end for new data on whether voters have any idea what all those “brat” memes actually mean.

But first, here’s Abby Livingston’s roundup of the latest Capitol Hill chatter…

• Congress’s schedule pinch: With the conventions finally behind us, all of the biggest potential shake-ups to the race—a shocking new poll, the presidential debates (if they even happen), and potential acts of God—could take place in September with the backdrop of Congress in session. The first order of business will be to pass a spending bill before the end of the month, but there isn’t much time. The Senate and House will return from recess on September 9, and the chambers are scheduled to go into recess ahead of the September 30 shutdown deadline to give incumbents all of October to campaign. This legislating sprint will be the last time Congress meets before knowing the outcome of the presidential race—and their own fates.
• Guns down: The 118th Congress has had an undeniable, McCarthy-esque flair for drama, but any Capitol Hill pyrotechnics in the coming months will probably be limited—especially surrounding the spending bill. Typically, in an election year, there’s no appetite for protracted spending negotiations because an October shutdown would look awful for incumbents no matter the party, and because shutdowns pull members off the campaign trail. At this point, every day on the trail counts.

  But it’s also worth noting that negotiations will not look like what members anticipated when the House let out for the summer. Joe Biden is no longer on the Democratic ticket, and won’t have to worry as much about the immediate political implications of the spending bill. He also won’t have to divide his time between sorting this deal out and the campaign trail.

• The chessboard: As for the autumn political outlook, the battle seems right back to where it started this cycle, even with the Harris boost: The presidential election is too close to call, the Democrats face an uphill battle holding on to the Senate, and Republicans will have a hard time holding on to the House.

  Historically, the ad wars heat up in the week after Labor Day, both in frequency and negativity of tone. It’s also likely that when members return next month, a fresh round of polling will be coming back from the field, and moods will begin to change. There’s little chatter so far about triage—the notion that party leaders might need to cut ad spending from badly trailing incumbents in order to save once-safe colleagues—and that’s partially because of the volume of money pouring into politics, and also how many of these races are set in stone.

  On the House side, there are a handful of districts that could come into play if either side gets momentum, but we’re still too close to freshly drawn, incumbent-friendly redistricting to see a massive expansion of the current map in either direction. On the Senate side, there are the big seven races—Arizona, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—and it’s possible Florida, Maryland, or Texas also become competitive. We’ll know soon enough.

Republicans, after all, are usually the ones wrapping themselves in the American flag. But now it’s Kamala Harris, the newly ordained Democratic nominee, who’s running as the tough patriot. In her telling, it’s Donald Trump who would roll back our freedoms, cater to dictators, and undermine the Constitution. ​​“As president, I will never waver in defense of America’s security and ideals, because in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand and I know where the United States belongs,” Harris declared in her address on Thursday night. “Fellow Americans,” she continued, “I love our country with all my heart.”

Yes, this was a Democrat talking. There were paeans to diversity and pluralism, of course, vows to protect abortion rights and stand up to big corporations. But Harris, and the many speakers in both parties who came before her, also promised to maintain the “most lethal” military on Earth, to shore up the broken U.S.-Mexico border, and to protect the meritocratic American dream. Unlike 2020, when she stumbled through a Democratic primary in which everyone was racing to the left, Harris’s audience last week was not Bushwick or Burlington. It was the suburban middle. The deciders.

Harris campaign strategists, very much aware that plenty of voters still think the Democratic nominee is too liberal, are trying to bury those concerns, and unabashedly playing to win. Harris’s flip-flops on issues she once supported—Medicare for All, abolishing I.C.E., banning fracking—are absolutely brazen. And so far, Democrats don’t seem to care. Independents don’t seem to, either, according to polls. And party insiders who are sick of genuflecting to the left? They’re as hyped as they’ve been in years. As one Democratic strategist texted me Friday after the convention: “Foreign policy hawks like me fucking ate at that convention.”

A new survey from Echelon Insights, which is partnering with Puck for exclusive polling on the 2024 electorate, suggests that the tolerant-but-tough message is working. In one of the few surveys conducted entirely after the D.N.C., a poll of likely voters conducted from Friday to Sunday found Harris running about even with Trump on a range of attributes that previously favored the Republican nominee. On the question of which candidate is “a strong leader,” Trump leads Harris by only one point, 48 percent to 47 percent. Who would do better at “keeping the country safe”? Again, Trump leads by one point, 47-46. “Good at managing a crisis”? They’re tied, 46-46. Harris is also trailing Trump by only a single point (48-47) on the question of which candidate “would make our economy work better.” On pretty much every single question about strength or toughness—and on questions where Republicans might typically lead—Harris has essentially erased Joe Biden’s deficits against Trump.

That’s more evidence, I’d argue, that voters were seeing Biden almost entirely through the lens of his advanced age. But it also suggests that the Harris campaign was smart to address public concerns about her record on immigration and border security out of the gate, with an early paid media campaign portraying her as a tough-on-crime prosecutor. Voters in the Echelon poll were asked to name the most important attribute in deciding their vote. The top answer was “a strong leader,” with 24 percent of voters citing it as their top attribute. It might have been unthinkable two months ago, but Harris has neutralized Trump’s advantage on the strength question.

Meanwhile, Harris is far outrunning Trump on the attributes that you’d expect. By wide margins, Harris is seen as more “honest and trustworthy” and “normal.” She’s winning on “having the right temperament” by 12 points, and on the question of “cares about people like me”—a useful bellwether in most elections—Harris is leading Trump by five points. On these topics, too, Harris is performing much better than Biden was when he was the nominee.

The Trump campaign has been savaging Harris for avoiding media interviews, painting the Democrat as an empty suit coasting on fumes, afraid of answering tough questions from reporters, or voters. That line of attack might seem inside baseball. Do voters really care if Harris sits down for an interview with David Muir or The New York Times? And, in a fractured media environment, how many people would see that interview, anyway? But it turns out voters do want Harris—and Trump—to joust with the press. We had Echelon ask the question, “How important is it for a presidential candidate to regularly do media interviews and answer questions from the press?” A whopping 89 percent of Americans said it’s either “very” or “somewhat” important for candidates to take questions from the press. (Harris has taken a few questions from her traveling press corps, and she continues to say that some kind of big sit-down interview is coming soon.)

The poll found a few more trouble spots for Harris. A majority of voters (54 percent) say that Harris would represent “continuity” from a Biden administration, while only 28 percent said she would represent change. A huge majority of voters (67 percent) also see her as an “insider,” which is what you might expect for a sitting vice president, but also perhaps not where a candidate wants to be when the entire world has caught anti-incumbent fever. At the same time, only 32 percent of voters see Trump as an insider.

Still, voters continue to give Harris the benefit of the doubt in other ways, viewing her as her own person, rather than Biden’s No. 2. And the convention might have helped that cause. Post-D.N.C., Harris’s favorable ratings are no longer underwater. More likely voters now view her favorably than unfavorably (50-47). That’s a remarkable turnaround from the last few years, when her favorable ratings were stuck, like Biden’s, in the low 40s. The change in opinion also gives her an unmistakable edge over Trump, who is viewed negatively by 54 percent of likely voters.

Even before she became the nominee, Harris had been the subject of fawning memes and edits on social media, in particular on TikTok, where Biden was drowning in a maelstrom of negativity and misinformation. With Harris, social media sentiment has been flipped on its head. Two memes led the charge: the coconut tree clip and the Charli XCX-inspired “Kamala is brat.” (My definition here, but “brat” is basically Gen Z speak for a party girl living her best life). The wellspring of Harris memes over the past two months have given the Democrat some much-needed cred among young people online and inspired an ocean of cringey meme explainers by mainstream press outlets on the hunt for clicks. So what does this have to do with our poll? Well, we wanted to know if voters actually know what the hell any of this stuff means.

As it turns out, just as Twitter Isn’t Real Life, neither is TikTok. Echelon asked voters, “How would you feel if somebody told you you were ‘brat’?” A majority of likely voters said they would either be “offended” (36 percent), “confused” (24 percent), or “unsure” (20 percent) if someone called them brat. Only 20 percent said they would be “delighted”—a number that was only slightly higher among voters aged 18-34.

Echelon also asked about all the Harris memes in the form of an open-ended question, “What memes have you seen about the upcoming presidential election?” Voters were allowed to respond any way they wanted. And most of them (75 percent) said they had not seen any memes about the election at all. A small sliver of voters said they had seen a variety of memes but couldn’t name one. Two percent of voters had seen a meme about Trump’s bloodied-and-bandaged ear, and another 1 percent had seen a meme of Harris laughing. But only 2 percent of voters said they had seen a ‘brat’ meme, and only 1 percent said something about a coconut. That’s it.

In other words, if you know what “brat” means, you live in a very small cultural bubble populated by other screen addicts. And in the waning days of this brat summer, maybe you should consider logging off for a day, removing your AirPods, and planning a leisurely road trip to the nearest Bass Pro Shops, where you can learn a little more about your fellow Americans, in service of the good citizenship Harris was calling for in Chicago.