If she's elected president, Kamala Harris pledges to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the wall along the southern border — a project she once opposed and called "un-American" during the Trump administration, Axios' Alex Thompson and Hans Nichols write.

• Why it matters: It's the latest example of Harris flip-flopping on her past liberal positions such as supporting Medicare for All and banning fracking — proposals that aides say she now is against.

Harris is embracing a more hawkish immigration policy as Donald Trump's campaign spends tens of millions of dollars attacking her about the border.

• But she still has significant differences with Trump on immigration, opposing his approach to family separation and his plans for mass deportations.

🎤 In her speech to the Democratic National Convention last week, Harris said she'd sign the recent bipartisan border security bill — which Trump had ordered his allies to kill, fearing it would help Democrats in the November elections.

• That bill, negotiated by senators such as James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), requires hundreds of millions of dollars of unspent funds to be used to continue building a wall on the border.
• "It requires the Trump border wall," Lankford told Axios. "It is in the bill itself that it sets the standards that were set during the Trump administration: Here's where it will be built. Here's how it has to be built, the height, the type, everything during the Trump construction."
• Her campaign says the border deal is a whole lot more than continuation of wall funding — and a tiny fraction of what Trump has proposed.

Lankford's office estimated the legislation would spend $650 million on a wall, down from the $18 billion Trump requested in 2018.

• The bill, which Murphy described as a "compromise" also included provisions with more money for asylum lawyers and judges for the overloaded immigration system.

🥊 Reality check: Harris advisers note that the bipartisan border proposal didn't include any new money to continue building the wall.

• It just extended the timeline to spend funds that had been appropriated during Trump's last year as president, they say, although the legislation has new restrictions to ensure the money is spent on barriers.

Share this story.

When former President Trump suggested he might back out of the Sept. 10 debate, the Harris campaign posted sound effects of squawking, whining chickens, layered over video of Trump speaking. (Hear the clip.)

• Another Harris tweet featured a flock of 🐔🐔🐔 emojis.

Why it matters: The same Democratic digital team in Wilmington, Del., has pivoted from the stuffier, decorous Biden for President campaign to a saucier, more ruthless Harris for President campaign.

🖼️ The big picture: Trump has always been the taunter — "Sleepy Joe," "Crooked Hillary," "Little Marco," "Low-Energy Jeb," "Meatball Ron." Now he's the taunted.

• It's another dimension of Vice President Harris' "happy warrior" approach to a campaign that's sure to get even uglier this fall.

🔎 Between the lines: Top Trump advisers tell me they expect he'll debate — both because neither side can afford to be seen as hiding, and because Trump will relish the stage.

• But yesterday's widespread coverage of the backstage fight over the "muted mics" issue meant Harris was continuing to control the campaign conversation as she roared out of Chicago into her first post-convention week.

The other side: When I asked the Trump campaign about Harris' mocking posts, communications director Steven Cheung replied:

"Acting like whiny schoolchildren is not a political strategy, but it is a coping mechanism for the Kamala campaign who knows they have a weak candidate incapable of being authentic. If anyone thinks that using emojis is some cutting-edge message technique, they are severely out of touch with reality and the seriousness of the challenges Americans face after a disastrous Harris-Biden administration."

Share this story.

Americans put less money into their brokerage accounts in states where sports gambling has been legalized, Axios' Felix Salmon writes from a new paper that has caused something of a stir.

• Why it matters: Sports gambling makes more sense as an entertainment expense than an investment. Fans often report they're more engaged in the activity on the field when they have real money on the line.

But if that expense comes from money that'd otherwise be invested in the stock market, the result is lower wealth and possibly less long-term financial stability.

• One lesson of the meme-stock winter of 2021 was that get-rich-quick investing — even if it loses money — can be a lot more fun than get-rich-slow investing involving index funds and decades of doing nothing much at all.

Get Axios Markets.

A measles outbreak in Oregon is refocusing attention on declining childhood vaccination rates as kids head back to school, Axios' Tina Reed writes.

• Why it matters: Lingering vaccine hesitancy from the pandemic is evident in pediatricians' offices as more parents opt out of the shots for measles, chicken pox, and whooping cough, among others, using non-medical religious exemptions.

While official data lags by several months, public health experts told Axios that anecdotal reports suggest rates continue to fall, leaving the population more vulnerable to outbreaks.

• U.S. parents still overwhelmingly support childhood vaccinations. But kindergarten exemptions rose to a median of 3% nationally during the 2022-2023 school year, up from 2.7% the year before.

🔬 Between the lines: A Gallup Poll this month found 69% of respondents view childhood vaccines as "extremely" or "very" important, down from 94% in 2001.

• Gallup attributed the dropoff to people who lean Republican, noting the percentage of that cohort saying childhood vaccinations were "extremely important" stood at 26% this year, compared to 62% in 2001.

Share this story ... Get Axios Vitals.

It's become nearly impossible to reliably capture what's going viral online without manually tracking engagement on posts, Axios' Sara Fischer and Neal Rothschild write.

Why it matters: The internet was supposed to unleash a new level of transparency around news consumption. But it's more muddled than ever.

• Instead, platforms hoard the data to avoid scrutiny over how their algorithms work.

Zoom in: Two weeks ago, Meta officially shut down CrowdTangle — a platform it acquired in 2016 that allowed users to measure the engagement of posts and accounts across social media.

• TikTok used to display audience data next to certain hashtags in its videos. But it pulled down that feature after the beginning of the Hamas-Israel war when it argued journalists were misinterpreting the data.
• X and Reddit have started to limit access to their data to prevent AI firms from scraping it. That's also made it harder for researchers and journalists to analyze content trends.

🔬 Between the lines: News audiences have moved to private groups and encrypted chats that are difficult for third parties to measure amid privacy concerns.

• Gen-Z is particularly sensitive to posting public information about their personal lives.

Share this story ... Get Axios Media Trends.

Rural and suburban areas in the U.S. are seeing higher rates of police shootings than urban areas, Axios' Russell Contreras and Delano Massey write from a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

• Why it matters: The analysis counters the widespread belief that killings by police are mainly an urban problem — and suggests that many police shootings in rural and suburban areas often go unreported and unnoticed.

A lack of media coverage in rural and suburban areas — and uneven accountability measures in rural police agencies — often give the public an inaccurate view of such shootings, analysts say.

• Fatal shootings by police in big cities typically get far more attention because of media coverage and local activists who mobilize rapidly.

🔢 By the numbers: From 2015 to 2020, 45% of all shootings by law enforcement occurred in rural areas and 22% in the suburbs, according to a study also in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

• Keep reading.

The fast-food industry's pain is fast casual's gain. Chipotle, Cava and Wingstop are running circles around the likes of McDonald's, Starbucks and KFC, Axios' Kelly Tyko writes.

• Why it matters: The price gap is shrinking between fast-food and fast-casual restaurants.

An Axios analysis identified these publicly traded companies as having big gains or losses based on same-store sales discussed in recent earning reports.

📈 Who's winning:

• Wingstop (28.7%)
• Cava (14.4%)
• Chipotle (11.1%)
• Sweetgreen (9%)
• Taco Bell (5%, an exception to the fast-food sales slide)

📉 Who's losing:

• KFC (-5%)
• Papa John's (-4%)
• Starbucks (-2%)
• Pizza Hut (-1%)
• McDonald's (-0.7%)

Share this story.

Ben Shelton — an American ranked 13th in the world — hits a serve during the first round of the U.S. Open, which started yesterday in New York and lasts two weeks.

• Day 1 at the year's last Grand Slam tournament went about as well as possible for Shelton and fellow American Coco Gauff, who won the event last year. Both easily advanced in straight sets.

🗽 By the numbers: The tournament drew the largest single-day crowd (74,641 people) in its history yesterday.

• More on Gauff ... Full ESPN guide.