It’s feeling pretty Trumpy out there, isn’t it?
You can tell that Donald Trump’s campaign thinks he is winning from the fact that his people aren’t doing very much to soften the ground for a fresh round of “We wuz robbed!” horse pucky. They’re not doing precisely nothing, of course—Marjorie Taylor Greene is out there raving about voting machines again. But one gets the feeling Moscow Madge is working to undermine faith in American institutions on Vladimir Putin’s behalf these days rather than for the sake of Donald Trump—even the tines of a snake’s forked tongue ultimately diverge.
You can tell that the Harris campaign thinks it’s losing from the vice president’s itinerary. When it comes to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Kamala Harris is out there working to build the blue wall and find somebody to pay for it. She has a West Coast progressive’s mental picture of the angry white men of the vast American interior, and so she’s been out there hunting where she imagines the ducks are, bragging about her Glock, appearing on the Howard Stern show and Fox News, while seeking to connect with black men via Charlamagne tha God. If she’d name-checked Wilson Combat or Korth rather than Glock, she might have caused some ears to perk up. If she could figure out how to talk about inflation without sticking her fingers in her ears and saying “Lalalalala I’m not listening to you!” she might have a more credible campaign.
Here’s a reminder—it didn’t have to be Harris. I’m not quite ready to say “I told you so,” but …
Yes, I know: Both administratively and politically, it was easier to nominate Harris than to nominate somebody else. The easy thing is not often the smart thing. Democrats right now are feeling a lot of things—and smart is not one of them. They pulled a semi-switcheroo, sending Joe Biden off on his ice floe but subbing in Kamala Harris, possibly the worst of the available choices.
“The only elections in which Harris has run on her own against Republican opponents were in two statewide races in California, one of which she barely won.”
There’s a difference between stupidity and ignorance, and while Harris doesn’t seem to be exactly off-the-charts in the raw-IQ department, it is ignorance that is her problem. There is a lot of irresponsible and stupid talk about her being a Maoist radical or whatever imbecilic thing Lindsey Graham is saying this week, but Harris is, to be sure, a creature of the left wing of the center-left party, a Bay Area progressive who doesn’t seem to quite get the rest of the country.
Historically, this has held true: The leftier the constituency, the more able Harris has shown herself. She was a reasonably skillful operator when it came to winning Democratic primaries and Democrat-dominated general elections in California. She was very skillful in working party leaders behind the scenes to secure the nomination once the knife was in Biden. Meditate briefly on Harris’s electoral history: She unseated an incumbent DA in San Francisco (her boss) in 2004 and kept the field cleared for her reelection. But while the state is loopy enough, California at large is not San Francisco, and in 2010, she beat her Republican opponent in the AG’s race by less than a point. (She’d go on to win 58 percent in her reelection against a sacrificial Republican nonentity.) In her Senate primary, she won only 40 percent of the vote, and—this is significant—her opponent in the general election was, thanks to California’s eccentric election rules, another Democrat, there having been no Republican to qualify for the ballot.
Think about that: The only elections in which Harris has run on her own against Republican opponents were in two statewide races in California, one of which she barely won. And if California at large is not San Francisco, the national Democratic electorate is not the California Democratic electorate, and Harris was the worst-performing candidate in the 2020 presidential primary—famously not even making it into 2020. And the national Democratic primary electorate, while more moderate than California’s, surely is more sympathetic to Harris’ values and sensibility than the general national electorate is. In the 2020 general election, Harris was barely a presence in Joe Biden’s basement-dwelling non-campaign.
Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Harry Reid spoke Republican as a second language, as it were—both of them well enough to pass for natives, if it came to that. There’s a reason insular and peninsular Democrats such as Charlie Rangel, Chuck Schumer, or Nancy Pelosi never tried to become president—smart politicians know their limits. Harris, thanks to the short-sightedness and cowardice of her party’s leaders, has been thrust into a race for the presidency without having shown herself able to win a statewide election in a competitive state, a national Democratic primary, or anything else that would make any sensible person think of her as a likely contender for the White House. Of course, one could have leveled the same criticism at California Gov. Gavin Newsom or a few other Democrats who might have been selected instead of Harris. But while Newsom may be missing some of the same items on the “pro” side, he’s also got a few less on the “con” side—he doesn’t speak like some unholy mix of San Francisco vice principal and Marin County yoga instructor, doesn’t look terrified in front of a non-fawning interviewer, and isn’t shackled—has not chosen to remain shackled—to the worst elements of the legacy of the current administration. And Newsom wasn’t the only other option.
It is easy to offer impossible-to-disprove counterfactuals that conveniently make one’s case. But it also is easy to imagine Josh Shapiro being 6 points ahead in the polls, too. And Democrats wouldn’t even give poor old Gov. Shapiro, a popular figure in a must-win state for Democrats, the No. 2 spot—in part because Democratic leaders are too cowardly and too shallow to appreciate that an outpouring of antisemitic bile from a few dozen expensively educated dolts from the Department of Bunghole Studies at Columbia would be an opportunity for a Democratic presidential candidate rather than a problem. A political coward dies a thousand political deaths.
North Carolina’s Roy Cooper? People would forget he’s a Democrat—he sometimes does, too.
I’m not calling it for Trump. In fact, my own sense (NB: I have been burned before!) is that Harris is likely to eke out a very close win on Election Day. If she loses, Tim Walz is going to have a lot of spare time on his hands, while Gov. Shapiro will be very, very circumspect. If Trump loses, it will be because the Republican Party currently is dominated by people whose main interest is in hoovering money out of the rubes in the red hats rather than in winning races. (If Trump wins, what’s actually in the goody bag? A bunch of crappy jobs that pay in a year what a top-shelf Trump sycophant can earn in two weeks shilling for Moscow—incentives matter!) Once the vote is certified, every misfit toy in the discount bin at the Jerk Store on K Street is going to have a story to tell about how the Good Guys lost because his party didn’t care enough about whatever pet constituency he gets paid to complain about.
But it didn’t have to be close. Republicans didn’t have to nominate a depraved game show host, pornography dabbler, and failed coup d’état leader. Democrats didn’t have to nominate somebody who has never shown anything that suggests she knows how to win this kind of a race.
I don’t hate to say “I told you so.” Not even a little bit.
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