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Why Harris Lost
Politics
Why Harris Lost
“Fascism” gets you only so far.
Credit: image via Shutterstock
This was an angry election; none of that “which candidate would you rather have a beer with” stuff here. Trump is an angry man representing angry constituents. Harris was angry that things were not going her way and constantly expressed the Hillary-esque idea “How could I possibly be losing to a guy like Trump?” Both sides prioritized personal attacks over policy. At times it felt like elementary-school playground stuff, name-calling, but in the end it was much more serious than that. Harris lost because she tried to make “Trump is a fascist” her closing argument, and no one was listening anymore. The girl had cried wolf for the last time.
Now, to be fair, Harris’s fate also rested on the fact that she is wholly unqualified for the toughest job in the world, having distinguished herself as Vice President of Nothing. She was an empty suit and kept showing it. A candidate created whole in the womb by the media with a past that supposedly did not matter and a future as vague as her recollections of that past. She had one job—the border—and made a royal mess out of doing nothing about the many problems there to the point where thousands of migrants (we use the word as a generic term because no one in the Harris house cared whether they were legal, illegal, asylees, protected peoples or whatever witches’ brew our immigration system could cook up) poured in.
Harris did nothing of substance as VP; she made matters worse by having no real plans or policies for her presidency besides giving away money. Softball questions from the ever-so compliant mainstream media were met with ever-vaguer answers, bits of biography, and the odd nasty remark about Trump. It was Orange Man Bad all over, and the electorate had had enough. Trump’s shortcomings were baked in after what seems like an eternity of campaigning, never mind four years in the White House itself. The Never Trumpers had had their day four years ago. Most Americans had taken Trump’s measure, for good or ill. By contrast, many Americans remained unsure who Harris was and what she stood for. In the background, Biden’s inflation and the fastest rise in interest rates since the early 1980s nagged. And working people worry much more about payday than they do January 6.
January 6 was an embarrassing day for America, but a) it had no chance of making Trump the election winner and b) two weeks later, with not much in between, Biden was inaugurated. It was all about a day of rage, an angry expression of an unfavorable situation not unlike the BLM protests one summer that burned down pharmacies and convenience stores but accomplished little more. The system worked. The riot was put down. Congress, including Republicans, reassembled and certified Biden as the next president. Rage is not insurrection, and while the people seemed to have figured this out by Election Day 2024, Harris and her ilk never did. It made Harris seem uninformed and out of touch, desperate enough to get elected to cry broadly that the sky is falling over and over. It was a tactic that did not work in 2016, was not decisive in 2020, and had little air left in it for 2024, except for the MSM and the Harris campaign, basically one and the same anyway.
Still, some of it might have stuck had it not come on the heels of the seemingly endless and seemingly pointless lawfare campaign. Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist wrote,
This lawfare against Donald Trump has been their beginning argument, middle argument, and ending argument. It obviously has backfired completely. The whole goal was to make sure that Donald Trump would be imprisoned, bankrupted, so discouraged, so distracted by being off the campaign trail dealing with these various examples of lawfare from Democrat prosecutors at the federal and state and local level, that he wouldn’t win. Well, he’s about to win, most likely, and it is a stunning rejection by the American people of that lawfare campaign.
“Should Trump defy history and return to the White House as a convicted felon, he will send a message to the world that elections don’t matter,” added the Daily Beast, quite unaware of how democracy and elections work.
There were other factors. History may regard 2024 as a peak for gender-based politics, wrote the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Trump’s all-out appeal to a controversial model of masculinity that emphasizes toughness and strength is mobilizing hard-to-reach men, including members of racial and ethnic minorities. This prospect obviously worried the Harris campaign, which rushed out an agenda for black men.”
The media has so little credibility left its endless formal and informal endorsement of Harris not only did not matter but was tiresome. So desperate for an October surprise, they beclowned themselves with stories like this. The Atlantic had published a similar Hail Mary story in September 2020 citing anonymous sources claiming Trump canceled a 2018 visit to a French cemetery where American troops are buried, declaring that they were “suckers” and “losers.” The credibility of that story has also been refuted, with former national security adviser John Bolton denying Trump uttered those words and asserting the former president did not visit the cemetery for reasons related to weather and security. So why not try a failed move again?
And Liz Cheney—in what alternate universe did it seem like a good idea to bring in the Cheney family to help support a Democrat with progressive followers? Dick is personally responsible for the deaths of millions and Liz does not believe in abortion (or she didn’t used to, anyhow). Where are the Democratic votes in that pile of war-mongering neoconism?
But the worst was saved for last, a Harris campaign closing argument based on a coordinated effort to proclaim that Trump is an actual fascist, a real-life Dr. Evil who seeks the presidency so that he can rule as a dictator, destroying the Constitution and the rule of law as he goes about his nefarious tasks. It is the ultimate expression of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the apogee of Orange Man Bad. And it is what the Harris campaign chose to run on in the campaign’s final days.
The coordinated fascist line began with Generals Kelly and Milley announcing that Trump is a flat-out fascist who seeks to be a dictator. Kamala Harris called an “emergency” press conference to tell the world that he is the second coming of Adolf Hitler. “Donald Trump is out for unchecked power. He wants a military like Adolf Hitler had, who will be loyal to him, not our Constitution,” she said. “He is unhinged, unstable, and given a second term, there would be no one to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses.”
“‘He’s Talking Like Hitler’,” blared a headline for the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, who warned that Trump wants “absolute power” in his second term. She also spoke about the similarities between Trump’s rhetoric and what she found in her research from the archives of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi.
“Trump is Hitler,” claimed James Carville.
“Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden. There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the 1930s at Madison Square Garden,” Tim Walz said during a campaign stop.
Other Democrats such as Hillary Clinton made similar comparisons. Liz Cheney declared with authority either you vote for Harris, or this “may well be the last real vote you ever get to cast.” Whoopi Goldberg even explained how Trump is committed to being a dictator who will “put you people away… take all the journalists… take all the gay folks… move you all around and disappear you.” The October Surprise was the Dems ran out of ideas and could only fling around the f-word. So much for the convention-era Harris’s promise of joy.
The public did not buy it. When asked whether Trump or Harris “would do a better job” of “defending against threats to democracy,” 43 percent picked Trump, while 40 percent chose Harris. This was the same result when Biden was the nominee. While over half said that threats to democracy were important to them, the voters trusted Trump (44 percent) more than Biden (33 percent) to protect democracy. Voters, featured on Mark Halperin’s 2WAY platform, commented that Harris’s Hitler remarks were off-putting or unlikely to help her win the November election, while none raised their hands when Halperin asked if the vice president should be campaigning on this issue.
Most damning of all, Harris’s Hitler remarks were called out by an actual Holocaust survivor. In a powerful video clip circulating on social media, Jerry Wartski blasted Harris and her fellow Dems for comparing Trump to Hitler and his supporters to Nazis.
“Adolf Hitler invaded Poland when I was nine years old. He murdered my parents and most of our family. I know more about Hitler than Kamala will ever know in a thousand lifetimes,” he said. “For Harris to accuse President Trump of being like Hitler is the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my 75 years living in the United States.”
When your campaign is based on insulting the memories of actual Holocaust survivors for political gain, it has run out of gas. Kamala Harris ended up where she did most of all because she had no real connection to the American people. She was a manufactured entity, full of catchphrases at first, paranoid, bitter insults at the last. Her disappearance from public life will not be missed.
The post Why Harris Lost appeared first on The American Conservative.
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