In my 15 years of writing about American politics, I’ve come up with a few axioms that always seem to turn out to be correct. And perhaps the most on-point of them seems to be the Fun Rule. The Fun Rule is simple: Show me the team in an election that is having the most fun, and I’ll show you the winner. Maybe that’s a negative commentary on the seriousness of the voting public, but I’m going to say I don’t agree with that. For one thing, what makes politics fun is belief. The people who come out to rallies, who do the grunt work of a campaign, whether that might be phone banking, putting up yard signs, grinding out fundraising calls, and all the rest, had better believe that either their candidate is a great guy or gal worth having in office or else that their party will bring policies they earnestly want to see made into reality. Or preferably both. If neither are present, it isn’t going to be fun. And attempts to make it fun are going to come off as petty or pathetic, or probably both. Believers have more fun. And believers generally win. And candidates who can do things to make the grunt work of politics enjoyable for their believers, particularly when those things can generate a palpable difference in enjoyment vis-a-vis the other side, will win every time if all other things are equal. Sometimes they can win even when all the other things aren’t equal. There has never been an underdog who won an election without a huge difference in fun. That Joe Biden, who was not an underdog given the polls in advance of the 2020 election or the meaty thumbs pressing down upon the political scales that year, managed to beat Donald Trump is probably the exception that proves the rule. Look at what Biden needed just to eke out the smallest and shabbiest victory that year, and you’ll realize the power of the Fun Rule. Besides, Donald Trump and his supporters are having a whole lot more fun than in 2020 amid the disaster that was the COVID lockdown and George Floyd riot season. A couple of items in the past week utterly and completely drove that point home. The first was Trump’s appearance on some particularly hostile ground, that being the Al Smith dinner in New York. Trump took the podium at a dais that was covered with snarling leftists, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, state attorney general Letitia James, former mayor Mike Bloomberg, current mayor Eric Adams, and Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and he spoke for nearly half an hour, telling bitingly hilarious jokes poking fun at people just feet away. Trump made fun of Adams’ legal troubles, claiming they’re the product of his heterodox (among Democrats) positions on illegal immigration. He said that when Adams first expressed consternation over the massive flood of migrants to the Big Apple, he predicted they’d come after the mayor, and he took credit for being right. He needled Schumer, who was seated directly to the left of the podium and well within the main camera shot of the event, again and again. He brutally trashed former Mayor Bill de Blasio, which brought the house down even among the Democrats. Trump admitted it was a somewhat hostile crowd and said it wasn’t easy to get up in front of a bunch of people who “hate my guts,” before claiming that 70 percent love him — something that was certainly not true but funny as hell nonetheless; it was clearly an example of Trumpian hyperbole that was obvious bait for the army of idiot fact-checkers who would come behind. Even joyless CNN scold Brian Stelter had to admit afterward that Trump was funny and engaging and got the crowd going. He probably didn’t move the needle among the mostly hostile audience, but that wasn’t the point. Trump spoke to them anyway and managed to entertain them. He held the room’s attention, and for a Trump supporter, the Al Smith dinner speech was gold. It was fun for the Trump camp, whether it moved votes or not. What was the reaction to Kamala Harris’ speech? Oh, there was no speech. She didn’t show up to the Al Smith dinner last week, despite the fact the event is always populated by some of the wealthiest Democrats in America. Instead, Harris mailed in a video starring herself and … former Saturday Night Live player Molly Shannon, whose armpit-sniffing Catholic school dork-girl character was lame three decades ago when it debuted and hasn’t particularly aged well now that Shannon is 60. The audience reaction after that video played in the hall was, to put it mildly, subdued. There was a smattering of golf claps laid over a low moan of disapproval at the lameness of the three-minute skit, and comedian Jim Gaffigan, who served as the event’s emcee, said it was reminiscent of what a parent FaceTiming into a kid’s piano recital would expect for a reaction. Harris didn’t go to New York because she was too busy slashing her throat not just with the Catholics watching the Al Smith event but with all the other Christians when this happened: What were the hecklers yelling? “Jesus is Lord.” How much fun is it to tell Christians that they’re at the wrong rally? For Kamala, apparently, it’s a real hoot. And for her snarling-lefty supporters in the audience, it looked pretty cool as well. But at the “smaller rally down the street,” or something kind of like it a few days later, a far better campaigner than Harris picked up on the issue: So Kamala’s message to Christians is that they don’t belong at her rallies and her message specifically to Catholics is a 30-year-old unfunny skit that mostly ridicules Catholic education. Sure, insulting people can be fun at times. But then, those people can turn that on its head and insult you. And woe betide the campaign whose candidate gets trolled in the most entertaining way possible. Which is exactly what happened to Kamala when Donald Trump showed up at a McDonald’s in Bucks County, just outside of Philadelphia, donned an apron, and worked the fryer and the pickup window to hilarious effect. The line about working 15 more minutes at McDonald’s than Kamala ever did was a steamroller, and it left Democrats howling with outrage over a “political stunt.” Perhaps no stunt in the history of U.S. politics deserves more ridicule than the grotesquely embarrassing mummery Trump put on at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s today The whole country got sh*ttier because of this The McDonald’s was closed, the customers were fake, Trump did nothing pic.twitter.com/qseSiRf2Hp — Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) October 21, 2024 Wait, this was a stunt? You don’t say! Piers Morgan called it “one of the best political stunts of all time.” This is one of the best political stunts of all time.. https://t.co/5tTWUGUVUh — Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) October 20, 2024 And Trump spokesman Steven Cheung got to drop a fuel air bomb on MSNBC for their unhinged reaction: MSNBC says working at McDonald’s is bizarre and strange. This is how @KamalaHarris and the elites think of everyday Americans who work everyday jobs. pic.twitter.com/VaSXiI5jyr — Steven Cheung (@TheStevenCheung) October 20, 2024 And then there were the attempts to cancel the McDonald’s franchisee who owns the store Trump worked in on Sunday: In the end we are going to know more about this one franchise location than we are about Harris' entire McD's "career". Which proves Trump's point. https://t.co/4GBT13Kxmg — Brittany (@bccover) October 21, 2024 Is Kamala Harris able to get earned media like this even with “news” organizations like CBS News not just editing her 60 Minutes answers but then posting political attacks on Trump as they defend the indefensible? Not really. And are Harris’ ads fun? I don’t know, you tell me. Is this fun? An aging, has-been celebrity who won’t even take off his sunglasses while spewing partisan rhetoric about a hurricane that hit Puerto Rico (and therefore reminding voters about the hurricanes that just hit the Southeast and which the Biden–Harris administration was deficient in their response to). That’s what she’s got. Oh, and she has this: A couple of no-name swamp rats calling Trump a dictator. Most people think the administration Harris is now fronting is a lot more dictatorial than Trump’s was, and yet this is what they have to offer the airwaves. And when a couple of medical emergencies derailed a Trump rally a few days ago, he instead turned a speech into a dance party to the amusement of the crowd — while Democrats screeched that Trump was too deranged to finish his speech and commenced to demand that he divulge his cholesterol levels. At some point, it starts to become very clear who the “joyful” candidate is — and it’s not the one they told you it was. This race is a great test of the Fun Rule. It’s starting to look like it’ll hold up nicely. READ MORE: In Georgia, GOP Districts Dominate Early Voting Kamala Harris Is Melting The post The ‘Fun Rule’ Would Suggest Kamala Is Toast appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.