The famous "fist raised" photo of Donald Trump by Evan Vucci. AP.
As you are certainly aware, Kamala Harris is now the candidate for Democrats after Joe Biden was pushed out of the race. The reactions have been mixed. The media and Republican doomers are saying that Harris has wrapped up the race while others are saying that fundamentally, nothing has changed.
As evidence the doomers are citing a few polls that show Kamala Harris either narrowing the gap or even with an one or two point lead. Most polls still show Trump a couple of points ahead in the national vote and still in the lead in the swing states. There is also the very obvious media push that is shoving Kamala Harris down the throats of America whether or not they like it.
Does that have anything to do with reality? I don't know for sure, but I would think that the Democrat's problem was never Joe Biden. Trump did get a bump after the debate, but Trump was winning before it, by about the same margin as now. If switching candidates did anything at all it's reversing the debate performance.
And I don't think switching candidates is the action of a party that expects to win. It's an absolute desperation move and it's an example of what you do when you know you are going to lose. To put into football terms, the Republicans are up 21-7, the Democrats have the ball and it's 4th and 10 at the 50 yardline. There are three minutes left in the 4th quarter. Instead of lining up for the punt, the coach called a Hail Mary to the endzone. Right now the ball is still in the air and we aren't sure that the high risk-high reward strategy is going to work. But it's also clear that the QB didn't fumble before the pass.
In simpler terms, this is a desperation play by the Democrats. Could it pay off? Possibly. Sometimes the desperation play pays off. Sometimes the Hail Mary gets a touchdown, sometimes you get the ball back on the onside kick and sometimes you throw the 2nd touchdown and send it to overtime. But there is just as much chance that it backfires horribly. And you wouldn't do this if you weren't in real trouble in the first place.
Fundamentally, Kamala is a weak candidate. This is someone who dropped out of the 2020 race before Iowa after getting destroyed by Tulsi Gabbard. She's one of the most unlikable people in the political arena today and makes Hillary Clinton look like a master of charisma. And she is still burdened by both Biden's awful presidency and her own non-existent 'accomplishments' as VP.
She is also a huge turn off for male voters. I can't tell you how much her personality is a turn off to me. Indeed, I was talking yesterday with one of my IRL friends who had been all in with Biden but is now refusing to vote at all because Kamala Harris and her "girl boss" personality. The only people that like that kind of personality is tumblr and twitter activists and those folks aren't real life. It's a turn off for most people.
Plus, Donald Trump is doing very well this time around. They haven't found an effective attack on Harris yet, but they will soon and we have to remember that Trump is different this time around. He has been dramatically more focused and still has a lot of good will from the assassination attempt. And the Republican coalition is larger than it once was, we now have a lot of big tech on Trump's side, notably including Elon Musk and X, as well as a lot of Jewish people that are extremely upset about how the Democrats are going full pro-Hamas.
But that hasn't stopped some panic on the right. I don't know how you argue against any of those facts but I do think that Harris might have a shot to do better than Biden. After all, Biden is almost completely senile now and while you can say many things about Kamala Harris, most of them bad, but you can't say that she is senile. And a surprising change like this drives uncertainty and that is not something you want this late in the game. The fact that I am even writing this post instead of more speculation about if Biden is going to drop out or not is indeed a negative thing.
There is also a chance that she could drive turnout for both single women and some minorities. There will be people out there that will vote for her to be the first woman president, just like they did for Hillary Clinton. I think most of those voters were people that were going to be "blue no matter who" just because of the abortion issue, so this is already baked in, but I do think that she might get a few more black women voters out there. But I think her "girl boss" personality is going to utterly turn off both black and Hispanic men, at least some of whom will want to vote for the macho Donald Trump instead. I can tell a lot of working class Hispanics that are at my job are fans of Trump and not a fan of Democrats.
My only real fear is the total 180 the media has gone. For a few weeks we actually had a media that was critical of the Democratic candidate but that is obviously gone. The media has gone into full defense mode, pretending that she didn't try to encourage people to bail out 2020 George Floyd rioters and wasn't actually Biden's border czar. Having the media 100% on your side is not a recipe for failure in most cases, though it also didn't help Hillary Clinton. The big difference is that at the very least the GOP has a friendly patron in Elon Musk on X, which means that on Twitter you can at least call out the media's lies. Still, even with Musk on our side, it's still hard to withstand the media's attempt to change the narrative.
The other fear is, of course, voter fraud. Conventional wisdom is that the Democrats needed an extremely close race and all the advantages the pandemic gave them to pull off the steal in 2020 and they shouldn't be able to do the same thing twice because of the different conditions in 2024. I tend to agree with that, but if we do see an extremely close race again it's very possible.
Of course the other option is that Kamala Harris herself will get replaced. I think there is a real chance of this. Harris is not popular and if she doesn't get a massive post-convention bump, it's very possible that the Democrats change her out again. The conventional wisdom there is that doing so would be an even bigger disaster for the Democrats. But it really depends on the candidate. If there is a standout VP candidate that gets a push of Michelle "big Mike" Obama decides to actually run, then things could get bad. I actually think that this is the smartest thing the Democrats could do even if it creates some obvious and very serious problems.
But does that mean the doomers are right and the Democrats are a shoe in? Absolutely not. Everything still favors Trump, even though the chances have gone from "absolute shoe-in" to "very likely". Nothing is certain, obviously, especially in this absolutely insane election cycle. But I still think it would be a lot less likely for Kamala Harris, or whoever they replace her with, to win than for Trump. Even if the outlier polls are right and Harris has a 1 or 2 point lead, that's not enough to win. That's what Hillary Clinton had and it wasn't enough. Biden supposedly had a 4.5 point lead and even then he barely managed to sneak through under very suspicious circumstances.
My guess is that Trump will win. I think the chances of Trump running riot and picking up blue states like New York and New Jersey are probably extremely low now, but I do think he's a fundamentally stronger candidate and Kamala Harris is pretty terrible. A lot can happen between now and November, obviously, but if I had to put money on it I would be spending it on Donald Trump.
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