Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Why Donald Trump won and why Kamala Harris lost...

 

The famous Trump photo that defined the election. AP.

As you are certainly aware, Donald Trump has won the 2024 election in a landslide. To many on the left this news is inconceivable but for me it was obvious from the start. Stopping Trump was always going to be an uphill battle and even if Trump had ran a terrible campaign or if Harris had been perfect, Trump would have probably still won. 

But this post is about the world we live in and I think the Harris campaign and Democrats in general deserve a lot of criticism for the campaign they run. Trump, on the other hand, deserves a lot of  praise for the campaign he won. 

This post will be the post race autopsy on both campaigns, starting with the Trump camp and then ending with Harris. There are absolutely lessons both sides can learn from this campaign but who knows if the right lessons will be learned. Let's start with Trump:

Trump Campaign:

Trump's biggest success has to be his reaction to the 1st attempt on his life in Pennsylvania. See that photo up there? That's the moment Trump won the 2024 race. Almost everything else I am going to write about is a joke compared to what happened that day. 

Why? Trump finally demonstrated a universal virtue. Courage and bravery. Trump got shot in the head and instead of cowering or running away, he got up, fist in the air and said "Fight!". Everyone who saw that moment had to admit that Trump did something beyond brave. Even Mark Zuckerberg had to say that Trump was "bad ass" in that moment and it's pretty impossible to disagree. 

It was a moment that resonated with everyone and not only did it make the Trump base beyond motivated to vote for him, it probably convinced more than a few independents and Democrats to vote for him. People want to follow a leader and Trump displayed true leadership in that moment. Because his concern wasn't with his personal safety, it was his followers. He was showing the world that he was still alive and wouldn't be stopped by an assassins bullet. 

Trump also had a much more disciplined and mature campaign compared to the 2020 and 2016 campaigns. He stuck to issues that were important to the country and was mostly gaffe free. The worst gaffe of the campaign, the dumb joke about Puerto Rico, wasn't even done by him. While it wasn't a good move to bring an insult comic to a campaign rally, it wasn't even a mistake that Trump made directly, which is a huge improvement compared to 2020. 

Barron Trump, Donald's son, deserves credit as well. It was Barron Trump that suggested that Trump should go on the podcast circuit, a move that allowed Trump to connect with younger voters and got him into a position that played to his strengths. Those podcasts also managed to secure the Joe Rogan endorsement and forced Harris to do the same thing, despite interviews being her biggest weakness. I think that going onto podcasts is going to be a standard election ploy from now on (which I'm not happy about because I hate listening to hours long audio). 

Trump also corrected the biggest mistake he made in 2020, which was not focusing on the issues that folks cared about. I couldn't believe in 2020 that Trump didn't make the race a referendum on immigration. It was the issue that let him win in 2016 and it's also the issue that likely won him the White House in 2024. Making people talk about the Biden immigration policy was a coup for Trump. 

Trump also had the advantage of being able to focus on the economy, which wasn't an issue in 2016. Trump was able to hit Biden and Harris hard on their performance. The economy was always going to be a major issue in 2024, despite gaslighting from the Democrats that it was actually good. Unlike Harris, Trump was able to demonstrate what he would actually do to fix the problem.

Trump also had a focus on expanding the GOP coalition. Indeed, Trump basically talked to every single group he could. He spoke at the Libertarian convention, he brought RFK Jr. and Elon Musk on board, he went after the crypto-bros, he went after basically every racial and religious group in the country. He campaigned for the Amish in Pennsylvania, he spoke to black journalists and he even did what he could to get Muslims on board, which may have helped him win Michigan. In short, Trump did everything he could to appeal to as many Americans as possible, including groups that traditionally did not like the Republican Party or Trump himself. Some of these efforts were more successful than others, but he absolutely managed to take some votes from the Democrats with this effort. 

The Trump team also did very good in the debates. Trump's victory in the first debate was so overwhelming that it ended Joe Biden's political career. And JD Vance, who was a great pick by the way, probably did the same thing to Tim Walz, the Harris VP candidate (more on him later). The 2nd debate with Harris was more mixed, but for a three on one ambush, Trump did well. Trump has always been a strong debater but he added a few more scalps to his belt this time around.

In short, Trump ran a pretty good campaign where he focused on the issues and largely avoided gaffes. He built a very large coalition and did everything in his power to win. He worked hard with his rallies and ran the best campaign he has ever done, better than 2016 and much better than 2020. Trump absolutely deserved to win due to his efforts. But he was greatly helped by the Democrats and their massive mistakes...

Biden/Harris campaigns:

The biggest problem that both the Biden and Harris campaigns had was the fact that Biden was a pretty terrible president. Biden had destroyed the economy and caused several major wars for little reason. Though Biden ran as a centrist, he ruled as a far left liberal and destroyed much of the credibility of his party. 

This problem continued even after Biden dropped out and Harris replaced him. Harris was in the bad position of being held accountable for Biden's mistakes and was unable to distance herself from him. How could she? She's Biden's VP and either she had to admit that she was a total non-factor under Biden or stay hooked up to his policies. She ended up being stuck with his policies, and, critically, was unable to say how she would have done anything differently. 




Biden himself was a drain on the Harris campaign, to the point that I suspect he may even been sabotaging it. I mean, how else do you explain the above photo where Biden put on a Trump hat? Biden also made statements that made it clear that Harris was involved with his campaign and said they were essentially joined to the hip. And the last minute statement about how all Trump supporters are "garbage"? That absolutely damaged her campaign. 

It's just another reason why changing the candidate in the middle of the race was such a bad idea. Biden was a deeply flawed candidate that was going to lose to Trump, but switching him out damaged the campaign greatly. It was essentially admitting that the campaign had no chance to win and was down to a Hail Mary play that was extremely unlikely to work. And it generated some rifts and bad feelings among the Democrats that are going to take years to fix. And although it's probably false that Biden was actively sabotaging the campaign, it's absolutely true that there was anger about removing him.

The way they replaced Biden was terrible too. Instead of having a traditionally primary, they dumbed Biden after millions of Democrats voted for him. And after they dropped him, they put Harris in there without any real debate or contest. Harris was just assigned and for a party that was whining about democracy being under threat, it was rank hypocrisy. Had they had some kind of actual debate they might have come up with a better candidate. 

But it was Kamala Harris herself that should take a lot of the blame. Harris was an uniquely bad candidate that almost nobody wanted. When I heard that she was the candidate I said to myself that it was the worst possible person they could have picked, and I had a few other people that day say the same thing to me. She was an awful choice. 

Why? Well for one she's just clearly unlikable. Harris always gave me the vibe of the kind of ubiquitous woman right now that cares more about lecturing people than actually having a conversation. Harris is the HR lady nobody likes and her voice is like sandpaper. She is a charisma black hole and I can't imagine what the Democrats were thinking when they picked her. 

The best thing the Democrats did is when they tried to have Harris do the "bunker" strategy that Biden did where she avoided the media and had no real interviews. She never did do a press conference but eventually she was forced to start doing interviews and she was found wanting. Harris is uniquely bad at interviews and she absolutely showed people that she isn't actually all that intelligent. Both previous Democrat candidates, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, were much better in the interview format, and that was true with Biden even after senility hit. Harris, on the other hand, just isn't very smart and is not a good speaker. 

Policy was a huge problem for the Democrats this year as well. They had very little to  run on as it was clear that the Biden policies had largely failed. When Harris did put out her own economic policies she was laughed at by just about everyone. Absolutely nobody who had even a basic understanding of economics understood that subsidizing housing demand was not the way to reduce prices. Not to mention the absolute insanity that was taxing unrealized gains, a policy so bad that I still can't believe that she proposed it. 

With economic policy a dead end the Harris camp pivoted to woman's rights. Though they were able to turn out a lot of angry cat ladies, this was an absolute disaster for every other demographic group. Men especially were sick of hearing about abortion when they had actual concerns about the direction of the country. And it also gave the Trump campaign an opening to show how extreme Democrats have become on the abortion issue. 

Indeed, the Democrats have a major problem with men. The only men that seem to be on board with the Democrats now are sex predators that want to prey on naïve and misguided leftist young women. That and "men" that think they are women. For normal men, the Harris campaign offered nothing but contempt. The Harris campaign eventually tried to win men but were beyond out of touch, with ads towards men still focused on woman's rights! It was insane. And it rang hollow when the Harris camp was on the wrong side of the woman's rights issue. How can you be for women's rights when you want men competing with women in sports and paying for male prisoners to transition into "women" and being housed with biological women? 

Harris also made a huge mistake with her VP pick, for much of the same reasons. Walz was supposed to be the masculine friendly uncle for the campaign, but he was more like the "funny uncle" you don't let your kids around. The man gave off weird vibes and his national debut, his debate with JD Vance, he failed miserably.

He was obviously a bad candidate and it raises the question why they went with him instead of Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. Shapiro is a popular governor in a state Democrats could not afford to lose. But they snubbed him because he was Jewish and went with Tim Walz. It's possible that Walz is the reason why Minnesota didn't flip, but at that point, you were screwed no matter what. 

Speaking of Judaism, Harris handled the Israel-Gaza war horribly. She tried to play both the Muslims and Jews at the same time and ended up offending both. Trump on the other hand was able to secure a large amount of support from both groups because he had the credibility of a deal maker. Harris had no credibility on the issue and both sides figured out right away that she was just pandering to them. It was always going to be a hard issue for Democrats to handle given the realities of their coalition, but Harris handled it poorly, to the point it may have cost her both Michigan and Wisconsin and perhaps some house seats as well. 

I knew the campaign was pretty much done when they went back to the "Trump is Hitler" barrel. That had been played out back in 2016 and it hadn't worked. You can't keep telling the same lie again and again when we had Trump's first term as absolute proof that Trump was absolutely not Hitler, not a tyrant and not a bad president. Doing so was a sign of desperation and just motivated Trump voters to vote for him even more. 

Finally, Harris really screwed up by letting Trump get some crucial endorsements. She snubbed RFK Jr, who was able to bring back a lot of vaccine skeptics that would have otherwise abandoned Donald Trump. She and Biden snubbed and disrespected Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in response and turned it into X, and eventually became Trump's most powerful supporter. And her handling of the Joe Rogan situation led to the last minute endorsement of someone who had been pretty critical of Donald Trump. 

It was a terrible campaign by both Biden and Harris and you would think that the Democrats would have drawn some lessons from it. Instead they appear to be making the very questionable decision to blame the race on the voter. Calling everyone that voted against them racist and sexist is a bold strategy and I don't see it working out for them. But it's a good example of the kind of mistakes that Democrats just can't help but to make... 

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