The Three Mistakes Kamala and the Democrats Are (Still) Making
I hate to interrupt all the (premature) celebrating on the Democrat side since they unchained themselves from “the dying anvil that was Joe Biden that was dragging them down into the murky depths of the lake named Guaranteed Election 2024 Loser Lake”, but Kamala Harris and the Democrats are still making some big mistakes when it comes to their campaign to hold onto the presidency in 2024.
Yup, that’s right, you heard things correctly. Despite all the mainstream media propaganda, the Democrats are the ones making three yuge mistakes since Vice President Kamala Harris leaped into the ring to replace the old, senile, and broken-down Biden.
First, Kamala Harris and the Democrats just can’t seem to quit their campaign attack on Donald Trump for being the devil. Meaning, they continue to portray Trump as a man who is a particularly corrupt and crude barbarian crook who abuses women and hates minorities and wants to overthrow America’s democratic society in favor of a dictatorship. This kind of attack does work with their base, as is clearly demonstrated to me whenever I attempt to discuss politics with my large number of relatives who are part of that voting block. These people often tell me how Trump admits he wants to be a dictator (he once made a joke), Trump is a Nazi (despite him not being a socialist and his daughter and grandkids being Jewish), and that once in the White House Trump will never leave the building (despite him already having done so).
The problem for the Democrats is that although this attack does work to rev up the base, it doesn’t work on anyone else, most especially the actual swing voters the Democrats will need to persuade to vote for Harris to win the 2024 election. These swing voters have heard this argument repeated before – really, ad nauseum since 2015 – and have already seen a Trump presidency in action, so they know that it is ridiculous partisan BS.
To resort to a well-known meme, the Democrats need to stop trying to make this “fetch” happen. (But they can’t, because they believe their own propaganda.)
Second, Kamala Harris and her campaign are not doing enough to separate her from President Joe Biden and his administration. As the vice president for Biden, she is intrinsically tied to his administration and his left-wing policies. For that reason, during a year when that administration and its policies are resoundingly unpopular, it is imperative that she criticize Biden or otherwise separate herself from him in some significant way. Instead, Harris is just ignoring this problem and pretending that she had no power or responsibilities during the Biden administration, and thus, that nothing that happened can be blamed on her. (I wasn’t the border czar! I didn’t cause any inflation!)
As I wrote before that in 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a far more distinguished public official (unlike Harris) acted to separate himself from his president, Lyndon Johnson, on the key issue that was harming the Johnson administration – the Vietnam War. Because of this strategy, Humphrey, under similar conditions, came back in 1968 and almost won the election.
Third, Kamala Harris and her campaign team chose unbelievably poorly for her vice-presidential nominee. The ironclad rule of choosing a vice-presidential running mate is, first, DO NO HARM. Here, she chose a man – Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota – who DOES HARM. As my Red State colleague and fellow Seinfeld super fan Bonchie has clearly demonstrated, Tim Walz routinely and egregiously lied and dissembled about his “war record” to try and help himself politically, first when running for Congress, then when running for governor and now while advertising himself as the nominee for vice president. And now, Walz has been finally caught.
Contrary to Democrat hopes, this stolen valor issue is easy to understand, and it is serious enough that it is not going to go away.
This particular mistake is also inexcusable because it was so preventable. Normally, when campaigns are selecting a vice president, they go through the potential candidates and make sure that each one has no major skeletons in his/her closet. Eric Holder, the former six-year U.S. Attorney General, was supposed to be doing that here. But, somehow, Holder missed these obvious facts that came to light just a few days after Walz was selected. So, Harris, in her first major test as candidate, failed miserably in choosing her running mate.
It gets worse. As everyone with even a rudimentary amount of political knowledge knows, the smart money bet to be selected as Harris’ running mate was Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Shapiro had some major advantages over Walz: 1) he came from a more important state (Pennsylvania is a state that Harris MUST win to win the presidency); 2) he was more moderate than Walz, the latter of whom is just another left-wing radical like Harris (normally you want to “balance” the ticket); and 3) as only the second Jewish nominee for vice president, he would presumably help with Jewish Americans nationally and in other states, like Joe Lieberman did in 2000, especially in Florida. Nevertheless, Harris was clearly intimidated by the anti-Semitic Democrats into choosing Walz instead of Shapiro. Shapiro was a proud religious Jew, who had also (once) been somewhat conservative on the issue of Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. The antisemites simply could not tolerate that in a Democrat vice-presidential nominee.
Of these three mistakes, Kamala Harris can still fix the first two of them, if she wants to. (But she probably can’t ditch Walz at this point.) But I doubt she will do so. Indeed, there is absolutely no evidence that Harris realizes that she has, and is, making these mistakes, so it seems unlikely that she will in any way change her election strategy. Especially since she and the other Democrats are so enraptured by her current temporary and easily explainable polling boost.
As Donald Trump would say, “We’ll see how this turns out” for them.
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