This week might have been better than when Donald Trump first won the presidency in 2016. Back then, I was in shock for the first three days, making the thorough embrace of schadenfreude difficult. Thank God for YouTube for giving me the ability to see what I missed, and completely relive the rest that I saw. This time, I’ve done my level best to make sure I don’t miss a thing.
My eyes are open and my DVR is full.
My misery is laced with what amounts to watching a dog try to use tools, as progressive after progressive tries desperately to figure out what went wrong; how they lost.
The simple answer is they ran a horrible and wildly unpopular candidate who picked a horrible and wildly unpopular running mate, they promised to implement horrible and wildly unpopular new policies while continuing horrible and wildly unpopular existing policies. The 2024 Democratic Party playbook seemed to be to make one mistake after another, piling them up on top of each other as they went along.
While it is impossible to know how things would have worked out had they done any of these steps differently, there really is nowhere to go but up. Had they not run a coup on Joe Biden, who knows if he could have pulled up from his dismal poll numbers. Had Joe decided not to run or had dropped out early enough to run some semblance of a primary the odds are fairly high they would have not picked Kamala Harris. The furious blowback over bypassing the sitting Vice President and a woman of color would have faded fairly quickly – Democrats are insane, but they do want to win and even they knew, deep down, that the more people saw of Kamala they less they liked her. That’s why they tried to hide her for 3 months.
Picking Tim Walz as a running mate was the first and greatest unforced error of the campaign. The one time Harris had a chance to show the world she would not be beholden to the radical left she crawled into bed with it. Passing on the popular Governor of Pennsylvania, taking that state off the table and sliding it into her column, simply because Josh Shapiro is Jewish and the activist left hates Jews was monumentally stupid. Walz is a clown who may look somewhat good on paper - he served in the National Guard, a sitting Governor with a record the base likes, etc. – but it was tissue paper, unable to stand up to the most basic of scrutiny.
Nothing the campaign did worked, but they kept doing as if they were convinced they could fail their way to success, unpopular their way to prom queen. It was odd.
Now that they’ve suffered the humiliation of having raised more than a billion dollars and still ended up in debt, the Harris campaign may be the Sam Bankman-Fried on politics.
Now the recriminations have begun. But they are hollow. There is nothing they did more wrong than the very first thing they did. A house built on a faulty foundation will collapse, no matter how pretty it was in the blueprints.
All these “men let women down,” “married women betrayed their gender,” “Hispanic men don’t like black people or women,” “black men sold out” and “everyone let down black women” – as the New York Times put it in a supposed “news” article, “From the moment Kamala Harris entered the presidential race, Black women could see the mountaintop… Was America ready, they asked, to elect a Black woman? The painful answer arrived this week” – make watching MSNBC absolutely worth it, even though I could not bring myself to truly care about it on a dare.
These people deserve every bad thing that comes their way and more. They turn on each other like they’re Highlanders – there can be only one.
Not one of these people get it because they aren’t looking for reasons, they’re looking for excuses. There’s a big difference. Unless and until that changes, nothing else will.
The American public does not like what Democrats are pushing. Kamala Harris was a horrible, fake candidate who made really bad choices while refusing to answer any specific questions. No one could take a piece of paper with “Kamala Harris was raised in a middle class family” (which she was not) to the grocery store and get 25 percent off; no one’s rent payment is reduced by that.
As I watch a panel on MSNBC this morning whining about who America let down black voters because Democrats lost, I have to laugh. The largest prostitute in politics today, former RNC Chair Michael Steele, actually read a script about how Donald Trump “under-performed” in the election because he got fewer votes from 2020, which any moron could look up and see is not true. They don’t care that they lie to their side, they take comfort in the knowledge that no one on their side will either know the truth or look it up for themselves.
Ultimately, that’s why they lost and will lose in the future if they don’t change – once Democrats lost control of Twitter to Elon Musk and he made it a true forum for free speech, the left no longer had a monopoly on communication and could not continue to contain the truth. And the truth is kryptonite to the left.
They can whine and complain all they want, but every MSNBC viewer with an ability to think now has the opportunity to avail themselves of it. Democrats will do all they can to coral them back to the barn, but for the first time in a long time a not-insignificant segment of the “woke” were actually awake. As long as Republicans deliver, there’s little reason to think they’ll be going back to sleep, no matter how hard Democrats insist voters have let anyone down because we didn’t let ourselves down.