Unburdened. How Trump shattered Kamala’s dream.

Anthony Morris I 16 November 2024 I Spectator Australia

Of all political aphorisms, the most reliable is surely the adage holding that oppositions do not win elections; governments lose them. This truism is equally valid in democracies like the United States, where there is no official opposition. Accordingly, the question is not why Trump won, but why Harris lost.

Even before it became fashionable for elected governments to divert taxpayer funding towards promoting their prospects of re-election, incumbency was considered an electoral advantage. At worst, it is a case of ‘the devil you know’; a case of choosing between predictability and uncertainty. An above-average incumbent may be confident of being returned, and even a sub-par incumbent may be rewarded for having no shortcomings more blameworthy than their own mediocrity.

Aside from the benefits of incumbency, Kamala Harris had obvious advantages in being pitted against a colourful, controversial and divisive opponent. Donald Trump is one of those rare participants in public life who are adored and loathed in almost equal measures: it is hard to think of another example among recent actors on the world stage, although Boris Johnson is perhaps the nearest. The fact that Trump could be described (albeit with some imprecision) as a ‘convicted felon’ could only be seen as helping Harris.

Harris also enjoyed the overwhelming support of the mainstream press, with endorsements from the New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Seattle Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Even newspapers with proprietors favourably disposed towards Trump – such as the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times – chose not to issue an official endorsement rather than risk the wrath of their staff or readership. Harris also took a virtual ‘clean sweep’ of endorsements from general interest magazines like the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Vogue, Rolling Stone and Scientific American, and (needless to say) from college and university newspapers.

While US broadcasters do not traditionally endorse particular candidates, their news reporting and commentary left little doubt whom they supported. Viewers of the three major television networks, as well as CNN, were treated to a steady diet of pro-Harris, anti-Trump coverage. This was reinforced with personal endorsements from the cream of Hollywood’s glitterati, the most popular television presenters and comedians, and a roll-call of the nation’s most prominent academics.

And, of course, Harris not only inherited Joe Biden’s impressive war chest of monetary donations; she also managed to raise a similar stockpile in her own right. By election day, Harris had out-spent Trump by a factor of three. So what went wrong?

The argument that Trump tricked or deceived the voting public may work as a salve to the disappointment of the liberal left. But it is utterly fatuous. On the one hand, no event on the planet attracts more advertising expenditure, or more intense media scrutiny, than a US presidential election. On the other hand, for this election voters had the rare benefit of knowing the track records in high office of both contenders, as a former president and the incumbent vice president.

After more than twelve months of the most intense ‘lawfare’ ever inflicted by a ruling American party on their chief political opponent – after four years of a compliant media portraying Trump as dangerous, unhinged, ‘weird’, a loose cannon, a megalomaniac, a fascist, a ‘threat to democracy’, someone who wants to ‘suspend the constitution’, an associate of dictators and despots, a bosom buddy to Putin and Kim Jong-un, an admirer of Hitler – there can barely be a person left on US soil who is unconscious of Trump’s deepest flaws, whether real or imagined, contrived, concocted, confected or fabricated. Nobody who cast a vote in Trump’s favour did so without knowing of every plausible risk which a Trump presidency might entail, as well as many which are objectively inconceivable.

Everyone knows, for instance, that it was Trump – nobody else – who stacked the US Supreme Court with the conservative majority which brought down the long-standing ruling in Roe v. Wade. Nobody voted for Trump with any illusions about the level of his commitment to ‘women’s reproductive rights’.

Yet the electorate did not merely give Trump a marginal victory. It was a veritable landslide, giving Trump 312 electoral college votes to 226 for Harris, the first presidential election in two decades at which the Republican candidate has won a popular majority, and the highest percentage vote for a Republican since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

It also looks like the GOP will not only retain its majority in the House of Representatives, but also retake a majority in the Senate.

The Democrats’ post-election ‘blamestorming’ got into full swing even before Trump had officially reached the decisive threshold of 270 electoral college votes. The first scapegoat was the vice-presidential running mate, Tim Walz, a self-confessed ‘knucklehead’, but a seemingly affable and inoffensive character, despite some dodgy claims about his military service, and despite his backing of a law which inexplicably required that male lavatories in public schools be stocked with free feminine hygiene products.

While Walz made no discernible positive contribution to the Harris campaign, he was not the cause of its failure. Moreover, if Walz was not up to the task, surely the person to be held to account is the one who selected him for the role: the position of vice-presidential running mate is a ‘captain’s pick’.

If Walz was an unlikely scapegoat, even more improbable was the next choice: Joe Biden. Okay, it was a mistake for him to seek re-election when his mental acuity was obviously compromised. But is it fair to blame the guy with Alzheimer’s for not understanding the extent of his impairment? Or should the blame go to those who worked most closely with him, and who facilitated his quixotic – almost Putinesque – bid to extend his term of office until his 85th year?

Some nastier excuses began gradually to emerge. It now seems that Harris was ‘betrayed’ by some categories of ‘traditional Democrat supporters’, specifically African-Americans, Hispanics, and (worst of all) immigrants. These groups were singled out for their alleged misogynistic predispositions, and their racism against people of mixed ethnic heritage. Immigrants, moreover, showed particular ingratitude by not supporting the Biden-Harris administration’s compassion towards recent arrivals. It evidently occurred to nobody that the law-abiding citizens who waited patiently in line to enter America legally felt little affinity with those who jumped the queue, and even less empathy towards those who brought with them the violence and lawlessness of the countries from which they fled.

Next came the Clintonesque trope, ‘It’s the economy, stupid’. The prevailing Democrat dogma is that, although ‘Bidenomics’ actually had a strong positive impact, people tend to ‘misremember’ a time of greater affluence during Trump’s first term. Voters therefore blame the Biden-Harris administration for an economic decline which either didn’t occur, or (if it did) was caused by international conditions outside the US government’s control: in other words, voters misunderstood the situation, if not due to Trump’s misinformation, then through their own foolishness.

Again, if there is the slightest truth to this thesis, surely the blame rests with the candidate who failed to educate voters about the great economic benefits wrought by Biden’s and her own sagacious economic management, and to explain why this was not reflected in their weekly grocery bills.

There is only one explanation which Democrat grandees will never countenance, yet it is the obvious one: Harris was the wrong candidate. Even to hint that Harris was not up to scratch is, at the same time, both sexist and racist. In the ultra-woke institution which the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson has become, it is impossible to admit that a woman of colour was no match for Donald Trump, the epitome of male, pale, stale and frail.

But there is an even more important reason why Democrat grandees cannot so much as entertain this hypothesis: it was they – a cabal comprising former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ex-presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (and their respective wives), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries – who foisted Harris on the party membership, although she had never won a single primary vote. Better to endorse a candidate whom they could control than risk an ‘open convention’ at which grassroots members might choose somebody with their own popularity, their own charisma, and their own agenda: perhaps a Bernie Sanders, a Gavin Newsom, a Pete Buttigieg, or a Michael Bloomberg; maybe even a Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

It did not matter that, in terms of popular approval ratings, Harris had already plummeted to the lowest-recorded for a vice president in the history of NBC News polls, with a negative score of minus seventeen, compared with a positive rating of plus two for Dick Cheney and a negative rating of? minus four for Mike Pence at corresponding points in their respective tenures.

Aside from the stigma of her complicity in Biden’s unimpressive first term – from which she was never able to dissociate herself – she faced the prospect of a 16-week campaign against a Republican candidate who had been on the campaign trail for all of four years.

Never a strong political debater, she would spend much of that time hiding from the media, appearing only on hand-picked programmes with supportive interviewers, and never exposing herself to an open press conference.

Her biggest problem was, however, the lamest of lame-duck presidencies, following Biden’s ignominious withdrawal from the presidential race after a disastrous debate against Trump.

Had it been a case of Harris providing the solution to a problem which was not of her own making, she might have carried it off. But, in the weeks and days leading up to Biden’s withdrawal, Harris never stopped defending his cognitive ability, claiming that he was ‘on his game’ and ‘ran circles around his staff’. Pressed with a report by special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents and found that his memory was ‘hazy’, ‘fuzzy’, ‘faulty’, ‘poor’ and had ‘significant limitations’, Kamala Harris insisted that the report was ‘gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate’.

Less than three weeks before the election, she was still claiming that, ‘Joe Biden, I have watched from the Oval Office to the Situation Room, and he has the judgment and the experience to do exactly what he has done in making very important decisions on behalf of the American people’. Biden repaid her loyalty with a comment widely interpreted as calling Trump supporters ‘garbage’: the final proof, if such was needed, that he was losing his marbles.

Pitted against an opponent well-known for his tendency to hyperbole and exaggeration, and whose veracity had frequently been called into question, the primary task for Kamala Harris was proving that her acquaintance with the truth rested on firmer foundations than Donald Trump’s. In this, she failed even before her campaign began: the fact that she replaced Joe Biden as the Democrat nominee only proved that her previous denials of Biden’s senility were fictitious.

The ultimate irony is that the very circumstance which gave Harris an opportunity to stand for the presidency robbed her of any chance of winning.

Author: Anthony Morris