Almost a month ago to the day, the BizNews tribe’s favourite columnist RW Johnson explained why Donald Trump would win the US presidential election, citing several factors in his favour. Trump historically outperformed polls, and the electoral college bias has only strengthened. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, is portrayed as a weak candidate with minimal public support, poor campaign strategy, and lack of clear policies. Johnson nailed it, concluding Harris’s campaign, marked by “politics of joy,” cannot effectively counter Trump’s solid positioning on key issues. Well worth another read.
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By RW Johnson
I have gradually come to the conclusion that Donald Trump is more than likely to win the US presidential election. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___ Of course, something could happen in the last month of the campaign to change this but as things stand I think it best to assume that we are in for a second Trump presidency. My own personal feelings about Trump are neither here nor there. I was trained as a political scientist and I have to follow the data.
There are many pointers. One should note that Trump ran ahead of pollsters’ predictions in both 2016 and 2020 and that the bias in the electoral college which gave him victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite her gaining a majority of the popular vote, has only increased since then. Moreover, it seems virtually certain that the Senate will go Republican. Sen. Joe Manchin’s retirement in West Virginia means a certain Republican gain there and Sen. Jon Tester seems unlikely to win again in Montana. He is already the only Democrat elected to state-wide office there and Trump won Montana by 16 points last time. The Big Sky Country, as it’s called, is naturally Republican. Tester has, notably, refused to endorse Kamala Harris. The GOP could quite possibly win the House too – they already hold it, after all – so there is a considerable likelihood of a Red sweep, which would, of course, greatly increase the powers of a Trump presidency.
When Hillary Clinton lost there was a general consensus that she had been a poor candidate. Above all, she didn’t seem to have a real motive for being President other than that her husband had done it and now it was her turn. There was a sense of entitlement and a great deal of blather about “breaking the glass ceiling”, neither of which endeared her to voters and she was altogether too quick to describe people who didn’t agree with her as “deplorables”. She was, quite transparently, the candidate of the coastal elites of East and West and she hardly bothered to campaign in some of the “fly over” states. She was aiming for a sort of apotheosis in which she finally broke the glass ceiling and ushered in a new era of feminine empowerment. Instead she went down as the woman who let Donald Trump take over the White House.
However, Kamala Harris is the weakest Democratic candidate that I have seen in my lifetime. Far weaker than Hillary Clinton. In 2019 her campaign was so disastrous that she had to pull out of the race even before her first primary contest. She was picked as Vice President entirely on identity politics grounds and she performed very poorly, with lamentable poll ratings. Staff turnover in her private office was over 90% – a terrible indicator of indecision and strife.
When Joe Biden pulled out of the race after his disastrous TV “debate” with Trump he immediately announced that Harris would run in his place. The result was enormous Democratic relief that at least they had a candidate who was compos mentis and who might give the ogre, Trump, a serious run for his money. It is essentially those feelings which have buoyed up Harris’s campaign till now.
It really hasn’t been much of a campaign. The politics of joy, Bill Clinton called it. That is, lots of smiles and good feeling and general professions of caring and sympathising (“I feel your pain”, as Bill Clinton was wont to say) but as little real content as she can possibly get away with. It’s hardly surprising that the most common question about Harris asked by voters is what does she stand for ? What are her policies ? She has avoided sit-down interviews with journalists like the plague. Partly the reason seems to be that she genuinely doesn’t know what policies to espouse but she also doesn’t want to spend time explaining that she has ditched most of the things she said she believed in in 2019. The result is pure candy-floss, best exemplified with her televised love-in with Oprah Winfrey which, believe it or not, was counted as an interview. It is now 77 days – yes, eleven weeks – that Harris has been campaigning without once holding a press conference. It is perfectly clear that she fears that exposure to press questioning would simply pull her to shreds.
To the extent that there is a theme to her speeches it is about the way that Trump’s Supreme Court is taking away a woman’s right to make decisions – such as abortion – which are essentially about her own body. This goes down well with most women but is of far less interest to men and Harris has a huge polling deficit among white males.
The problem is that there are just seven swing states – Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – and while the polls show Harris with a 1.5-2.0% lead overall, she is effectively dead-heating in this magnificent seven. This is very much inferior to Biden’s position at a similar stage in the 2020 election. Also, if one looks at the polls for Democratic senatorial candidates, most of them are running ahead of Harris in their own states. She has no coat-tails at all.
Worse – and probably decisive, the polls show that the economy is far and away the top issue and that Trump has a healthy lead as the candidate most favoured to manage that effectively. The second biggest issue is the mess on the southern border and Trump has an even bigger lead as the candidate likely to deal effectively with that. It is common enough for voters’ views on the economy to settle an election but rather less common to find that partisan views are equally skewed on the second most important issue.
Moreover a new report by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency shows that of recent illegal migrants entering the US, 435,719 are convicted criminals and a further 226,847 face pending criminal charges. This goes some way to substantiating Trump’s charges that the Biden-Harris administration has been allowing vast numbers of criminals to enter the country. They may not actually have been eating people’s pet cats and dogs, but it’s reasonable to imagine that they’re up to no good. Moreover, the habit of southern governors to send bus-loads of immigrants into northern states has nationalised the issue: even New York is now complaining that it can’t cope with the immigrant hordes.
Everything we know from previous elections suggests that Trump’s heavy advantage on these two issues is likely to be decisive. In effect Harris is relying on her pro-abortion campaign to cut through that, but it simply isn’t enough. Moreover, several of the swing states – especially Pennsylvania – have large Catholic populations who are under strict instructions from their bishops to vote against pro-abortion candidates. Harris absolutely needs the (traditionally Democratic) Catholic vote but it doesn’t look like she’ll get it. In this regard, Robert Kennedy Jr’s decision to throw in his lot with Trump could be important. At that point RFK Jr had 3.3% support and much of it was Catholic, drawn by the magic of the Kennedy name.
Harris has attempted occasionally to outline some of her economic ideas. These have been rejected as hopelessly jejune and ignorant by most commentators. On top of which it is now obvious that she has badly fluffed her choice of Vice Presidential running mate. She clearly should have picked Josh Shapiro, the highly impressive governor of Pennsylvania. That would have added real heft to her ticket and it would have won Pennsylvania. Instead she chose Tim Walz of Minnesota, which is bound to vote Democrat anyway. Clearly, she just felt more comfortable with a highly “progressive” liberal. Then came the Walz-Vance debate. Walz was utterly hopeless and even the (Democrat-leaning) LA Times said Walz was so abysmal that it suggested that Harris was incapable of proper executive decision-making.
One realises that Harris shares with Hillary Clinton the fact that her real experience of politics is very limited. Hillary became famous as the President’s wife and later when Obama, influenced by Lincoln’s “team of rivals”, decided to make her Secretary of State. Her only election was as Senator for New York – a state much given to celebrity candidates and a sure bet for a Democrat. She was always assured of huge organisational and financial backing and she had Bill Clinton as her key adviser: other possible candidates cowered away rather than challenge her.
Harris, on the other hand, owed much of her advancement in California to Willie Brown, the huckster political boss she was dating. She got elected as District Attorney for San Francisco and ultimately became Attorney General of California, helped all the way by identity politics and California’s heavily Democratic political slant. This in turn helped her become a Senator. She ran for President in her first Senate term. Then, faced with a variety of tough opponents she found herself completely out-gunned and her campaign collapsed. It was her first experience of really competitive politics. Saved by Biden’s appointment of her as Vice President she now finds herself running against a Republican opponent who might beat her – something she has never faced before. Thus, like Ms Clinton, she owed much of her career to non-elective factors. What is missing from both Harris and Clinton is much experience of the proper cut and thrust of political life which women like Nancy Pelosi and Nicki Haley have.
The press has played along with Harris to a remarkable degree, so great is the general fear and revulsion felt at the thought of a second Trump administration. But if she loses – and I think she will – this will come to a full stop and instead the media will explain in painful detail what a hopeless candidate Harris always was. Biden will again be blamed for choosing her as Vice President and then foisting her candidacy on the party.
In the old days of machine politics it was common for voters to bewail their dislike of the machine boss. To which the precinct captains would reply, OK, so who do you want instead ? Nervous voters would say, Oh dear, I don’t know. The precinct captains would say, well, that’s no good. The first rule of politics is that you can’t beat someone with no one. And that, ultimately, is what has happened in this election. The Democrats desperately wanted someone to put up against the mighty ogre, Trump, and Kamala Harris was ready to hand. And it was too late to have primaries. So they went along with all the nonsense, the avoidance of interviews and press conferences, the ludicrous “politics of joy”, the sheer vacuity of the candidate. In effect they had chosen to put up No One against Trump. And you just can’t beat Someone with No One.
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