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And along those lines, Harris last year clocked the worst net-negative rating (-17) of any veep in NBC’s polling history. And she’s going to have to justify a series of failures; border control (e.g., “you had one job…”), inflation catastrophe, crime, global unrest, disaster pullout of Afghanistan, not to mention her tacit collaboration as ringleader in propping up senescent Joe Biden.
And let’s throw in the fact that Harris has never been anything but a San Francisco Progressive. In 2019, she was awarded the “Most Liberal Senator” award, which was just taken down last week. She supported the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, open borders, repeal of Trump tax cuts, an “end” to “mass incarceration”, gun bans, student loan debt forgiveness, price controls for drugs and union payoffs.
Young voter support for Harris is not there.
Personal style, she’s bumbling, halting, incoherent. She’s prone to ridiculous gaffes. Virtually all of her senior staff quit. She’s tied to a teleprompter and can’t think on her feet. She bragged about her tough-on-crime positions. And the Left is furious with Biden/Harris’ position supporting Israel vs. the terrorists. She dodged the Netanyahu presentation to Congress. She’s supposed to sit next to the House speaker, and has literally never missed a joint session, yet there was a sudden “conflict” so she couldn’t attend the Israel speech. She’s been very vocal about calls for a ceasefire, but doesn’t have the fortitude to show basic respect to an ally’s address to Congress.
And let’s not leave out the wee fact that 14 million primary votes have officially been cancelled.
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Kamala Harris favors (or used to favor) increasing corporate income taxes by two-thirds, from 21% to 35%.
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Post-Kamala candidate announcements show that Trump is still in the lead for all the battleground states except one…and this is most likely her high point. Feeling very good about her failure in the Prez race.
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quote=8673]https://x.com/seanmdav/status/1816150595096416552 Cleanup on aisle 5. https://x.com/MikeKBerg/status/1816180437456474330 Convenient for a Democrat primary. Not so good for a national election.
That whole border thing…my theory is that Biden, at least in part, resented having having to select her as his veep. I make that comment for two reasons:
- His selection of her as, yes, his “border czar”. If he didn’t specifically name her, he put her fully in charge of the border and she very clearly wanted no part of it, and she very clearly failed at it.
- Biden resents being pushed out of the presidential 2024 race, and is not pleased with party leaders. He therefore fully endorsed Harris when the smart play for the party would be to hold a mini-primary. Biden remembers (a) what a disaster she was in the primaries and (b) he wants her to crater as a presidential candidate so that Biden can say “See? Told ya so” or have his media minions do it.
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Already seeing it on TikTok, X, and other social media. The number of laudatory legacy media pieces is incredible, including a bunch of 180s by pro-Biden reporters who wrote hit pieces when Biden and Harris were engaged in a cold war early in the administration (how do you think she ended up as Border Czar?).
One of the bizarre collective observations by the media is looking askance at young people not collectively embracing Harris because she’s so “young and fresh.”
Since when did 59 going on 60 become young and fresh? To a 25 year old, 77 year old Trump and 59 year old Harris aren’t all that different in age. Yes there’s a difference, but it’s not like she’s a Kennedy.
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Lots of good points. A few thoughts:
– Right now, Harris is in the honeyiest of honeymoon phases. She hasn’t made any difficult choices, she hasn’t offended anyone other than Trump, she replaced unpopular Joe and she wasn’t seen as the cause of the replacement.
– A difficult choice she will need to make is her VP selection. Whoever she picks will tick off somebody. The other half of the challenge is that some prominent Dems think she’s going to lose, so they’re aiming for 2028…I suspect that’s why Whitmer has flat out declined, as has Shapiro. If Harris were to pick Shapiro (would be my choice), she risks offending the Hamas terrorist/Middle Eastern supporting Democrats, which are legion. None of the swing state governors or Senators (Kelly, ) can deliver that many electoral votes. Other popular choices (KY gov Beshear, IL gov Pritzker, CA gov Newsom, MN gov Tim Walz) don’t deliver swing state votes. If she were to pick Whitmer or Wes Moore (MD’s popular young gov, who said he doesn’t want it anyway), she would be doubling down on gender or race. Buttigieg is not polling well, particularly among Black voters (he didn’t in 2020 either). Might end up with Roy Cooper, who terms out in December, he’s an old white dude and he really knows how to win elections…he’s won 13 straight.
– The single poll (Ipsos) that shows her ahead of Trump overweighted Dem voters by 5% relative to Republicans and Independents.
– Kennedy is shown as drawing more from Trump than Harris. He’s infringing on the conspiratorial fringe vote. If he drops out, his votes will accrue to Trump.
– When she was an AG, she did a lot of very bad things. She put a lot of black men in jail — and kept them there. According to Tulsi — which Harris did not refute — she kept them there long past the date they should have been released.
– Most people don’t know Harris. They don’t know the gaffes (“We have a secure border” “Equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place”), the awkwardness, the brittle behavior. That’s why Trump is calling for multiple debates. He’d crucify her.
– She benefits from her association with Hollywood, but — crucially — she isn’t crucified over her long-term ties to California the way that Newsom is.
– Similarly, Biden’s disastrous policies haven’t really touched her yet. She’s as responsible for them as he is. She’s been such a significant supporter of Biden that it would be difficult for her to repudiate his policies at this late date. Specifically in two critical areas:
– Inflation / Economy. People other than the upper class are getting crushed by inflation, and the moneyed Dems and their four-part ideological sponsors (technology, Wall Street, Hollywood and academia) aren’t paying much attention to it. Bill Clinton used to have the “It’s the economy, stupid” sign on his desk. No indication that anyone in the Democrat party has picked up on that.
– Immigration. Most Americans are petrified by the porous southern border and what’s happening there. Even northern, blue state governors woke up and started to squeal when Texas started busing illegal immigrants to those states.
– Right now, she’s dealing with an adoring media. How will she react when they start to ask her the hard questions?
– You mentioned Harris as an Obama-level savior. Interesting that Obama hasn’t endorsed her. He made Biden wait, too. Obama’s political instincts are quite strong, and I suspect his memory is long enough to remember how miserable she was at campaigning.
– In my opinion, the Dems have one chance and one chance only to win this election: they need to re-embrace the blue collar MAGA world, the part of the electorate that they once owned lock stock and barrel, and of which they are now fully contemptuous. David Brooks’ July 18 article nails it. He also notes that it is a worldview that offers working class voters respect. He thinks the Dems are playing into the Republicans’ hands.
– P. S. A tiny part of me wonders if Biden’s forceful support of Harris is his way of thumbing his nose at his party who saw his unceremenious exit.
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And Trump just scored his highest favorability rating ever in the Quinnipiac poll, currently at 46%, up from 44% last month and 41% a few months ago.
Donald Trump Breaks Record, Poll Shows
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A substantive number of polls are out comparing Harris and Trump. The numbers are not good, in most cases, for Harris.
Trump, overall, has a two-point lead over Harris nationally, but with Kennedy / Stein / West it widens to four points. Not surprisingly, Kennedy/Stein/West siphons votes from Harris.
Harris has significant net negative approval ratings, -17 and -16 net disapproval in two Forbes polls. Trump’s net unfavorable ratings are much narrower, in the +1 to -8 range, depending on the poll.
Trump has big leads in battleground states including NC (+4), AZ (+6), MI (+5), PA (+2), GA (+5), and in FL (+7), TX (+8). Trump led Biden in WI (+3).
Harris is ahead of Trump in MA and NY. Not surprisingly.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
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The only record she can run on is Joe’s. IMO, Trump needs to push the idea that she is essentially Joe Part 2 with less experience in foreign and domestic policy. It will be interesting to see how she will disconnect from this administration, or if she will. I think she stands a decent chance if she moves the middle NOW with policy statements on Foreign Policy, Education, Energy and Health Care. At the risk of losing the lunatic fringe, (a small risk, IMO), I think a moderate position will win more votes than it will cost. Like I said, it’s a small risk, where else is the LGBQTxyz crowd going with their support? I didn’t bother watching the RNC Convention . This may be a different story.
100% accurate, and the funny thing is that this is achievable. A politician runs toward the poles during the primaries and runs to the center during the general election. The hard party is already done, she’s past the primary, and as you point out, she needs to move to the middle to show she’s not a Progressive right now. And given her conservative propensity as an attorney general, it’s actually in her wheelhouse.
The lunatic fringe will vote for her, they have no other choice. She needs to be tough on crime, tough on immigration, pedal to the medal on the economy, push traditional value, go quiet on LGBTQxys. She should keep left on the one and only issue that most of the country is left, and that’s abortion.
One other thing…like Newsom, she’s perceived to be a wacky San Francisco liberal. She needs to lose that perception, which means she needs to disavow what hasn’t/isn’t working in California…and there’s a lot of it.
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The record she has, if she isn’t subbed in through the 25th Amendment, is: Border Czar (failure); sent to Europe to prevent the invasion (provoked Putin, Russia invaded the next day); on climate, kicked off a conspiracy theory by saying we need to reduce population to achieve climate goals. She was also rated more liberal / left than Bernie Sanders in her short time in the Senate. She is the poster child for the California Democrats’ system of failing up. We’ll see how it goes.
She’s a terrible communicator. She’s awful with swing voters. She’s really only comfortable with elite liberals. To be candid, after having worked at the highest levels of four major law firms, her personality embodies the weaknesses of traditional law firm lawyers, without the positives; e.g., very smart, hyper-focused, adroit mind, very capable. She doesn’t possess those attributes. But she is egotistical, artificial, insecure, socially awkward, occasionally childish, deceptive and has some nervous tics.
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Well, she is a role model for young aspiring women politicians. Sleep with a powerful (still technically married) man twice your age, ask for appointments to cushy government agency board seats, be given a BMW, get placed in elections with zero competition, and get set up for life.
I still don’t understand why she doesn’t get pilloried for this. She and other Dems will nail Trump to the wall for supposed misogyny…what about her sleeping with WB who gives her political appointments in her 20s? Was she really the best qualified politician to sit on those agency committees?
To me, this is the flip side of the #metoo movement…yes, men like Harvey Weinstein should be buried beneath the prison. But at the same time, a number of women chose to do it and benefited from it…like Kamala Harris.
Also…I can’t believe no media member has pointed out that her senior staffers fled her employee after a short employment period.
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I think, in Biden’s eyes, they’ll achieve the same by having Harris “transition” e.g., be at all the top meetings, meet the top people, get the Secret Service protection that Trump didn’t get, etc.
Harris was a profoundly flawed candidate. Tulsi Gabbard eviscerated her in the debate. She was a terrible Attorney General (from a liberal point of view).
YouGov poll indicates that Harris does 2% worse than Biden vs. Trump. When asked if Harris would be more or less likely to win against Trump than Biden, 15 percent answered more likely, 26 percent about as likely, 39 percent less likely and 20 percent were unsure. On the other hand, Ipsos polled 992 registered voters across the U.S. on July 16 for Reuters. The survey placed Trump ahead of Biden in a presidential matchup by 43 percent of the vote against 41 percent. However, once Harris was subbed in as the candidate she tied with Trump on 44 percent. And CNN poll of 1,045 registered voters, conducted by SSRS between June 28 and 30, found Trump ahead of Biden nationwide with 49 percent of the vote against 43 percent. Trump also polled ahead of Harris but by a smaller margin, with the backing of 47 percent of registered voters against 45 percent.
I think Trump still wins. There are several keys:
– The Democrat nominated by the Dem party. Biden endorsed Harris, but I don’t think that means it’s a done deal.
– The VP nomination
– the battleground states
– % of population that finds Harris as unlikeable (or more) than Hillary Clinton
– the gravity effect caused by third party candidates RFKJr, West and Stein
– incipient racism (both ways) and voters who won’t admit their real choice to pollsters (both ways)
– Open Convention?
Lots to do…
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Read dueling CNN articles, both of which want Biden to step down. One of which said the candidate must be Kamala Harris, the other stated that the Dems need to have an open primary, of sorts, between now and the convention because Kamala Harris is the most not-ready-for-primetime VP…ever.
Apart from that, here’s a quote arguing for consensus candidate versus lockstep to Harris:
Some progressives have said behind the scenes, meanwhile, that they trust Biden to be more aligned with their agenda than they do Harris – and that is part of why so many have stuck with him.
Interesting tacit admission that Biden — who ran as a moderate — has been implementing a Progressive agenda — and that Harris is unlikely to follow suit. If you followed her career as a prosecutor, you’d know that she was fairly conservative.
Also read that Biden is still ticked off about getting passed over in 2016 in favor of flawed HRC, and that he’s particularly disinterested in Obama and Obama-circle recommendations that he step down…in fact, that it’s hardened his resolve.
BTW, Aaron Sorkin has an interesting remedy for the Dems. He recommends (seriously) that they nominate Mitt Romney.
Aaron Sorkin: How I Would Script This Moment for Biden and the Democrats
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I heard he supposedly donated $15 to Act Blue (a Democratic organization), but apparently it was a donation made by a 69 year old guy with the same name.
Incorrect. This was fact-checked by lefty fact-checking organization Snopes. Crooks made the donation the day that Biden was inaugurated, in response to an email he received related to the inauguration.
Trump Shooter Once Donated Money to a Democratic Cause? | Snopes.com
I don’t think we can say he was definitively left or right. Pennsylvania holds “closed” primary elections, in which only voters registered with a party can vote in that party’s primaries. In such states, someone might register with a party not because they agree with its values, but because they want to weigh in on that party’s nominees for each elected post.
Incidentally, Crooks’ father is a registered Libertarian and his mother is a registered Democrat.
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You guys are funny. Debating the politics of a killer vs wondering how he easily subverted a billion dollar security apparatus. who cares if he was a disgruntled Republican or Democrat? How was he able to do what he did? An innocent person is dead and three other innocents are injured.
I do wonder (a) how Crooks got up there with no apparent issue, (b) why the police and Secret Service ignored multiple entreaties from attendees at the event who saw Crooks with a rifle prior to the shooting (c) why there wasn’t Secret Service on that specific rooftop, (d) that the shooter aimed his rifle at a cop who apparently didn’t do anything about it.
I mean…WTF? How does any of that, much less all of that happen? Conspiracy nuts could blame the moderate right (Never Trumpers), the moderate left (crazy Biden supporters), the national security apparatus (insulted by Trump on numerous occasions), the Far Left (Progressives vs. Trump), Russia, China, North Korea and on and on.
Yeah, I heard you the first time. Lone gunman, just like Kennedy and Lincoln…except in the case of Lincoln (and additional target Sec of State William Seward, who was seriously injured along with Seward’s son, and a bodyguard), nine conspirators were accused, seven found guilty, four were hung, Booth himself was shot, three were sentenced to hard labor for life and one was given a six year sentence. One of those hung was supposed to kill VP Andrew Johnson.
So what happened with Crooks? We’ll never know, I suspect.
Execution of the Lincoln conspirators, 1865 – Rare Historical Photos
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