Two weeks ago today, the American people cast their votes, and Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in a stunning and decisive victory, and as the Democrats attempt to identify what went wrong, they’ve come up with an array of explanations that would almost be impressive if they weren’t so out of touch.
They blamed Joe Biden for waiting so long to drop out of the race, insisting that she didn’t have enough time to put together a successful bid for the presidency, as if she hadn’t run for president in the previous cycle and wasn’t second in command to a senior in obvious cognitive decline. They blamed George Clooney and top Democratic donors for pressuring Joe Biden to drop out despite internal polling showing Trump winning a staggering 400 electoral votes if he had remained in the race. They blamed it on racism while simultaneously scapegoating her loss on Latinos and Arabs shifting towards Trump. They blamed it on misogyny while blaming it on white women. The White House blamed it on COVID. Kathy Griffin blamed it on Taylor Swift.
Joe Biden “dropped out” of the race on July 21st, essentially coronating her as the presumptive nominee. Knowing that she had three and a half months to make her case to the American people, she waited over a month to engage with the media. She didn’t take real questions, she didn’t hold press conferences, she didn’t give interviews, she didn’t even upload a platform until the campaign was 1/3 of the way over.
Kamala Harris enjoyed one of the most robust fundraising windfalls of any presidential candidate in American history, and to her credit, she made a point of sharing the wealth with down ballot candidates. The Democrats consistently outraised and outspent Republicans in presidential, Senate and House races by significant margins, provoking quiet panic in right wing political circles.
As much of a financial advantage as the Harris campaign had, they not only lost but ended up in significant debt.
They spent $100,000 replicating the Call Her Daddy studio in D.C. because Harris couldn’t be bothered to travel to film the episode. The set itself looked like something an Instagram renovation DIYer could’ve done for less than a tenth of the cost – all for an interview didn’t move the needle at all in her favor.
She spent tens of millions on celebrity appearances – most notably $10,000,000 on a 5 minute Beyonce speech falsely marketed as a free concert to draw a crowd in a state she had no chance of winning. While every poll showed voters listing the economy as their number one issue, she relied on actors and singers completely isolated from the financial burdens facing the American people. A huge portion of her campaign strategy revolved around endorsements of the rich and famous, as she branded herself the champion of the “working class.”
She refused to go on podcasts that could have actually advanced her standing with voters she desperately needed to gain ground with, on the issues they didn’t trust her on, like Joe Rogan and Dave Ramsey.
The one time she took an interview that presented any real risk was with Bret Baier on Fox News, and it was a disaster from start to finish.
Even in the appearances she’d agreed to with friendly outlets and hosts like Andersoon Cooper, Dana Bash and Oprah, she sounded incompetent and insane, leaving her interviewers in visible shock on more than one occasion.
Clearly learning nothing from her previous presidential run, where her campaign was torpedoed by an entirely predictable attack on her record, she failed to prepare for completely obvious inquiries, flailing and flopping through virtually every interview she took.
She adopted Trump’s No Tax On Tips after casting the tie-breaking vote for the dubiously named Inflation Reduction Act that expanded and empowered the IRS to start aggressively enforcing tip taxation. She was against fracking, then for it. The economic plan she introduced in the middle of August included Soviet era price controls for groceries that she began walking back shortly after announcing it. She was an open borders extremist calling for the abolition of ICE, then tried to portray herself as a hardliner, blaming Trump’s political maneuvering for the influx of migrants, promised that if elected she’d sign a bill allowing border wall construction to resume even though her administration was hemorrhaging money to prevent its completion, then proceeding to promise mass amnesty.
The economy, abortion and immigration steadily polled as the top three priorities for voters, and her stated plans on 2 of the 3 were contradictory and incoherent. A freshman poli sci major could have told her that she needed to address these concerns clearly and confidently, but she changed her proposals like a nail color. It was like she was throwing spaghetti at a wall, hoping something would stick, and when it didn’t, she was ready to pivot without missing a beat, with no consideration for how it would undercut her credibility.
She didn’t bother uploading an official platform to her website until the night before her debate, and when she finally did, much of it seemed to focus more on Project 2025 than original, concrete ideas able to stand on their own.
She thought she could run a campaign that depended more on “vibes” than substance – but ignoring that when a staggering number of Americans are struggling to afford keeping a roof over their heads and food on their tables, gimmicks and memes can only go so far, and that Trump has an aura 100x more powerful than hers with zero effort on his part.
By the time she realized she couldn’t win the vibe campaign, she was already in a policy deficit, and her attempts to close the gap by stacking interview after interview backfired.
After ducking the press for over a month, she should have had flawless answers locked and loaded about her shifting positions, what would set her apart from Joe Biden, and why the American people should entrust her with another four years in the executive branch after four years of abject failure. But she didn’t.
If she couldn’t handle interviews from American media – most of which were softballs – how was the electorate supposed to trust her on the world stage, head to head with hard hitters like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping?
Of course, even if she had been smarter with her media strategy or her spending, she still would have lost, because she was a terrible candidate in 2020, she was a terrible candidate in 2024, and she was a terrible vice president during the years in between, and I can’t imagine anything she could have said or done that could override that reality for anyone that’s been paying attention in a real way.
Under her leadership, one of the holiest days in the country’s dominant religion was declared Trans Day of Visibility. Under her leadership, FEMA spent around a billion on illegal aliens, only to tell the hurricane victims that they were shit out of luck, then lie about where the money had gone. Under her leadership, the FBI deployed counterterrorism tactics against parents that wanted their children to receive classical education. And I’m not exaggerating when I say that’s only the tip of the iceberg. But her staff thought that if they trotted out enough celebrities and had her yap about growing chili peppers, voters would forget what she had done. But we didn’t.
And despite the White House and its allied media telling us that things were actually better than we thought they were, begging us to ignore our eyes and ears, they didn’t succeed in gaslighting a plurality of the American people.
As much as Democrats in denial insist that America rejected her because of her race and sex, the truth is, she only got as far as she did because of her race and sex. And they have no one to blame but themselves for the mess they’re in, because they created the environment that allowed imbeciles to become the face of their party if they were dark enough with the right chromosomes.
what do you think?