The NBC News poll hurled the liberal media into meltdown mode. We’re now seeing thought pieces and columns about why Kamala Harris is failing, with the usual anti-Trump tropes sprinkled in as a coping mechanism. If they’re going to endure a second term of Donald Trump in the White House, they might as well hurl extreme hyperbole about the man. They seem to know that a) Kamala’s momentum has stalled, and b) they’re perplexed about why that’s the case. Yet, there’s also acceptance that Kamala did a poor job defining herself to the electorate, allowing Trump’s campaign to do that, which is usually an election-killing move. Her inability to do that and set herself apart from the Biden White House is killing her, along with her elite ineptitude and social awkwardness. These were the two top items; some were relatively easy, and she bungled them. It’s now too late to turn this around.
The New Republic touched upon these areas, but not before claiming that Trump stumbled during his town hall in Philadelphia—not true—and is running a genuinely fascist campaign—also, not true:
Yes, Harris’s prospects rose after each of these events, although the race has remained close throughout. But more than generating momentum, these events created an opportunity for the campaign to figure out what it wanted to be. Having become her party’s nominee at a remarkably late stage of the election, Harris has had to build a campaign—and a message—in a very short period of time, at least by American electoral standards. So the days (or even weeks) of excitement created by her nomination, the convention, and the debate theoretically bought her campaign time to decide how to define itself. But instead, the campaign seemed happy to bask in the afterglow, perhaps hoping that it wouldn’t fade.
Each time, it has faded. And with less than a month to go until the election, Harris is still struggling to address the two biggest drags on her campaign: her role as the vice president to a remarkably unpopular leader and her inability to articulate both a larger vision and a coherent set of policy positions.
Perhaps anxious about appearing ungrateful—or to diminish the enthusiasm surrounding her candidacy—Harris has largely been deferential to Biden, to her campaign’s detriment. She has consistently failed to answer the question of what she would have done differently from him. (In a disastrous moment in an appearance on The View, she merely said that she would have appointed a Republican to her Cabinet.) She has failed to break from Biden symbolically or, for that matter, on areas where he’s particularly vulnerable, such as inflation or foreign policy.
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Beyond taking down Trump, however, there is no larger sense of mission in Harris’s campaign. She has not had enough time to craft a raison d’être for her candidacy and to articulate how she would govern the country. But the race keeps snapping back to the mean in large part because Harris has squandered those opportunities that bought her time and goodwill. Despite performing well in individual moments, she hasn’t been able to actually change the terms of the election itself. Indeed, Harris has arguably let Trump set those terms: Harris is running as a hawk on both immigration and foreign policy; as she woos Republican voters, she has largely eschewed the attacks that were so effective in the summer, particularly on Project 2025 and the current “weirdness” of the Republican Party.
It’s an approach that might nonetheless work, of course. Maybe Harris doesn’t need to craft a larger message. Maybe she doesn’t need to stake out a defense of liberalism or, for that matter, to articulate a vision for the Democratic Party or the country at large. It’s possible that her approach will awaken just enough Nikki Haley voters to push her over the line in the upper Midwest. It may even work in socially conservative states where she’s currently trailing, like Georgia and Arizona. But it’s also increasingly clear that the moment when she could have altered that course has passed.
The GOP is ‘weird’ attacks weren’t effective. They had a shelf life since it was going to be known that Kamala supported taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal alien inmates—a position so outrageous that it left media hosts stunned when fact-checked. Are they still serious about Project 2025? No one cares if they can’t pay for the groceries or keep the lights on. The lack of mission is not shocking. Kamala’s failed 2020 run had a similar flaw, leading to her precipitous collapse during those primaries.
David Brooks wrote a lengthy column about why Kamala could not break away from Trump. He also spews the ‘Trump is a threat to democracy’ line, though he did well explain why Democrats are blind to the issues within their fiefdom. You’ve known it for years: they’re snobby, condescending, overly educated, and care about things that normal people couldn’t care less about. Brooks warned that Democrats have the foundations to establish long-lasting political dominance, but the public opposes everything they push:
The problem is that where you find their weaknesses, there you find the priesthood. The public conversation on the Democratic side of things is dominated by highly educated urban progressives who work in academia, the media, the activist groups and so on. These folks have a highly developed and self-confident worldview — a comprehensive critique of American society. The only problem is that this worldview is rejected by most Americans, who don’t share the critique. The more the Democrats embrace the priesthood’s orthodoxy, the more it loses working-class voters, including Hispanic and Black working-class voters.
For example, the progressive priesthood, quite admirably, is committed to fighting racial oppression. Its members believe that the way to do that is to be hyperaware of racial categories — in the diversity, equity and inclusion way — in order to rearrange preferences to support historically oppressed groups.
Most Americans also seek to fight racism, but they seek to do it in a different way. Their goal is to reduce the salience of racial categories so that people’s talents and initiative determine their life outcomes. According to a 2022 University of Southern California survey of Americans, 92 percent of respondents agreed with this statement: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” Which is why only a third of Americans in a recent Pew Research Center survey said they supported using race as a factor in college admissions.
Or take energy. Most members of the Democratic clerisy are properly alarmed by climate change and believe we should rapidly shift from fossil fuels. Liberal white college graduates favor eliminating fossil fuels by two to one. It’s no skin off their teeth; they work on laptops.
But if you live in Oklahoma or work in an industry that runs on oil, coal or natural gas, this idea seems like an assault on your way of life, which, of course, it is. An overwhelming 72 percent of Americans favor an all-of-the-above approach, relying on both renewables and traditional energy sources.
Or take immigration. Highly educated white progressives tend to see the immigration and asylum issue through the lens of oppressor and oppressed: The people coming across our border are fleeing horror in their home countries. But most Americans see immigration through a law-and-order lens: We need to control our boundaries, preserve social order and take care of our own. In a June CBS survey 62 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Hispanics, said they supported a program to deport undocumented immigrants — the most extreme version of this approach.
On these, as on so many other issues, the position that is held by a vast majority of Americans is unsayable in highly educated progressive circles. The priesthood has established official doctrine, and woe to anyone who contradicts it.
He then explains how both parties are content with being stuck in a political deadlock, with no interest in expanding to create winning majority coalitions. While there’s a lot of text about why Kamala is failing and what’s tormenting Democrats regarding messaging and public policy, it glosses over that the vice president is likely the worst candidate for the highest office in a generation and the Democratic Party is too extreme and out-of-touch. We’re the wrong ones. That is not the case, Poindexter. Your views on America are trash, but being faux philosopher-kings who think they’re the gatekeepers to knowledge and debate—we’re the peons blocking progress.
God, I hate these people.