Conservatives are gnashing their teeth over the Democrats’ election strategy. First the Democrats ditched Joe Biden, even though all of their delegates were pledged to him, and substituted Kamala Harris, by fiat. Now Kamala is their candidate, but she isn’t running on a platform. Rather, her campaign theme is “joy,” and she is portrayed as a fresh face, even though she has been the vice president for the past three and a half years.
The record of the Biden/Harris administration is catastrophically bad, but the Democrats don’t try to run on it. In fact, they hardly ever mention it. To hear them talk, you would think they are the outsiders, running against Donald Trump’s failures. Only the failures aren’t Trump’s, they are theirs. As for what Harris intends to do if she wins, it seemingly is a secret.
More accurately, Harris’s platform is pretty much irrelevant. Anyone who pays attention knows that her administration will be a continuation of the far-left Obama and Biden administrations, if not worse. Those who don’t pay attention, the large majority, know only one thing: Kamala Harris is not Donald Trump.
That, really, is Harris’s campaign: she is the not-Donald-Trump. Complaints that her current persona is inauthentic, and she has no platform, miss the point. She is perfectly authentic as not-Donald-Trump, and that negation is her platform. Anything beyond that is window dressing.
This approach wouldn’t normally work, of course. If the Republicans had nominated anyone except Trump, Harris’s record, her political views and her platform would be front and center. Against anyone but Trump Harris would be a pitifully weak candidate. She couldn’t run as not-Nikki-Haley, not-Ron-DeSantis, or whoever. It is only the Republicans’ nomination of Donald Trump that makes the Democrats’ strategy possible.
Will the Democrats’ unprecedented strategy work? It may. A year and a half ago, when most anticipated a Biden-Trump rematch, I predicted that neither Biden nor Trump would be on the 2024 ballot. I said that the Democrats would be crazy to nominate Biden, and the Republicans would be crazy to nominate Trump. I was half right: the Democrats were smart enough to switch out Joe Biden. But the Republicans couldn’t resist going with Trump for the third time in a row.
The Democrats couldn’t win if they had to run on the Biden/Harris record, and they know it. By rights, 2024 should be an easy Republican win. The Biden record is far worse than the Jimmy Carter record of 1980. So Democrats have seized on the lifeline the Republicans gave them: they are turning the election into a referendum on Donald Trump.
As such, it is a tossup. Around half the country hates Trump. They don’t care who Harris is, what her views are, or what she would do as president. She is not-Donald-Trump, and that is enough. The Democrats were smart enough to realize they needed a new candidate. The Republicans were not. The future of the republic may turn on that difference.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.