Not gonna lie. This past month was a tough one for Republicans. Not that Trump or any of us did anything wrong, mind you, but because the media refuses to do its job.
In our hyper-instantaneous age of social media and nanosecond attention spans, optics plays an outsized role. Rightly or wrongly, whichever candidate is presented as having "momentum" has an in-built advantage, no matter what the realities on the ground. To this end, the media has been overselling Kamala Harris's momentum since the moment her Brutisian blade entered the back of Senilius Scranton Caesar.
KAMALA HARRIS IS MEETING THE MOMENT!!! they scream.
TIM WALZ IS AN EVERYMAN SUPERMAN!!! they fawn.
KAMALA HARRIS IS BEATING DONALD TRUMP AT HIS OWN GAME!!! they chortle.
HARRIS IS BEATING TRUMP BY TRANSCENDING HIM!!! they swoon.
WALZ'S MASCULINITY IS TERRIFYING TO REPUBLICANS!!! they claim, with a straight face.
My terror of Walz's fabled masculinity notwithstanding, I am heading into September a tad less pessimistic than I was heading into August, for the following reasons:
1. Momentum cannot sustain itself with nothing behind it.
Little kids waiting in line at the amusement park can stay hyped up and excited for only a few minutes before their shoulders slump, and they start swaying side to side, whining, "I'm boooooooored." In contrast, the media has been trying to maintain the Joy™ of Kamala for over a month by sheer force of will. As they control every lever of public opinion, they've been largely successful.
Every lever, that is, except time.
Slow and steady wins the race. Despite the attempted media blackout, Trump and Vance have spent the last month steadily and consistently hammering Harris and Walz on the campaign trail. The media can only hide for so long the fact that Trump is out there, doing pressers, sitting down for hostile interviews, while Harris and the terrifyingly masculine Walz are MIA. It has now been 35 days since Pelosi changed her Biden hand puppet to the Harris hand puppet, and the latter has still not done a single sit-down interview, not even with the softball-lobbing Stephanopoulos. Her website still does not outline her agenda, nor was any agenda outlined during the entire week at the DNC. Voters tend to notice these omissions with increasing suspicion and distrust.
2. Harris's polling momentum seems to have puttered out.
Harris' monthlong ascension in the polls finally appears to be hitting a ceiling and is holding mostly steady. As of this morning, the RCP average still has Trump slightly ahead in most swing states. And he is still in a better position against Harris this month than he was against Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016. The historically more accurate polls like Rasmussen and Trafalgar are the ones that have Trump ahead by the biggest margins.
3. Harris missed an opportunity at the DNC.
I'm predicting that Harris won't get much of a bump, if any, from the convention. My reasoning for this is two-fold. First, despite the overblown theatrics and the lockstep media, the DNC was nothing to write home about. It was the standard paint-by-number gaggle of bigwigs, celebrities, and powerbrokers giving rabblerousing speeches and convincing themselves they've got the election in the bag. If you rearranged the names of the candidates, it's the same convention every four years for Democrats and, frankly, for Republicans as well.
Trump received no discernable bump in the polls from the RNC. This isn't because the RNC was subpar, but because voters see conventions as weeklong, overrated political rallies. Unless there are soaring oratories, surprise announcements, or major policy initiatives, they serve as little more than eye candy for political junkies.
But while voters know Trump, they still don't know Harris. The convention was an opportunity for her to present some sort of tangible vision. Instead, we got vague yard sign idealisms. Anyone tuning in to the DNC to find out who Harris really is and what she really stands for was undoubtedly disappointed.
4. Harris has no more surprises.
Harris has run out of headline-grabbing announcements. She's accepted the nomination. She's announced her VP pick. She's had her convention. These strategically spaced-out milestones had the intended effect of giving her an entire month of breathing space, during which she has been able to successfully evade any real scrutiny.
But there are over two months remaining that she has to fill. And in politics, two months is an eternity. It's been barely over a month since the assassination attempt against Trump and the palace coup against Biden, two historically momentous events. How distant they seem in the absence of any reflection on either event by our look-at-the-shiny-new-toy culture.
And most importantly...
5. The Trump campaign is back off the ropes.
Sometimes you have to wonder if the chaps running Trump's campaign are the same Democrat plants that seemingly run his legal affairs. Ever since whispers began last year...LAST YEAR...of the possibility of Biden being shuffled unceremoniously to the retirement home Bingo room, they should have immediately been preparing for contingency plans in the event of a probable Kamala coronation. By the time of Biden's disastrous debate performance, they should have been ready to hit Kamala with months' worth of opposition research. That's Day One, Page One of Politics 101 at the local community college. Instead, they seem caught unawares and flat-footed for the first few weeks, completely allowing Kamala to control the narrative. This was inexcusable.
But even his critics agree that Trump is a master showman, an indefatigable fighter, and certainly not one to let inept campaign management derail his reelection.
By getting in front of the cameras, by doing the hostile interviews, on a near daily basis, Trump has slowly but steadily blunted Harris's momentum by the simple fact that people see him and they don't see her. Trump is effectively regaining control of the narrative.
Since Kamala refuses to outline her policy positions, Trump went ahead and outlined her policy positions for her online. He is defining her because she won't define herself. Trump is regaining control of the narrative.
While Trump's interview at the National Association of Black Journalists has been criticized, the fact is that people will remember not so much the pissing match he got into with "moderator" Rachel Scott. They'll remember he had the courage to face a tough audience and a lying, prejudiced interviewer. He did the same thing with the Libertarians. Kamala will never, ever agree to speak to, much less sit down for an interview for, a gathering of the Federalist Society or the NRA. Trump is regaining control of the narrative.
While Harris picked up endorsements of this union boss or that celebrity pop star, Trump picked up the endorsement of Robert Kennedy Jr., who just suspended his campaign to throw his support behind him. The optics of a Kennedy supporting a Republican presidential nominee are worth a hundred Cheneys and a thousand Hutchinsons supporting the Democrats. The strategic timing of the announcement, meant to disperse any lingering euphoria from the DNC, has Trump's style written all over it. Trump is regaining control of the narrative.
When Trump controls the narrative, he's unstoppable. And it looks like, as of now, he is at least partially successful in wresting it back from the Democrat media machine. To this end, Trump should rightly continue trying to win over traditionally Democrat minorities rather than waste too much time with independents.
As I've previously pointed out in these pages, "independents" are mostly closet liberals, and the lowest informed ones at that. Wasting precious time and resources trying to make them see reason is like wasting a division trying to claw across a quarter mile of no-mans-land on the fields of Flanders. By appealing to Democrat minorities, Trump is bypassing this futile war of attrition and hitting them right in the trenches. To this day, Democrats still don't know how to counter Trump's inexplicable (to them) rise in popularity among minorities other than to scream "RACIST!" ever louder and to accuse these minorities of being race traitors.
You'll always have your Oprah Winfreys, the billionaire sellout who spoke to the field workers from the loftiest porch on the DNC plantation, warning them against "the old tricks and tropes that are designed to distract us from what actually matters" by talking about...segregation in the 1950s. You'll always have your John Shapiros, the almost-VP pick turned kapos guard, passed over solely because he is Jewish, who nonetheless stood before a frothing crowd of antisemites in Chicago and told them to vote for the pro-Hamas candidate.
But, as evidenced by Trump's rising popularity among minorities, their rank-and-file is slowly but surely souring on the empty promises of racist, divisive identity politics. If Trump can continue to (1) drive the narrative, (2) keep making inroads with minorities, and (3) maintain the same discipline that he showed in his debate against Biden in his upcoming debate(s) against Harris, he might be able to not only hold onto his slim lead, but to expand it beyond the margin of cheat.
We'll see what happens.
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