Since Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, the media has been gaslighting us about who she really is. After years of her being recognized as the administration's "border czar," suddenly we were being told that she wasn't. As for her flip-flops on fracking and border security, we were told they weren't flip-flops at all. She's even been getting cover for her refusal to conduct press conferences or interviews.
We knew this would happen. Even before Joe Biden dropped out, pundits on the right were predicting that the media would treat Kamala Harris like the best thing to come out of the Democratic Party in history—and I challenge anyone to dispute that this is exactly what has happened.
The worst thing is that we have just under three months left of this, and it's going to get worse.
Take, for example, this Newsweek piece, published on Wednesday, headlined, "Can Kamala Harris Turn Texas Blue?"
It doesn't take a genius to understand that this headline suggests that she most certainly could win Texas.
Yet nothing in the story actually supports the notion that Kamala Harris has a prayer at winning the Lone Star State.
Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, a professor of American politics at the University of North Texas, suggested that even Harris' momentum and a close high-profile state level race doesn't necessarily mean the vice president will be competitive in Texas.
"I do not think that Texas will be in play. At all," Eshbaugh-Soha told Newsweek.
"This does not mean that Harris will avoid Texas. She will visit, to raise money and generate some exposure for herself and her campaign," he added. "There is nothing in the mix that indicates future performance will be any different from past performance; I don't see anything that may shake up the presidential vote in Texas."
Eshbaugh-Soha said that one issue which could harm Harris is that voters in Texas may still associate her with the record breaking levels of illegal migrant crossings seen at the border during the Biden administration.
A second expert agreed.
Kimi Lynn King, a University of North Texas political science professor, said that while Harris in enjoying a "bump" in her White House bid, it is unclear how that will help shift the narrative in Texas, a state where "pundits have been predicting since 2006 that there was going to be a purple wave."
"In 2022, up and down the statewide ballot, solid red candidates like Governor [Greg] Abbott and indicted and impeached, but not convicted, Attorney General Ken Paxton enjoyed double-digit victories over Democrats," King told Newsweek.
And, to put the final nail in the coffin of the idea that Kamala Harris can win Texas, a third expert chimed in.
Mark Jones, professor of political science and fellow in political science at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy in Texas, added: "At the present time, while Harris is likely to make the race more competitive than it would have been had Biden been the Democratic nominee, I don't see Harris doing much better than Biden did in 2020, and thus a Trump victory in the mid-to-high single digits is the most likely scenario today."
Why does this matter? Well, just ask the Harris-Walz campaign, which was recently caught using fake news headlines in Google ads: What's more important, the headline or the actual story?
Related: Ouch! The White House Just Threw Kamala Harris Under the Bidenomics Bus
Don't get me wrong. If Democrats want to waste resources in Texas and other red states, by all means, they should do it. But make no mistake, almost everything the media is pushing about Kamala Harris right now is phony baloney. The media wants the public to believe that Kamala Harris might actually be competitive in Texas—when she isn't—solely to make her appear stronger than she actually is.
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