There’s a distinct possibility that if Kamala Harris had been undemocratically anointed as the candidate closer to the election, she’d be in a much better position right now. In the past few weeks, her leads in battlegrounds disappeared, and her lead in the national average just vanished. One might say her campaign started to choke when the vibes ran out.
I have been critical of Trump and his campaign when it deserved criticism. There have been times when Trump clearly didn’t seem to be taking this election seriously. His debate performance with Kamala was one notable low point.
But come October, things changed. It was like a switch was flipped. The Harris-Walz campaign just kept making mistakes, while the Trump campaign finally seemed to be on its game. Kamala’s media interviews were one train wreck after the other, while Trump had a string of wins, from the Al Smith dinner to the McDonald’s experience, and now the Joe Rogan interview. Donald Trump has found a way to connect with voters, while Kamala Harris is recycling tired old strategies from the Democrat playbook: fear, hate, and division.
I fully concede that I didn’t even think Trump’s McDonald’s stunt would work. But it did, and you can tell by the way unhinged Democrats attacked it mercilessly from every angle possible. And it really struck a chord with voters. Newsweek conducted a poll and found that it was a net positive for Trump and was a real hit with Gen Z voters.
And now Trump is favored to win the election.
Kamala's supporters in the media feel obliged to talk up her campaign every chance they get, and yet recently, they've been far less shy to call her out for her obvious missteps. She spent an entire day off the campaign trail to prepare for a CNN town hall event with Anderson Cooper and her performance was panned from both sides. Even CNN pundits weren’t very impressed. David Axelrod called her responses “word salad city,” and said she missed opportunities to clarify her positions on key issues. Dana Bash pointed out that Harris failed to “seal the deal” on key legislative priorities and past mistakes, while Van Jones criticized her evasiveness, saying her word salads likely alienated voters.
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Her missteps have continued, as her reliance on celebrities to boost attendance at her rallies is backfiring. People are leaving early once the show is over, or, as was the case in Houston, Texas, Friday night, people got angry when they were expecting a performance from Beyoncé and didn't get one. In various ways, Kamala has proven she doesn't care about the voters, to talk about the issues they care about. She just wants to compare Trump to Hitler and she thinks that will be enough. She tried the same thing during her failed presidential bid in 2019. Her breakout moment was when she accused Joe Biden of being racist for his willingness to work with Democrat segregationists to oppose busing. It wasn't enough to save her campaign, and she dropped out before the Iowa caucuses, yet for some reason, she thinks that tactic is going to work in the general election with Donald Trump.
When the election is over and if she loses, there will be a lot of election postmortems about what she did wrong, and there will be a long list of reasons. The first mistake they'll point to is her selection of Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro as her running mate. But the lion's share of things will be from the final month of the campaign, because that's when everything really started to unravel.
