The disaster began, as so many do, with a few ill-chosen words pouring out of the mouth of Joe Biden in a hamfisted attempt to woo voters. After promising at a March 2020 primary debate to pick a woman as his running mate, Biden then got bullied by fellow Democrats into picking a black woman.
"After news broke over the weekend that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a white woman, had flown to meet with Biden to discuss the vice presidency, frustration and disappointment boiled over among Black female Democrats," Politico reported. “He better pick a Black woman. If he picks Gretchen, he’ll lose Michigan,” said Virgie Rollins, then-chair of the Democratic National Committee Black Caucus.
That's ironic because the black woman he did pick, Kamala Harris, lost Michigan by a convincing 1.4 points in 2024. (The other strong contender was Stacey Abrams but she was too busy cosplaying governor of Georgia.)
You know the rest of the story, how Biden's selection rescued a cookie-cutter progressive senator from her own failed presidential campaign — "We did it, Joe!" — just so Biden could be kicked to the curb to make way for Harris to run an even worse presidential campaign.
How much worse? Let's roll the tape.
While Harris made many mistakes along the way from becoming the Anointed One to losing every single swing state (as foreseen by my Townhall colleague Storm Paglia), there was one meta-mistake to rule them all like an anti-Sauron's Ring of Lameness.
Harris never nailed down her core constituents. People were screaming for relief from high food prices, unaffordable mortgages, a seemingly permanent jobs recession — all caused by Biden's reckless spending and regulation — and the chaos unleashed by Biden at our southern border.
Yet when asked on The View a month before election day what she would do differently, Harris said, "There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of – and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done."
If Biden's record was a boat anchor, Harris is the one who padlocked it to her own ankle.
And Another Thing: Harris tried to win Republicans to her side with Liz and Dick Cheney, and I literally can't even. Maybe the less said about the rock (Jew-hating progressives) and the hard place (Israel's Gaza War) Harris trapped herself between, the better.
Donald Trump nailed down his constituents quickly and, rather than waste time trying to woo Never Trumpers who were, well, never going to vote Trump, he started going after Harris's voters with his resonating economic message. Trump won just 8% of the black vote in 2016 but 15% on Tuesday, nearly doubling his support. Trump went from winning 28% of the Hispanic vote in 2016 to 45% this time around. That's an improvement of two-thirds.
It helps, of course, to know who the men and women are, but that's another ideological trap Harris particularly and Democrats generally dug for themselves.
Much of Trump's improvement with minority voters came from men, which brings us to Harris's next big fail: her Biden-level cockup of picking Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.
This was the guy she chose to win back male voters.
A camo hat doesn't cover jazz hands.
Harris's endless scaremongering on abortion couldn't even help her win the Democrats' most loyal voters. Trump won white suburban women by four points. Some honest talk about inflation — the number one household concern — might have kept them on board.
But Harris couldn't speak honestly about inflation because that would require abandoning the inflationary progressive agenda.
Not even David Plouffe, one of the evil geniuses behind Barack Obama's ascendancy, could save Harris. "We dug out of a deep hole [Biden left us in] but not enough," he whined on X on Wednesday before deleting his account in a huff. I wonder who read him the riot act?
But as my RedState colleague Rusty Weiss noted:
Indeed.
It ended as it had to, with Harris spending money her campaign didn't have (she's currently $20 million in the hole, despite raking in more than ONE BILLION DOLLARS) on celebrity endorsements that didn't matter on the way to losing everything to a convicted felon that nearly half the country has been deluded into believing is Literally Hitler™.
Harris ran a train wreck car crash dumpster fire of a campaign, and it would take a heart of stone not to laugh.
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