from the weekend australian:Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris is now a ghastly mud wrestle, with both sides dishing out abuse and relentless misrepresentation of each other.Trump’s running mate, J.D.Vance, famously said – in a comment from a few years ago that has come back to haunt him savagely – that too much of American life was dominated by people without children, in his terms “joyless cat ladies”.
It was a stupid remark, admittedly made before he was running for national office, but is seen as the equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s characterisation of Trump voters as “a basket of deplorables”.
Some 22 million American women aged 20 to 39 have never given birth. Defaming all of them in this way is utterly ridiculous.
For their part, Democrats and their media supporters continue to put absurd interpretations on everything Trump says. So Trump said that if Christians, whom he claims don’t vote in very high numbers, voted for him this once, they wouldn’t need to vote again.
This is admittedly a strange remark, and it’s still impossible to know why Trump says these things, but insofar as Trump has interpreted his own remarks it’s that (a) he can’t run again after a second term; (b) the country will be fully rehabilitated after four years of his peerless stewardship; and (c) his policies will have overwhelming support by then so even if a small cohort doesn’t vote again their continuation will be assured.
Democrats and their media spruikers seriously pretend Trump has declared that he will abolish democracy, institute dictatorship and end all elections.
You could say this is a MAD election – Mutually Assured Destruction in a blizzard of two-way lies and abuse.
Trump certainly says outrageous and untrue things. But Harris also routinely lies about Trump. Harris’s signature issue is abortion. She wants abortion to be legal from conception to birth in all of the US. She said this week that Trump is committed to a national abortion ban. Harris knows she’s telling lies. Trump’s clear position is that abortion law should be decided exclusively by individual states.
Out of this strange culture war, political struggle, clash of personalities, wholly divergent realities in an apparent Marvel movies multiverse coming to a Cineplex near you, who is actually winning?
The polls tell us only one thing: this is now an extremely tight election, although the fates have favoured Harris this week, including with an emotional prisoner swap that saw three US citizens, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and more than a dozen others, released from detention in Russia. It certainly was a good look for Biden and Harris.
How radically fortunes can change. Just three weeks ago, Trump was cruising to victory over a feeble Biden. One poll lead or another doesn’t tell you who will actually win an election. Many presidential candidates who ultimately lose, lead the polls for brief periods. But where polls show a lead beyond the margin of error that persists for months, they are much more predictive. Trump held such a lead over Biden. Not any more, now that Harris is the candidate.
US polls are typically neither accurate nor reliable, and are complicated by the Electoral College system. In 2020, Biden won seven million more votes than Trump overall, but a change of fewer than 50,000 votes across three states would have changed the result of the election.
This is not undemocratic. All electoral systems have oddities. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won less than 34 per cent of the national vote in the recent British election, but a huge majority in the House of Commons.
Today, virtually all the polls, for what they’re worth, show an effective dead heat in the national election and in most of the battleground states. Some have Trump up by a percentage point, others put Harris just ahead.
Most states vote either solidly Democrat, like California or New York, or solidly Republican, like Florida and Texas. So the election will be decided in the battleground states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia. When Trump was leading Biden it was likely he’d take virtually all those states and Virginia as well. It now looks much tighter.
The advent of Harris has transformed the campaign. When Trump survived an assassination attempt he looked unbeatable. That moment has gone. Trump didn’t consolidate it, nor did he harness the national sympathy for him, nor did he use it to broaden his coalition.
The Republican campaign managers are highly professional and disciplined. Trump remains highly undisciplined. Harris has huge momentum behind her. For Trump, everything was going right, now everything’s going wrong.
The Democrats’ electoral machine is professional and ruthless. Harris has historically been a poor campaigner and vote winner. Though not in senile decline, she concocts her own bizarre word salads when answering unscripted questions. So the campaign has kept her away from interviews of any kind. She’s been packaged as a feminist heroine and champion of racial diversity, not because of anything she’s done, but just because she’s there.
Trump and Vance have been strangely flummoxed by this fairly obvious development and have had a series of brain explosions and campaigned, over this short period, poorly.
Harris has had a huge bounce in the polls. Is it just a bounce, or is it a trend? She’s still in her honeymoon period. Will the honeymoon end? Trump raised well over $US100m after the shooting attempt. Harris raised $200m in the first week of her candidacy.
On pure policy, Trump should win this election. Harris was hailed as the “border tsar” in the early days of the Biden administration, though now it’s said her mission was only diplomatic. Either way the policy failed utterly. Harris herself favoured there being no adverse legal consequences for illegal immigrants and that they should automatically qualify for US health care. These positions are a massive pull factor for illegal immigrants which has been a catastrophe under Biden.
Inflation has hurt living standards. Crime is out of control in big American cities. US debt and deficit are exploding. The manner of the Afghanistan withdrawal was a humiliation. The Democratic left has imposed cultural policies that tens of millions of Americans reject. For years Americans have felt by two to one the country was travelling in the wrong direction. Any credible Republican should win in this environment.
But America is in many ways an evenly divided society. These left-wing policies arouse support as well as opposition. Americans will vote with some decisiveness if one side of politics looks likely to handle the economy much better than the other. But if it’s a contest on culture and identity issues, America is savagely divided.
Recently I’ve spent time in Salt Lake City and San Francisco. It’s like different universes – Salt Lake City clean, prosperous and safe, San Francisco awash with homeless and drug-affected people.
Probably each side comes into the presidential election with a floor of 45 per cent. So 10 per cent is up for grabs. Trump won a larger percentage of the vote when he lost in 2020, some 46.9 per cent, than he received in 2016 – 46.1 per cent – when he won. Trump has a high floor but a low ceiling.
In seeking the extra few numbers for victory, both sides go after two types of voters – centrists or independents who in principle might vote for either candidate; and folks with settled opinion on one side or the other but who might not bother to vote at all. So candidates simultaneously run to their base, and to the centre.
Since Harris came into the campaign, Trump and Vance have put way too much focus on themselves, and trying to attack Harris personally, even on identity grounds, more than attacking her policies, record and competence.
When Ronald Reagan ran for re-election in 1984 against Walter Mondale, who had been Jimmy Carter’s vice-president, Reagan and his campaign referred to their challenger almost exclusively as “Carter-Mondale”, tying Mondale inescapably to Carter’s unpopular and failed policies.
But Trump has for the moment lost his rhythm. Pathetically, he called Harris “a bum”. It’s hard to imagine a more disgusting way for any man to refer to any woman. More particularly, abusing Harris this way, like choosing Vance as his running mate, doesn’t enlarge Trump’s coalition by one vote, doesn’t provide any reassurance to uncertain voters.
Then, truly bizarrely, Trump went to a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists and claimed that Harris was not really black because she had identified as Indian. Republicans say they hate identity politics, as they should, but here was Trump impugning, without the slightest justification, Harris’s blackness. Harris’s mother was an Indian migrant, her father of African Caribbean background. She is as African-American as Barack Obama. She has the same kind of African-American inheritance as Colin Powell did. She attended a black university, was part of a black sorority, was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. (It’s worth noting, in Trump’s favour, that he did at least show up. Harris, rightly scared of interrogation, declined the Black Journalists’ invitation.)
In my view, none of this makes Harris one zot more qualified to be president, nor one zot less qualified. Trump should attack her policies, competence and record. For a conservative to attack an opponent’s ethnicity is grotesque.
All this marks the re-emergence of the bad Donald, like Bruce Banner involuntarily turning into the irrational version of the Incredible Hulk. It might make a certain type of Trump backer cheer louder. It surely alienates centrist voters and even normal Republicans who will hold their nose and vote for Trump, but are less likely to do so the more abusive he becomes.
Harris and her surrogates now label Trump and Vance “weird”. Many ideas Harris has espoused are themselves weird, as this column has previously noted. She’s favoured defunding the police, massive increases in government spending, raised bail funds for violent demonstrators, taken extreme green positions and so on.
She’s now repudiating many of those positions. Having previously opposed fracking, for example, she now supports it. Republicans will naturally try to pin her past policy foolishness on her.
There’s only one politician who can certainly beat Trump, and that’s Trump. Having campaigned Biden out of the race, Trump has spent the last week effectively making the case against himself. At the same black reporters’ event, Trump was asked about his running mate. I’ve always respected him, Trump said, but the vice-president has no effect on the outcome of the election.
It was as savage a putdown as could be imagined from a presidential candidate of a running mate. Vance is intelligent, young, energetic and intellectually formidable. But he is as yet a child in politics. The men Trump overlooked, such as three-term Florida senator Marco Rubio, were long-established political figures whose every past utterance is well known.
Rubio also has strong fundraising credentials. With money pouring in after the assassination attempt and Biden so weak, Trump felt he didn’t need the traditional strengths Rubio offered.
Both Trump and Harris are, despite everything, elusive and paradoxical candidates. Trump won in 2016 partly by convincing people who don’t normally bother to vote to come out and vote for him. Trump’s very vulgarity and garish untruthfulness are a kind of defiant rebuke to the liberal elite which is widely regarded as morally corrupt and policy bankrupt.
Trump’s extreme crudeness, which normal people find repellent, is taken as a sign of authenticity, of true defiance of the liberals. Trump’s disposition to fight, which is often effective, and sometimes involves real courage, attracts almost everyone on his side of politics.
But in truth Trump has a poor record at winning elections. He won the narrowest of victories in 2016 after eight years of a Democrat presidency. It’s very uncommon for parties to win three terms in a row. The last time it happened was when George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan in 1988. Republicans then did very poorly in the 2018 mid-term congressional elections.
Trump convincingly lost the 2020 presidential election. Congressional and ***ernatorial Republican candidates did much better in their districts than Trump did. He ran behind the generic Republican vote. Trump still exercised great influence on Republicans in the 2022 mid-term congressional elections. Republicans again did poorly in that cycle and the candidates Trump imposed on the party did worst of all.
Calling Harris a bum and not really black may cause the Uncaged Fighting enthusiasts among his voters to rock with laughter and redouble their enthusiasm. It does nothing to attract independent voters, suburban women or even that large cohort of Republicans who detest Biden but also detest uncouth ribaldry.
For her part, Harris is also a weak candidate. She’s much better than Biden at reading a teleprompter and that has allowed her Democrat handlers to use her in staged campaigning opportunities. But she’s mostly been a disaster whenever having to speak without a script. She has given almost no interviews as Vice-President and none since she announced her presidential candidacy.
The liberal media has lavished her with excessive praise for three reasons. She’s not Trump. She gives the Democrats a chance. And she ticks a series of identity-politics boxes. None of these qualities suggest she will be a capable president. She has two opportunities to keep her momentum going – the announcement of her vice-presidential running mate, inevitably a reassuring white guy, and the Democratic Party convention on August 8.
Against Biden, Trump looked as though he would win a significant minority of Hispanic and black voters. Will the media’s Harris euphoria change that equation? Liberal Democrats struggle among white working-class voters. Harris is the quintessential liberal Democrat.
By rights, Trump should still win. But which Trump will campaign for the next hundred days, the political leader with the compelling policy message for middle America, or the self-obsessed brawler who lands as many haymakers on himself as his opponent and exhausts, rather than inspires, the electorate?
Only Trump can beat Trump. He might yet make Harris president.
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