I’m sure you don’t listen to as many political podcasts as I do, so let me give you the quick summary of the reasons America’s learned class has come up with for Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to former President Donald Trump this week:
- Misogyny
- Racism (those two were an automatic as soon as Harris became the nominee)
- President Joe Biden
- Elon Musk and X (Twitter)
- The mainstream media’s “normalization” of Trump
- Poor messaging from the campaign
- The View
- Trump’s refusal to have another debate
- Not having a Democratic primary
- “Bro Culture”
- Fox News Channel
- General ignorance of the voting populace
- Not being “left” enough
- Being too far “left”
- Latino culture
- Black men
- Cozying up to Liz Cheney
- Student protests supporting Hamas on college campuses
- Zionists
- Muslim Americans
- Supporting Israel
- Vladimir Putin
- Voting laws
- Facebook allowing “disinformation”
- Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post
- Attorney General Merrick Garland not starting prosecutions of Trump earlier
- A general decline in “classical liberalism” around the world
- Not enough people feeling the effects of the economic recovery
- Making no effort to distance herself from Biden on any issue
- Not picking Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer as her running mate
- White women
- Joe Rogan
- “False memories” of the first Trump presidency
With all of those factors going against her, it’s a miracle that Harris managed to get 48% of the popular vote and win 19 states in the Electoral College! But seriously, most of those are external excuses and few are internal reasons for defeat. I could spend another ten hours reading op-ed pieces and social media posts from Democratic insiders and other liberal talking heads about how Harris ran a “perfect campaign” and that “America just let her down”.
Another post-election trend is so-called political experts who predicted a narrow Harris win now coming out with claims that the information that should have set off panic alarms in the Harris campaign headquarters was staring everyone right in the face weeks and months before the election. Take for instance the polls that showed not just Harris but most Democrats were losing support among Latino voters and Black men. The response from the Harris camp was to release an “Opportunity Agenda for Latino Men” which was 90% of her previous economic agenda for “everybody” repackaged with “Latino men” replacing “everyone” in the text. And it came up in English on the campaign website. You had to click on a small icon at the top of the page to flip it to Spanish.
While the economy was the number one issue for Latinos in this election, number two was immigration policy–more specifically cracking down on illegal immigration. Marquette Law School polls leading up to the election showed that was the last-ranked issue on the mind of Democratic voters this year. It’s tough to foster a sense of belonging when everyone else in the group that is courting you doesn’t care about your issues. And Democrats tried to run away from the immigration issue mainly because Donald Trump said it was a major issue–and if the Orange Man Bad takes a position, the automatic reflex is to oppose anything he has to say.
Also, Latinos tend to be religious and socially conservative. The Pew Research Center finds only about a third of Latinos living in the US support same-sex marriage or special accommodation for transgender people. While they are not the ones who come to school board meetings to complain about people with penises in girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, they likely are not happy about it. And only a quarter of Latinos support increased access to abortion–meaning the endless parade of TV and radio ads attacking the overturning of Roe v Wade was falling on mostly deaf ears in that community. I should give the Harris campaign credit for at least using the term “Latino” and not “Latinx”–which was developed by white people, and whose use is opposed by 96% of Hispanics and Latinos.
Harris also had an “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” with a cornerstone of legalizing recreational marijuana. That continues a trend on the Democratic side to make pot legalization a “Black” issue–when that population does not use it in any higher percentages than whites. Polls show that 40% of Blacks still oppose the legalization of marijuana, and where use is legal, dispensaries are far more likely to be located in minority-majority neighborhoods than in the “whiter” suburbs. I’ve often likened this political stance to Marie Antoinette saying “Let them smoke pot!”
It also didn’t help that in the final couple of weeks of the campaign, former President Barack Obama held rallies where he scolded black men for not supporting Harris, saying that opposition could only have been rooted in misogyny .
Another acknowledged–but ignored–piece of data was the decline in Democratic support from blue-collar workers. The Teamsters were criticized heavily from the left for not making an endorsement in the Presidential race, but they weren’t the only ones. As results in Michigan show, the UAW endorsement that Harris did get meant little to the bottom line. I know a couple of UAW members here in the Fox Valley that stopped voting for Democrats years ago, even if their union leaders implore them to go blue–and they are hard-pressed to name anyone else they work with that would vote for a Democrat at this time.
Those guys are the ones that do show up to complain about people with penises in girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms–only to be told that they are “transphobic” and “ignorant”. When they see people with work from home, computer-based jobs getting their student loans paid off, they get mad too. But all they hear is how “this generation has had it so hard, we can’t expect them to pay that debt”. And then they turn on Fox News and see that California is banning gas-powered vehicles and the United Nations is calling for people to stop eating meat. To them, the message is “everything you like is bad for the planet, so we have to take it away from you”.
Now liberals are gnashing their teeth and wondering how they can “win back” what used to be the backbone of the Democratic Party. Yet in column after column this week–and podcast after podcast–those same “experts” can’t help but belittle the concerns of those voters and denigrate them in the same ways that Donald Trump attacks his political opponents. The path to victory in a very difficult climate was still there for Democrats in most states, they just couldn’t bring themselves to take it.
