Having a few days to think, I find myself in general agreement with a few comments - and I've not read every single post, so if I reiterate something said more eloquently, so be it.
Any political consultant will tell you one of several mantras, and this one is crucial: "
Every election is a referendum on the incumbent." By that fact alone, Harris was going to have an uphill battle, but there were a few reasons I thought she might overcome it:
- no race ever featured a "challenger" who had been an incumbent President and left the way Trump did
- it's always a bit sketchy exactly how much an heir (VP) gets the blame when you remember a substantial chunk of voters don't even know who the VP is (I will touch on the dilemma the Dems found themselves in momentarily)
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Loosely based, EVERY Presidential election is about two things, generally called peace and prosperity and categorized under the terms "
the economy" and "
national defense." Both have several aspects that define them and are not as simple as "the economy grew at x% last quarter" or "we are not in a ground war anywhere."
I'm willing to bet most posters here are familiar with "it's the economy stupid," the mantra that James Carville put on the wall in "the War Room" of the 1992 Clinton campaign. From beginning to end, they hammered "the economy."
But what did they mean?
I make no pretense to be an economist, but according to what I'm seeing online,
the economy grew at 2.7% in the third quarter of 2024...and Harris got clobbered despite a number of commentators (and TF posters) telling us this was a phenomenal economy. But
the economy grew at 2.7% in the third quarter of 1992, when everyone agreed the economy was TERRIBLE!!! Now I could be obtuse and say, "Why do folks who think the economy was so wretched in 1992 that Bush needed to go think Biden should have been reelected when the economy was growing at the same rate," but of course, that's where we admit there's NO SINGLE monolith known as "the economy." Unemployment last month
was 4.1% but in October 1992,
unemployment was 7.2%, so obviously the situations weren't the same.
So what happened?
Well, my Longhorn buddy - a labor union Democrat type - called me this morning, and we spoke for about 40 minutes. His take was, "I knew my party was in trouble when my groceries went from $140 a week to over $200 a week and I was looking at what the house mortgage rates were when I bought mine compared to today." And I heard from numerous people - including a coworker with a trans child - who said pretty much the exact same thing, PRICES. So some of you who want to arbitrarily dismiss this might ought to stop and realize these aren't cobbled samples from "Jaywalking" on the old "Tonight Show," these are real people saying this, and I heard it more than I ever heard it before.
(Anecdote: I was 23 when Bush lost in 1992 and telling my Dad that I couldn't understand it. Despite loathing Clinton as I do, he said, "Because look at the number of unemployed and stores that survived the Depression that are gone," and I said, "I'm doing better than I was just two years ago." At which point he snorted, "Because it didn't affect you - but that doesn't mean it didn't affect enough people to vote out the incumbent").
As far as national defense, Harris was stuck with the botched pullout of Afghanistan (particularly when she said she wouldn't do anything different than Biden but more on that in a moment), things are generally peaceful.....and...well, illegal immigration is part of national defense (or at least security).
Here's a hint: if your response to someone saying, "I'm fine with immigration, I have a problem with illegal immigration" is "you're a racist" (which seems to be par for the course), now you know why your side lost.
Now.....Harris's candidacy...
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I have gone from musing that the whole debacle of replacing Biden was interesting to "you guys tried to pull a Donald Trump and it backfired on you." There's a ton of blame coming out of the woodwork like "Biden should have announced he wasn't running early".....by liars who told all of us that when the camera was off, he was John Travolta on "Saturday Night Fever" active-wise. Besides, you don't announce your lame duck status until it's necessary. When the special counsel on the classified docs for Biden came out and said he was basically a nursing home patient that couldn't remember stuff, Democrats and the media (pardon the redundancy) went into high scale, "HOW DARE YOU!"
These are the same pretentious twits who NOW all of a sudden blame Biden for not stepping aside when they were telling us all he didn't need to step aside.
In the years to come - about the time the media revises history and tells the rest of us that Trump got elected on the basis of "the racist Southern strategy that worked for Nixon/Reagan/Bush/Bush/Trump" - the revisionism is going to swing hard against Harris, and I think in this case (unless we learn something along the lines of a Sarah Palin debacle behind the scenes as in "Game Changer") it is grotesquely unfair. (Let me add that JThomas66 has covered very eloquently about how Harris could corner the anti-Trump vote but had a harder time giving things for people to vote in favor of her "for" beyond the base.
