Does the Coronation of Queen Kamala solve Democrats' key electoral problem?
Dems may regret skirting democracy to "save it." Harris is a Woke-ster who might induce Dem angst when polls return to the mean after a post-convention bounce. Or she might be the 2nd Coming of Obama.
Let's be clear-eyed about what happened Sunday. Joe Biden is not seeking reelection because he believes he’s too weak or mentally unfit to perform the job. The opposite is true: Biden strongly believes he has the health, strength, stamina, and empirical record of success to win against Donald Trump again. Outside of the President's COVID diagnosis, there have been no White House statements that Joe has a neurodegenerative condition, though direct observation would suggest otherwise.
Mr. Biden is no longer running for reelection because big liberal donors, redistributionist nonprofits who survive off the government teat, deep state anti-Trumpers, Democrats in Congress, and open-border profiteers––who know that Trump is returning to clean house––wanted Joe gone to preserve their leverage, their payola, and their survival.
Yet Democrats on national TV Sunday night kept trucking in their tired, mendacious "threat to democracy" narrative, even as their power brokers snub their noses at the electoral will expressed by 14 million Democratic primary voters! Once again, over nine years, the only party that has remained a consistent “threat to democracy”––FISAGate, Steele Dossier, Trump/Russia collusion hoax, paid government censorship of conservative speech, collusion with 51 intel spooks to lie about the existence of Hunter's laptop, overt circumvention of state election laws––is the Democratic Party. The Coronation of Kamala Harris by Tammany-Hall-style decree is the latest manifestation of their anti-democratic ways. According to White House sources, Biden and his aides are furious about the undignified way this all went down. And some Biden donors and primary voters are preparing to challenge the legality of transferring Joe’s campaign loot to Harris without any formal competitive process.
Kamala Harris is the most far-left Democratic candidate in American history. She backed and bailed out Black Lives Matter rioters, thieves, and arsonists. She face-planted in her unofficial job as "Border Czar," helping enable a massive, unchecked, and unvetted migration of illegal immigrants into our nation. She supports higher taxes, no-cash bail, a federal law ensuring abortion on demand, massive new federal spending, racist and sexist quotas, men in women's sports, and no parental notification of a child's decision to switch genders.
The job before the Democratic Party is Herculean: to persuade Rust Belt voters––who are bearing the brunt of the Biden/Harris open-border, free-flow-of-fentanyl, pro-criminal, and inflation-stoking policies––that a former prosecutor from leftist, dysregulated, and dystopian San Francisco is suddenly their savior. There is zero evidence that she will be an easy sell to the critical Rust Belt demographic of white working-class voters that the Biden/Harris ticket is hemorrhaging.
When Obama ran as the “historic” identity savior in 2008, Rust Belt voters had no clue who he was. They only knew that Scranton Joe vouched for him, and GOP nominee John McCain seemed a bit jumpy when the financial crisis struck. By his autobiographical admission, Obama made a career out of making “white folks” feel at ease. Harris lacks both Obama’s composure and his anonymity. She may energize black female voters in states Democrats are already winning, but American swing voters know Vice President Harris well and are nonplussed and decidedly not reassured. Her grasp of foreign policy is kindergarten-level at best and often sounds moronic.
On the other hand, Harris might be the second coming of Obama. Trump and the Republicans need to tread very carefully here. She has enormous power in that smile, that laugh, that dance, which covers up her vindictive prosecutorial intentionality. Republicans are in a very treacherous place. They will not scramble out with crude gestures, ad hominems, and a lackluster ground game.
Though Harris might ultimately enjoy an Obama-like tsunami of support, picking off reliably red states like Indiana and Iowa due to an outpouring of identity-driven love, the race is not looking pretty for now. Democratic strategists are obsessively studying the same brutal electoral map as I am. Per the RCP poll of polls, Trump is up significantly in all seven key swing states. Only Michigan remains barely within the 3% margin of error. Trump is up nearly 5% in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, running away in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina, and getting a big post-convention bump in Wisconsin. Even more troubling for Democrats, Trump has pulled within the 3% margin of error in the recently reliable blue states of Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Virginia (where he is up by .04%). Harris will undoubtedly inspire a massive turnout among black females, but will it be enough to counter the 8% gap in popularity between the Biden/Harris and Trump/Vance tickets?
Harris’s best hope is to magically peel away a sufficient number of Trump-backing black and Hispanic voters in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin and close this out in a meat grinder ground game for suburban and ex-urban women. Picking Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer would help with that strategy, as I am the first national political pundit to suggest. As I noted in my piece, “Beyond Biden: Democrats must go big and bold to defeat bogeyman Trump,” it would be akin to Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential win, when the Arkansas Governor doubled down on the New South strategy in picking fellow Southerner, Tennessee Senator Al Gore, as his running mate. Doubling down on the women's vote would be a genius move, helping animate feminist turnout in leftist swing state hotbeds like Ann Arbor, Michigan, Athens, Georgia, and Madison, Wisconsin. Still, it is unclear whether it would move the needle much in other swing states.
Having foregone all pretense of democracy in pushing Biden off the gangplank, Democratic strategists are huddling to ascertain what other Vice Presidential candidates help Harris close the deal. Former Navy Captain and astronaut, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, might reassure moderate voters that Harris will not go insanely Woke Socialist. Democrats are nothing if not identity-obsessed. In 2008, they successfully paired their smooth, historic figurehead of Barack Obama with the "wild and crazy” Irishman Joe Biden. In 2024, they might turn that upside down, pairing the bubbly, laughing, dancing queen Kamala with the steady hand of astronaut Kelly. It might help them win in Arizona, but it does not help them much in the Rust Belt, where Harris’ overt desire to ban semiautomatic assault rifles, institute universal background checks, and pass stringent red flag laws––however touchingly tied to the near-fatal assassination attempt on Kelly’s wife, former Representative Gabby Giffords––will be a turn-off to gun owners, despite Kelly being a gun owner himself. Besides, Trump now owns the political violence messaging after the recent assassination attempt on his life in Butler, PA.
After Whitmer and Kelly, Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania is the other noteworthy VP option. This is where things get interesting. A win in Pennsylvania, paired with just two of the other six remaining swing states, would close the deal for Democrats. But Shapiro is Jewish in a Democratic Party that has become increasingly anti-Semitic. The pro-Hamas protests that rocked college campuses this past year shocked Jewish voters, especially when Jewish students were blocked from entering campuses. It is highly doubtful that, however bright and strategic, Shapiro would want to place himself squarely into that hate-filled maelstrom.
Outsider options include Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who won a tight race as a Democrat in a state that Trump won by a ton. It helped that Andy’s pappy, Andy Beshear, was also the Kentucky Governor. Beshear’s support for liquid natural gas (LNG) and coal could be crucial in swaying energy voters in Pennsylvania. Harris strategists would be instinctually drawn to the pairing of Beshear against his fellow Kentuckyian JD Vance. But the clear difference between a child of privilege (Beshear) and Vance (the personification of the Hillbilly Elegy narrative) would be striking, further hurting Democrat chances in the Rust Belt.
Charismatic Wes Moore, the first black Governor of Maryland, also pairs well against Vance, another veteran who served in the investment banking world. But doubts about Moore’s origin story––he did not grow up in Baltimore, contrary to what Oprah claimed––could hurt his chances. And then came the Key Bridge collapse.
There is low-key North Carolina Roy Cooper, who has never lost an election and whose measured Southern drawl balances Harris’s occasional goofy Cali antics. While Cooper is not remotely known nationally (an essential consideration for a campaign with such a short window reset), he is a friend of the Vice President. He might help hold North Carolina, but that is no guarantee and not worth the risk.
Then there’s Governor Gavin Newsom, a surefire contender in 2028 should Harris lose in 2024, who, per the 12th amendment, cannot legally be on the ticket, given that he and Harris hail from California. That could all get sorted out if one person moved, but don’t count on it.
Whoever Harris chooses as her running mate, I expect a big convention bounce in late August, regardless of what polls say now. Demographics is destiny. Democrats will rally around the history-making nature of her “aspirational” candidacy.
However, polling should return to the mean after the Trump-Harris and VP debates in September. That’s because the Biden/Harris Administration has been a disaster in terms of policy. Americans know what they will get from a de facto second Biden term (only amplified by a far-left racialist at the top of the ticket): more inflation, more crime, more illegal immigrants, more fentanyl, more division, more lawfare, and more of a world at war. These pressing issues outweigh whatever pyrrhic significance comes from electing our nation's first Jamaican-Indian female President.
The excitement around Kamala will make the race closer, possibly preventing a down-ballot Dem debacle. Still, as happened when Ms. Harris last ran for President, the more exposure voters have to her outside her canned and effective teleprompter speeches, the less they will like her, and, thus, the less pleased they will be that Joe Biden was unceremonially pushed off the campaign stage.