The parallels to a memorable election decades ago are unmistakable.
By Tim Donner Sep 23, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics
The defining narrative of the 2024 presidential election right now is that the race is a toss-up, and that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have an almost equal chance of winning. It’s not just the polls that make Harris appear to be on solid footing. Perhaps in response to the voluminous number of surveys showing a neck-and-neck race, and believing Trump is too volatile to be elected again, the betting markets – the best single indicator of who people believe will win – now favor Harris by seven points. So Kamala is in a strong position to become the 47th president, right?
In his piece for The Hill, entitled: “The ‘scared majority’ could deliver a landslide victory for Trump,” Douglas Mackinnon, a Reagan/Bush-era political consultant and no fan of Trump, cites the mounting fears of voters about what they have experienced since 2020. Alluding to the downward spiral of life in America, he observes that the alarming number of Americans living from paycheck to paycheck are increasingly driven by abject fear. Animated by Harris’s celebrity-drenched appearance with Oprah Winfrey, in which she returned to her pre-debate, cringeworthy words salads, Mackinnon pulls no punches:
“While the entrenched elites from politics, academia … Hollywood and the media who live in bubbles of luxury and protection won’t notice, those Americans have never been more scared in their lives. Not only about their future, but about their present … Those I speak with on a regular basis tell me they have never been so frightened about circumstances out of their control … I predict that there is a reckoning coming in November from those tens of millions of scared voters. And I suspect that reckoning is going to produce a landslide victory for Trump.”
Joining the Trump Landslide Bandwagon
Trump skeptic Douglas Mackinnon is not the only commentator daring enough to predict a Trump landslide. Longtime conservative columnist Roger Kimball, in a piece for Trump-friendly American Greatness entitled “Levitation 101,” cuts to the chase: “Victory for the Democrats will depend on the perpetuation of the illusion that Kamala Harris is in any way a plausible candidate for the presidency of the United States.”
Citing Harris’ “seeping, leaking emission of empty saccharine vocables,” he goes on to argue that “[t]he more she vocalizes (I almost said ‘talks’), the more damage she does to her candidacy. Her embarrassing performance on a ninety-minute livestream exchange with Oprah Winfrey in Detroit a few days ago underscored the problem … Even Winfrey, a prominent anti-Trump Harris supporter, seemed taken aback by her guest’s incoherent flights of flaccid, cringe-making glossolalia.”
Then comes Kimball’s conclusion: “Harris’s campaign will fall to earth before November 5 and – though this is not what the polls currently tell us – Trump will win in something approaching a landslide.”
Fulfilling the ol’ rule of three, there is also a piece just released by popular Substack author Sasha Stone, entitled: “Kamala Harris’ Pitch to Undecided Voters: ‘Just Be,’” and subtitled: “The Queen of Gobbledegook just dropped a doozy.” Stone brings dark humor and sarcasm to the ridiculous Kamala-Oprah event and its utter tone-deafness: “I’m sure an event with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts was a great way to win over undecided Voters. They’re probably out there thinking, I can’t put food on the table, and I can’t send my kid to school without worrying about them coming home and asking for puberty blockers, and what is going on in Springfield? Are we on the brink of World War III? Ah, but the celebrities will help. They will guide me! Yes! I’ll vote for Harris!”
While hinting at, though not directly predicting, a big Trump victory, Stone adds: “Harris sounded like that person who drank too much wine or maybe smoked a joint and is spouting a platitude.” She is not alone in that observation.
The Harris Strategy
The essential challenge for the vice president, beyond making the electorate believe she is up to the job, is to convince voters that she has had little to do with her boss’s failures and can chart a new course for the nation. But given her return to empty platitudinous word salads, the obvious question is whether she possesses the political skills to do so.
Coincidence or not, following her sit-down with Oprah, there appear to be noticeably fewer flattering stories about Kamala than we saw before the embarrassing performance. It is tough to project joy vibes when the original vibe queen Oprah herself looked flummoxed, embarrassed even, by Harris’s latest trip to the word-salad bar.
With the enfeebled Joe Biden removed to the sidelines and six weeks from Election Day, this is still a structural race, meaning Harris’s gains on Trump have largely been among traditionally Democratic voters returning to the fold now that the fear of a nakedly addled commander-in-chief have been removed.
The issues where Harris leads are all based on nothing she has done, with credit accrued to her without lifting a finger: hatred for Trump, abortion, and climate change. It is unlikely at best that an electorate driven by fear will set aside their most significant and fear-inducing issues – inflation, the economy the border, crime, and ground wars raging on two continents – to vote on vibes.
A Harris Landslide?
So predictions are trickling in about a Trump landslide. But what about the opposite? You will find few if any predictions of a Harris landslide, outside of purely data-driven comparisons to 2020 – a once-in-a-lifetime, pandemic-driven race – or subjective historical “keys” – how does one quantify ‘charisma’? – that can be plugged in like a mathematical formula to predict the outcome of a presidential election. It’s as if your own eyes and senses – or as the left likes to call it, your own “lived experiences” – are irrelevant.
Well, here is such an experience for anyone over the age of 50. In the 1980 election, a president widely viewed as a failure, Jimmy Carter, was running neck-and-neck with challenger Ronald Reagan as October turned to November. And, of course, this was well before the days of conservative talk radio, Fox News, the internet, and social media. The platforms that favored Reagan were few and far between, while big media, far more dominant then than now, were all behind Carter, while depicting Reagan as a dangerous warmonger and right-wing reactionary. It seemed that, despite his many shortcomings – economic stagnation, inflation, astronomical interest rates, consistent foreign policy failures – Carter might well hold on and win a second term.
But something dramatic happened in the last week of the campaign, driven by that famous question posed by Reagan in his single debate with Carter: Are you better off than you were four years ago? It seemed to be a question voters would ask themselves anyway, but it served to frame the election in the simplest terms for voters of all stripes. Of course, by that time, Ronald Reagan had long since introduced himself to the nation, serving two successful terms as governor of California, and nearly unseating President Gerald Ford in a tightly contested GOP primary race four years earlier.
This year, voters know very little about a presidential nominee whose resume to date does not suggest a serious person. What the voters know, or will by the time they vote, has been Harris’ standing in 2019 as the single most left-wing US Senator, her own disastrous presidential campaign in 2020, her failures as border czar, her confused and empty rhetoric, and her 180-degree reversal on a series of quasi-Marxist positions she held just four years ago. While she gave a surprisingly strong account of herself in her debate with Trump, even those who judged her the winner expressed the need to know more. All she has really offered to date is a manufactured joy vibe and an “opportunity economy” that seems only to provide opportunity for the government to reach deeper into your pocket for more taxes and more giveaways designed to purchase votes.
So what does the 1980 election have to do with 2024, you might rightly ask? Well, in that final week of the campaign, voters evidently asked themselves the mirror-image of Reagan’s famous question: Do we really want four more years of this? The answer was a resounding no. The dam burst on Carter in the final days of the race, and Reagan accomplished the unthinkable, a landslide of epic proportions, the worst defeat for an incumbent since the Great Depression. Reagan won 44 states, Jimmy Carter a mere six. Voters were not sure what they might get with Reagan, but they sure knew they didn’t want another four years of the misery they experienced under Carter.
So, when push comes to shove, when people enter the privacy of the voting booth or complete their mail-in ballots, alone with their conscience and contemplating the fear-inducing reality of their lives today, do we honestly believe that a majority will pull the lever for a vaguely defined leftist who did not capture a single vote for president, and whose career on the national stage has been marked by failure and confusion? It is still possible Kamala Harris could become the 47th president. But if she does, she will defy the full sweep of political history and affirm what many have feared over these last years: that the country we once inhabited is gone forever.
Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.
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