The message and the messenger were both flawed in now familiar ways.
Donald Trump’s astonishing political comeback might come down to the fact that, within the span of a decade, the Democratic Party has transformed itself into one that prioritizes lawfare at home and warfare abroad.
In late 2015 and early 2016, as Trump began to gain traction as a national candidate, the Clinton campaign found itself the object of neoconservatives’ newfound affections.
Back then, the neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan spoke for many others when he likened Trump’s takeover of the GOP to when “the plague descended on Thebes.”
In the ensuing years, particularly during the DNC-funded, MSNBC-driven Russiagate panic (which some enterprising journalists are still peddling), neocons and mainstream Democrats became indistinguishable—to the detriment of the latter. The gross McCarthyism that had long been a feature of neocon polemics on Israel became the defining feature of Democratic foreign policy discourse. Perhaps the lowest point in a crowded field was Hillary Clinton’s public accusation that the decorated combat veteran and three-term congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard was “groomed” as the “favorite” candidate of the Russians.
What Gabbard and other dissident Democrats knew then is something that all Democrats should understand now, that neocons lead to defeat—both at home and abroad
No one can say they weren’t warned. Upon leaving the Democratic Party in 2022, Gabbard charged that,
The Democrats of today believe in open borders and weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents. Above all else, the Democrats of today are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.
Kamala Harris’s decision to anoint former “Wyoming” Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-McLean) as one of her chief surrogates was only part of a larger messaging misfire.
“Democracy,” voters were incessantly warned, “is on the ballot.” Well, that fell flat. One reason, the most obvious, is that polls repeatedly showed that voters put the economy as their chief worry—followed by illegal immigration. Another reason, more esoteric but no less true for it, is that people understand that the U.S. is a democracy mainly because it calls itself one.
The other campaign message, related, was that Trump is a “fascist.” This also didn’t stick. To apply the term to Trump is to simply misunderstand the term. How many opposition (i.e. mainstream, legacy, corporate) news outlets did Trump shut down in his first term? How many opposition parties? How many times did he seek to jail his political opponents or his many critics in the media? Did he crush the George Floyd riots with the heavy hand of the military?
The fact of the matter is that Trump didn’t even overrule his own octogenarian NIH director over disagreements over the COVID lockdowns. Calling Trump a fascist is to confuse an insult comic for Hitler.
By the look of the election results, accusations of fascism fooled few. Indeed, the election results showed that the Democrats’ strategy of demonization didn’t pay. It was the economy all along. As I pointed out only two weeks ago in these pages, “recent economic indicators point to a souring mood among the electorate—bad news for Harris.”
So there’s the message, and then there’s the messenger.
Harris’s brilliant start could not, in the end, cover for her glaring weaknesses. Biden’s decision to drop out of the race energized the base and made (some) people forget that up until that point Harris had been a historically unpopular vice president. As the journalist Elaina Plott Calabro noted,
In June 2023, an NBC News poll put Harris’s approval rating at 32 percent. While Biden’s own approval numbers, in the low 40s, are hardly inspiring, the percentage of those who disapprove of Harris’s performance is higher than for any other vice president in the history of the poll.
This past May, Howard Husock, a domestic policy scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote, “It is hard to conceive of anything that would better revive Biden’s failing fortunes—and reassure the nation that a capable replacement was waiting in the wings—than the bold act of asking Harris to step aside” as vice president.
A month later, just prior to the Biden debate meltdown, a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll found that “only a third of voters” thought it likely Harris would win the general election if she were the nominee. Only three out of five Democrats polled thought she could prevail.
Democrats around the country are waking up to what they perhaps, deep down, knew all along: Kamala Harris was never the answer.
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