Stick the Fork In, the Harris Campaign Is Done
You know the Harris campaign is in trouble when you see headlines like these: “What If Joe Biden was the better candidate all along?” “Forget Kamala Harris: Should Democrats Have Picked Michelle Obama?” “Even Dem Voters Show Signs of ‘Buyers Remorse’ Over Party’s Unprecedented Electoral Moves,” and “Buyer’s Remorse in the Democratic Party Over Harris’s Weak Performance.” Even before this election is over, many Democrats appear to be resigned to losing, and they are blaming their party’s decision to nominate Harris for the loss.
I feel safe predicting that Trump will win. And it appears that many Democrats agree — with good cause. The Machiavellian plan the party bosses put in play was never intended to make Kamala the nominee. As I explain further on, the Democrat chiefs were aware that installing an untested and unpopular vice president into the presidential campaign was fraught with problems. Despite their best efforts to put on a happy face and remake her image, the signs are clear that the party bosses know they have failed.
Their postmortems have already begun — even before rigor mortis has set in. Their off-the-record statements make it obvious that the Democrats’ internal polls show that “it’s all over but the crying.” You don’t have to read their polls to see that Harris is losing in swing states; just look at the number of incumbent Democrats who are avoiding appearing with Harris in public. Their excuses are laughable — the political equivalent of “my dog ate my homework.” The fact is that they don’t want to be associated with a losing campaign.
In the Senate race, imperiled Democrats Bob Casey Jr., Tammy Baldwin, Elissa Slotkin, Jon Tester, and Sherrod Brown are bragging about the good working relationship they had with Trump. For example, ads in Pennsylvania boast, “Casey bucked Biden to protect fracking and he sided with Trump to end NAFTA and put tariffs on China to stop them from cheating.” And in Wisconsin, we hear, “Tammy Baldwin got President Trump to sign her Made in America bill.”
Do you really believe that they would be associating themselves with a candidate that Harris says is a Hitler if their polls didn’t show that the public is not buying that outrageous slur? Kamala’s campaign is so desperate that they violated a standard political axiom: “The first person to play the Nazi card or invoke Hitler loses the argument.”
So, what made the Democrat bosses think that installing Harris as the nominee would work? The seeds for this debacle were sown in January 2020, when the Democrat establishment feared that a fractious primary season with Bernie Sanders would result in a second Trump term. The pooh-bahs selected, or should I say settled for, Joe Biden despite serious misgivings about him. Remember Obama’s famous warning: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.”
They knew Biden had difficulty expressing himself and was prone to gaffes. But COVID gave them a perfect excuse to keep him in the basement and out of public sight. And, given his reputation as a “moderate Democrat,” they could pass him off to the public as a centrist. In order to lock down Rep. Jim Clyburn’s support, Biden committed to choosing a Black female as his running mate. He ended up choosing Kamala, despite her miserable presidential run in which she had failed to win a single delegate before dropping out. Biden’s promise to Clyburn may have garnered him the nomination, but it boxed him in to choosing a flawed running mate.
Back in 2020, it appeared that the bosses’ strategy worked: Biden and Harris achieved the victory over Trump that the Democrats so desperately wanted. However, like the dog that chased the car only to be unsure what to do with it, the Democrats quickly found that there were inherent weaknesses in the Biden–Harris team. The party bosses were caught off guard by the rapidity of Biden’s mental decline. And they were stunned when news organizations reported that Kamala was a difficult boss to work for and had lost a number of key staffers in quick succession. Staff complained to the press that Harris refused to study her briefing books, leaving her woefully unprepared about key issues. Even worse, when Harris was criticized in the press, she blamed her staff for being unprepared. When major news outlets ran feature articles about her ongoing staff problems, the Biden White House was frustrated and angry.
By late 2022, it was clear that a Biden reelection would be difficult. Democrat megadonors, along with Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, plus the Obamas decided to pull a silent coup and dump Biden from the ticket. They doubted he had the mental and physical capacity to make it through another campaign no matter how hard they tried to hide his infirmities.
However, that posed a second dilemma. Kamala Harris was the most unpopular vice president in recent history. Plus, her inability to answer direct questions without veering into unintelligible “word salads” convinced the political kingmakers they had to keep her out of the presidential race. This was delicate, though. Many Black voters assumed she would be Biden’s heir apparent. On the other hand, Black political heavyweights such as Jeffries and Clyburn knew she would make a horrible candidate.
How could Democrat leaders, who owed their positions to Black Americans, the most loyal bloc of voters for their candidates, explain that they were sidelining the vice president who could become the first Black female president? The Democrat bigwigs figured they could avoid this dilemma by nominating a female so popular with Black voters, as well as the public at large, that they would not resent the sidelining of Kamala. But who would fit that bill?
I picked up on this in early 2023. I was confident that I had figured out what the cabal was trying to pull off and wrote an article in The American Spectator laying out the planned coup. I wrote, “The Democratic establishment is laying the groundwork to dump Joe Biden…. Which raises two questions: when will they stick the shiv into Biden? And how do they plan to deal with the ‘Kamala problem’?”
The answer to when their coup would happen was mid-June 2024, after the primary season. To do so, they had to hide Joe’s cognitive decline so that no ambitious Democrat would take on the incumbent president. Once the primaries were finished, the plotters set in motion the effort to induce him into an early debate. Biden’s staff (most of whom are Obama people) convinced Biden that a debate would energize his campaign. It would be the earliest presidential debate in history. Why so early? They needed enough time between what they knew would be a disastrous debate and the Democratic convention in order to “introduce” their chosen candidate in a blitzkrieg of key states before any other candidate could get a campaign off the ground.
An unsuspecting Biden agreed to the debate. I can just picture the Obamas, Pelosi, Schumer, and Jeffries chortling about how they suckered Biden into the early debate. Think of the scene in Blazing Saddles where the locals talked the sheriff into arresting Mongo, and one of the townspeople shouted, “The fool says he’ll do it.”
As for how they expected to handle the “Kamala problem,” my piece in The American Spectator last year explained:
[T]here is one path the Democrats could take which would immediately dispel any notion of betrayal. If Michelle Obama announced she is running for president, any resentment among black voters about Harris’s treatment would evaporate. While some may think this is farfetched, a Michelle Obama candidacy makes sense for many reasons. Michelle is very popular with the Democrats’ base and is far more popular than Kamala. Michelle has recently raised her profile, speaking out on issues important to the Dems’ base. This is a striking shift from the low-profile Michelle has kept since she and Barack left the White House.
I pointed to several high-visibility moves by Michelle: Founding “When We All Vote,” which promised to register over one million new voters; launching her podcast, which is based on her book The Light We Carry, with a 50-city tour promoting it; co-founding a nutrition brand that she said would “jumpstart what I hope will be a race to the top that will transform the entire food industry”; partnering with Walmart for a new line of clothing and a national campaign boasting, “You Can Shop This Michelle Obama-approved Designer’s Activewear at Walmart”; and scoring an Emmy nomination that was announced with great fanfare on all of the networks.
It is clear that the Obama team — along with Pelosi, Schumer, and Jeffries — counted on her being able to clear the field once Biden had been forced out. With Michelle’s high name recognition and the Obama campaign team already assembled, Michelle’s entry into the race would discourage all other candidates. Any challenger would have to launch their campaign from a standstill.
This is where their plan ran off the tracks. Recall that when Biden announced he would not seek reelection, his letter did not endorse anyone for the nomination. After his letter was released, Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffries, and Barack Obama all released coordinated statements calling for a “process” to select a candidate. They did NOT endorse Kamala right away. Barack Obama’s statement said, “We will be navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead. But I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.” Of course, he fully hoped that the outstanding nominee would be Michelle.
My hunch is that when Joe and Jill made the decision to end his campaign, they did not want to endorse Harris, particularly because she was part of the threat to invoke the 25th Amendment against him. Plus, Joe and Jill were still smoldering from Kamala’s attack calling him a racist in their earlier presidential debate. I imagine that they sat nursing their wounded pride with their family gathered around them, growing more and more resentful of being muscled out of the race.
However, as much as they had hard feelings toward Kamala, they resented the Obamas’ continued demeaning of Joe even more, and they were concerned that they would seek to propel Michelle Obama to the nomination. To spite the Obamas and their crew, Joe and Jill decided they would derail the nascent Michelle Obama bandwagon — by endorsing Kamala. Doing that would drive Michelle out of the shadows and force her to openly challenge Kamala. That was never part of the Obamas’ game plan, and they folded. Joe and Jill were able to give a big middle finger to the Obamas.
That is how we ended up with Harris as the nominee, and her campaign that we see collapsing in flames — a Democrat Götterdämmerung that will install Trump back in the White House and also bring down many Democrats in legislative races at both the state and federal level. In the end, the bitter Bidens have gotten their revenge.
READ MORE:
There Is a Reason Michelle Obama Wasn’t the Nominee. This Is It.
The Bloodless Coup of Joe Biden Will Not Work Out Well for Democrats
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