It Can’t Be Kamala: Another Longshot Prediction in a Good Year for Longshot Predictions
By February of this year, Joe Biden was already so cognitively impaired that nearly four-in-five Americans had revealed to pollsters that he was just too old to run for president again. Biden was already beginning to drown in polls against his opponent on nearly every issue that is important to Americans by double digits, including a massive 35% deficit on the vital issue of border security and controlling illegal immigration.
For many of us, it was obvious that Biden wouldn’t make it to November. It can’t be Biden on the top of the ticket in 2024, I argued back then.
And yet somehow, the prediction that he wouldn’t be around in November to headline the ticket was considered a longshot prediction by all of the mainstream media and the supposedly smart set of political wonks. There just wasn’t enough time to replace Biden in the primary process if they didn’t replace him by March, we were told. If they were going to do it, they’d have to do it quickly, as Thomas Gift suggested.
But, as I also observed in February, it made far more sense for Democrats to wait to pull the plug on Biden in the summertime rather than the early spring, because waiting until summer would eliminate the pesky primary process and the party’s voters altogether. Having an honest and open primary introduces the risk that voters may choose a different candidate than the Democrat politburo’s preference, after all, just as they nearly did in the primary process of 2016 and 2020 when the party was forced to rig the primaries against Bernie Sanders. That went largely unreported by the left-wing media, but it managed to raise more than a few eyebrows on both sides of the political aisle.
Waiting until after the primaries to replace Biden was a longshot prediction among the supposedly smart set, too. But, lo and behold, the mainstream media, the Hollywood elite, and the Democrat establishment operated in unison to prop up a rapidly diminishing Joe Biden in the spring, only to send him as a lamb to slaughter in an unprecedentedly early debate in late June. Afterward, they orchestrated a finely tuned, yet unconvincingly veiled, slow-motion coup to oust Joe Biden in late July, with roughly one month until convention.
What’s interesting is that while these predictions may have once been considered longshot predictions, there was never anything illogical about them. In fact, it would have been far more illogical to imagine that Biden would continue campaigning into the fall as a viable candidate on the Democrat ticket, just as it would have been illogical to presume that Democrats would oust him in February to open a frenzied primary season, over which they’d have limited control to direct the outcome.
It’s been a pretty good year for logical longshot predictions, and I see no reason to stop making them now. And something just doesn’t feel right in all this new focus about this being a sprint to November between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Now, I maintain that the Biden camp’s nearly immediate endorsement of Kamala Harris was a big middle finger to those conspiring in a coup against him. New information this week only serves as further evidence of that. As it turns out, Barack Obama reportedly threatened Biden with the 25th Amendment, telling him that Harris was on board to invoke it. Equally unsurprising is that Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries were all in coordination.
When Biden’s announcement came with a surprise endorsement of Kamala Harris, none of these conspirators were quick to endorse Harris. What followed was a series of stringing endorsements by the establishment honchos, culminating with Obama’s endorsement nearly a week later.
If a show of unity is the goal, that goal would have been better served with a coordinated endorsement. But that didn’t happen, which suggests confusion on the part of the Democrat party elite.
And they would be right to have been confused. For lack of a better way of putting it, Kamala Harris simply doesn’t fit in a winnable Democrat presidential campaign strategy.
She is incredibly unlikeable, even in her own party. This is evident by the fact that she failed to get oxygen in a crowded field of Democrats in 2019. Despite holding a voting record that is to the left of avowed socialist Bernie Sanders (a fact that media apparatchiks are hilariously failing to expunge convincingly), she failed to gain any traction among the socialist bloc of Democrats and failed to make an impression in the moderate lane over which Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Bloomberg were contesting.
It feels crazy to even have to type this sentence, but if Kamala Harris couldn’t make it to the first state primary vote in a contested Democrat primary, it seems strange to imagine that Democrats are betting the farm that she’ll win over moderate votes in the swing states.
And what would be even crazier is imagining that Democrats could do this after her stint as vice president, where all logic points to Joe Biden having purposefully set her up to fail in the early task of addressing the longstanding and problematic issues with illegal immigration.
From that point forward, her approval rating plummeted and remained lower than even Joe Biden, who was so unpopular that Democrats had to orchestrate a coup to be rid of him.
None of this makes any sense. Not only because she is one of the most unproven and unlikeable candidates in the Democrats’ stable, but because she is a radical leftist from San Francisco whose voting record and rhetoric makes her a liability on the party’s ticket in swing states.
The internet is forever, and there’s no equivocation about her position on some matters that are of crucial importance to millions of Americans, and particularly in those precious swing states.
She has said that she supports the abolition of private insurance and a nationalized healthcare system. She supports taxpayers funding “free college,” an end to fracking and fossil fuels, defunding the police, open borders, and free healthcare for illegal aliens. Kamala Harris notably encouraged rioters in the leadup to the 2020 election and helped in fundraising for violent criminals’ and arsonists’ bail. And most importantly, she believes that it is the government’s job to achieve the equality of all Americans’ outcome.
In the words of the late, great Norm McDonald, that’s all “some commie gobbledygook.” And Americans don’t like that commie stuff. Some Democrats do, sure, but the ones they’ve liked are named Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And they haven’t been the candidates that the Democrat establishment has been promoting.
Somehow, not only has the radical progressive standard finally become acceptable to the Democrat party, but they’ve calculatedly decided that Kamala Harris will be the standard bearer in a national election?
I’m not buying it.
Here’s what we know. Selecting the VP to replace Biden was the easiest path. There are many reasons for this, and the selection of Hubert Humphrey at the 1968 Democrat convention serves as precedent. Just as in 2024, other Democrat candidates earned pledged delegates, but those Democrats were cast aside when the party elites decided who they wanted to anoint, absent any voter consent. The VP of the previous administration has implied voter consent, in a way.
But what happens when it becomes just as apparent that Kamala can’t win against Donald Trump as it had become that Joe Biden couldn’t?
It isn’t just me noticing this problem.
“And for whatever reason,” Bill Maher told his audience Friday night, “Harris has never been popular. You can count how many delegates she won in the 2020 primary on one hand – as long as that hand has no fingers.” He points out that she’s been “quieter than an electric car” in three years as vice president, but that “it’s not fair that she’s not popular,” he said. “She’s intelligent, and accomplished, and in fact, was put in charge of the border and look at… O.K., bad example. [laughter]”
If Democrats are smart, they’ll space out the potential polling bumps available to them all the way to November, and they will wait a week or so to announce a VP for the Harris ticket. If those bumps aren’t promising enough before convention, I would expect a replacement for Harris in an open convention. I have no reason to believe she can’t be bought off, and a simple statement with sagging polls about her not being the best candidate to secure victory in the Electoral College against the greatest existential threat to democracy that America has ever known, or some such, would suffice.
The way I see it, Democrats have a binary choice. Either they replace Kamala Harris in the coming weeks and vie for the presidency in November, or they keep Kamala on the ticket expecting a loss and regrouping for 2028.
Or, they’re hoping for a miracle in the form of some miraculous vote-counting in key cities and districts in crucial states, if you get my meaning.
Image: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0
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