The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Slow Death of Kamala’s ‘Joy’

Posted on | September 24, 2024 | No Comments

Notice something about that picture of Vice President Kamala Harris? She’s wearing sneakers. Is this supposed to be some kind of message? At age 59, she is the candidate of youth, or something? In a campaign short on substance and long on symbolism, we can be certain that having the candidate onstage in a pair of Chuck Taylors is not mere coincidence.

Maybe the fashion editors at Vogue or Cosmo can fill us in on Kamala’s footwear choices, but my point is that the Harris campaign has spent the first two months of its existence inside a bubble of media-generated unreality. Remember how the trained seals of journalism mindlessly repeated the “joy” theme of the Democratic National Convention? Remember all the talk about the sudden groundswell of “energy” and “enthusiasm” once Joe quit and Kamala stepped in?

“Kamala Is Underperforming,” as I explained 10 days ago, and that reality is starting to become apparent even to her sycophants in the media. Worry lines have begun to furrow the foreheads of CNN and MSNBC personalities as they contemplate such signs as the most recent New York Times/Sienna College poll showing the race a dead heat between Harris and Trump. This is not good news for Harris, because if the race is a tie nationally and we know that Democrats always do better in the popular vote than in the Electoral College, a tie in the polls almost certainly augurs a Republican victory in November.

So I went back to the well of “underperforming” Kamala:

Nobody wants Kamala Harris to win this election more than do her celebrity media friends, who are willing to forfeit their credibility to drag her across the finish line. ABC News, whose blatantly one-sided “fact-checking” during Harris’s debate with Donald Trump was widely criticized, has seen its ratings tumble in the aftermath.
What’s remarkable is not just the absolute shamelessness of the media’s pro-Democrat bias — they’re so far in the tank for her, their “news coverage” is just an endless campaign ad for Harris — but the fact that it doesn’t seem to be helping. The one story they’re not reporting is the most important of all: Kamala Harris is losing this election.
Don’t take my word for it. Go look at where Harris stands in the polls today, and then compare her numbers to what the polls showed for Joe Biden on the same day in his 2020 race against Trump, and for Hillary Clinton in her 2016 race against Trump. In both of those previous two elections, most polls were slanted in favor of the Democratic candidates, so that Trump did better in the final official vote tallies than he did in the polls. This track record of error in favor of Democrats provides the proverbial “grain of salt” with which everyone should consume public polling.
Fortunately, Tom Bevan, Carl Cannon and the rest of the crew at RealClearPolitics (RCP) have made it easy for anyone to compare current presidential poll numbers to those in 2020 and 2016. These comparisons show Harris to be underperforming Biden and Clinton to such an extent that a Trump victory in November is the most likely outcome. . . .

Read the rest of my column in The American Spectator. It’s more than 2,500 words, but I think it’s worth the effort.



 

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Category: American Spectator, Kamala Harris, Polls

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