Category: Kamala Harris

‘A Historic, Flawlessly Run Campaign’

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At some point, we will get past the Gloat Zone. Conservatives will begin to grapple with the difficult business of governance, and move on from the cheap thrills of election schadenfreude. Someday, and perhaps one day soon, we will stop mocking liberals and their idiotic “hot takes,” but my dear friends, today is not that day. In the perennial competition for Dumbest Liberal on Cable TV News, you may have your particular favorites — Brian Stelter or Brianna Kellar or whoever — but all of them are mere also-rans compared to the undefeated champion, Joy Reid.

Someone posted a “highlight” compilation video of MSNBC’s coverage on Election Night, which includes this declaration — made before any of the results were known — from the aforementioned Ms. Reid:

“So what you’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, if this is an audition for managing a complex organization like the United States, Kamala Harris has passed the audition flawlessly. This has been, in many ways, a perfect campaign.“

Not to give away any surprises — in case you just logged on after a week of isolation and don’t know how the election turned out — but “flawless” and “perfect” are perhaps not the correct adjectives for describing how the Kamala Harris campaign was run. Reid’s enthusiasm early on Election Night might be excusable, when you consider that several polls had shown Harris either leading or tied in key battleground states. In Pennsylvania, for example, the final Washington Post poll had Harris ahead by one point, and a Marist College poll had her leading by two points. Even if the Real Clear Politics average of Pennsylvania showed a fractional lead for Trump, no one could blame a Democratic Party hack (which, let’s face it, is Joy Reid’s job description) from hoping that Kamala could pull out a victory there, or in any other battleground state.

As I said before the polls closed, anybody could do the arithmetic and see that if Trump won Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, that was all he needed to reach 270 Electoral College votes and win back the White House. It was past 11:30 p.m. ET before MSNBC called North Carolina for Trump, and past midnight before they called Georgia for Trump. Meanwhile, Steve Kornacki was at the map going through Pennsylvania county-by-county to show that Harris was underperforming there, compared to Joe Biden’s 2020 numbers.

All the signs of a Trump victory were obvious and, about 12:45 a.m. ET, MSNBC cut away to Howard University, where the Harris campaign co-chairman made a brief statement basically telling the crowd to go home because they wasn’t going to be a victory celebration. Then they returned to the studio where Joy Reid said:

“And nothing that was true yesterday about how flawlessly this campaign was run is not true now. I mean, this really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign. … You could not have run a better campaign.”

What was this about? It was about staking out a position, that no matter how bad it was, none of the blame could be cast on Kamala Harris.

You can watch the entire nine-minute highlight reel:

And now, for the post-election denouement:

She raised and spent a billion dollars in her losing presidential campaign and left behind a stunning $20 million debt.
Now, Vice President Kamala Harris is begging tired donors for more money for her “fight fund.”
In a new fundraising email to donors, Kamala HQ wrote, “Is there anything we can say to convince you to make a contribution to support the Harris Fight Fund program today?”
The memo from the Harris Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee authorized by Harris for President, the Democratic National Committee, and several state Democratic Parties, said the money will help fund races that have yet to be decided.

Absolutely flawless!



 

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Election Results 2024: Trump Wins Pennsylvania, Will Be 47th U.S. President

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UPDATE 1:30 a.m. ET Wednesday: TRUMP JUST WON IT!

UPDATE 12:40 a.m. ET Wednesday: MSNBC just called Georgia and North Carolina for Trump who, I should mention, currently leads by 2.7 points in Pennsylvania and 3.5 points in Wisconsin.

UPDATE 11:45 p.m. ET: MSNBC just called Trump the winner in North Carolina. Trump is getting very close to a win in Georgia. With 91% counted, he leads by about 135,000 votes (a 2.7% margin, 50.9% to 48.2%) and it’s estimated that less than 500,000 votes remain to be counted. Meanwhile, in Ohio, Republican Bernie Moreno has beaten Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, which practically guarantees a GOP Senate majority. In Pennsylvania, Republican challenger Dave McCormick is is leading Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr. by more than 100,000 votes, while Trump continues to hold a lead of more than three points over Harris. She just got called the winner in Virginia.

UPDATE 10:55 p.m. ET: Just watched Steve Kornacki do a symphony of hard truth on MSNBC. In state after state, in county after county, tonight is looking a lot more like 2016 — a Trump win — than like 2020, when Biden “won.” MSNBC hasn’t yet called either Georgia or North Carolina for Trump, but Decision Desk HQ has.

UPDATE 10:30 p.m. ET: In Georgia, with 86% of the statewide vote now counted, it’s Trump 51.2% to Harris 48.0% — a margin of 150,000 votes (3.2%). Getting a bit close for my taste. In Wisconsin, meanwhile, Trump leads by about 6,000 votes (49.4% to 49.0%) with 48% of the vote counted.

UPDATE 10:15 p.m. ET: In Pennsylvania, Trump had been trailing in the early returns, but with 50% of the vote now counted, it’s Trump 50.4%, Harris 48.7% — a lead of nearly 60,000 votes for Trump.

UPDATE 10:10 p.m. ET: OK, we’re starting to see some Georgia counties where 99% of the vote is reported. Barrow County, where Trump got 26,804 votes (70.6%) in 2020, he now has 30,674 votes (69.9%) so that he has increased his vote total, but with a slight decrease of percentage. In Walker County, where Trump got 23,173 votes (78.9%) in 2020, he now has 25,452 (79.3%) — increasing both his vote total and percentage. The question is whether small gains like this in more rural counties will be enough to offset Kamala’s big numbers in metro Atlanta. As of now, with 79% of the statewide vote counted, Trump leads by 52% to Harris’s 47%. The Real Clear Politics poll average for Georgia was Trump +1.3. He is overperforming the polls in Georgia, so far.

UPDATE 9:45 p.m. ET: Right now, with 75% of votes counted in Georgia, Trump leads by a 5.2-point margin, about 112,000 votes. That’s a bit too close for comfort. In my next update, I’ll do some county-by-count breakdowns of Georgia. Meanwhile in Virginia, with 61% reporting, Trump leads by about 16,000 votes. He probably won’t win there, but the fact that it’s this close is a very good sign. Ohio has been called for Trump — it was never in doubt, really — and the encouraging thing there is that Trump’s margin is about 11 points, with 64% counted. Trump won by 8 points in Ohio in 2020, so expanding his margin there would bode well for Michigan and Wisconsin. We shall see . . .

UPDATE 8:50 p.m. ET: With 87% counted in Florida, Trump’s margin there is now 13 points, while in Virginia, with 43% counted, it’s a 49%-49% dead heat. These are good omens for Trump.

UPDATE 8:22 p.m. ET: Wait a minute — I heard that wrong! Hallucinations? Flashbacks from that 1979 psilocybin trip? Whatever — MSNBC still has Georgia “too early to call.” Apologies for the false alarm.

UPDATE 8:15 p.m. ET: Georgia is the first battleground state called for either candidate, and MSNBC calls it for Trump. The word for this is YUGE! Remember, the margin of victory is important here as an indicator of how other battlegrounds may go, but to be declared the winner in Georgia barely an hour after polls closed? YUGE!

*** PREVIOUSLY (6:45 p.m. ET) ***

Usually, I watch CNN (so you don’t have to), but tonight my home office TV is tuned to MSNBC, because I think it’s gonna be glorious! Trump wins this thing? They’ll be crying 96 tears on MSNBC, baby.

Anyway, earlier today, I told you about Stacey Abrams and her fantasies of “voter suppression” in Georgia, and I turned some of that material into a column at The American Spectator:

When the Georgia General Assembly enacted new election laws in 2022, the state was targeted by a dishonest propaganda campaign led by the president of the United States. The new Georgia law was “Jim Crow 2.0,” Joe Biden said — a hateful smear for which that notorious liar has never apologized. Excuse my indignation, but I was born in Atlanta and grew up in Douglas County, Georgia, and this disgusting slander outraged my sense of pride in my native state. Yet the beautiful irony is that the new law in Georgia may prevent America from suffering another one of those “too close to call” nightmares such as was inflicted on us four years ago.
Georgia has greatly increased its early voting, and the votes that have been cast early will also be counted early, so that within a couple of hours of 7 p.m. Eastern, when polls close in Georgia, we may know the winner of that state. Depending on how Georgia goes, the winner there may be almost certainly projected as the winner of 270 Electoral College votes necessary to claim the White House. . . . 

You can read the rest of that. We’re getting ready for the polls to close in Georgia now, and I’ll be back with updates on that and other numbers.

UPDATE 7:05 p.m. ET: MSNBC just projected Kentucky for Trump and Vermont for Harris, but claims that both Indiana and South Carolina are “too early to call.” LOL. However, Virginia — a state Joe Biden won by 10 points — is also “too early to call,” which could be interesting.

UPDATE 7:10 p.m. ET: OK, now MSNBC has called Indiana for Trump, and also projected Republican Jim Banks has won the Senate race in Indiana. Meanwhile, we’re starting to get results in Florida, which is not a battleground state, but which may give us an indication of whether Kamala Harris is underperforming Joe Biden. So far, with 18% reporting, it’s Trump 51.9% to Harris 47.2% — not much different from the Trump-Biden numbers four years ago. We’ll see.

UPDATE 7:25 p.m. ET: OK, I’m watching Steve Kornacki break down Georgia votes, with only 3% statewide reporting so far, but we’ve got a few GOP-leaning counties — including Gordon and Union — that are up around 80% reporting, and these seem to be on pace to hold strong for Trump. Honestly, we need Trump to get up around 52% in Georgia to feel comfortable with the other battlegrounds.

UPDATE 7:35 p.m. ET: Welcome, Instapundit readers! The polls have just closed in North Carolina, and meanwhile, MSNBC has just projected Donald Trump the winner in West Virginia (just in case anybody didn’t already know). And at this moment, with 9% of returns counted in Georgia, Trump leads 60% to 40% over Harris.

UPDATE 7:50 p.m. ET: It’s rather too early to draw any conclusions from the Florida vote — 71% counted, and polls still open in the western panhandle — but it doesn’t look bad for Trump there. To repeat, Florida is not a battleground, but we want to see if Trump does better against Harris than he did against Biden four years ago. In order to be confident that he can flip the battleground states, Trump needs to be exceeding his 2020 vote share everywhere. Right now, it’s Trump 54% to Harris 45% — a substantial improvement on the 51%-48% against Biden four years ago.

UPDATE 8:10 p.m. ET: Several states just got called by MSNBC, including Florida for Trump. Again, this was not a battleground, but Trump’s Margin of victory in Florida may be indicative of his nationwide strength compared to 2020. Right now, with 78% of the votes counted, it’s Trump 55%, Harris 44% — a substantial gain for Trump. Meanwhile, Steve Kornacki is going through Georgia county-by-county, and finding net gains of between 1 and 3 points for Trump. As I’ve said, we need to see Trump at 52% in Georgia to feel comfortable about North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Right now, with 36% reporting, he’s at 56%.

Hang on and keep praying, folks.



 

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Georgia: How’s ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ Working?

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Despite the fact that early voting has set historic records in Georgia, a certain Democrat remains permanently disgruntled:

Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is claiming that “voter suppression” is occurring in Georgia despite record turnout in the Peach State.
During Friday’s installment of “CNN News Central,” co-anchor Kate Bolduan asked Abrams what she believes is driving the surge in early voting.
“While we are excited about who is showing up, we have to understand that turnout does not mean there is not voter suppression activity,” Abrams replied.
She suggested that one of the reasons for long early voting lines is because residents can no longer use the “easier” method of voting by mail.
“People who are disabled, people who have lost their homes are facing harder times casting their ballots, but they refuse to be silenced. What we are excited about is that here in the state of Georgia, despite the government making it harder to cast your ballot, people are willing to fight to make it happen anyway,” Abrams continued.
Senate Bill 202, which was adopted by the Georgia General assembly in 2021, made several changes to absentee ballots. Prior to its passage, signature verification was the primary means of checking voter identity, according to the Fulton County website.
Absentee ballots could also be requested up until the Friday before the election.
The new method stipulates that Georgia voters provide their Driver’s License number or other forms of voter ID and must request their ballot at least 11 days before the election.
“Once again, Stacey Abrams is lying about Georgia’s elections, and over three million voters who have already voted know not to take her seriously,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “She’s cost the state millions and it’s time for her to get real: Georgia has the leads the nation in voter accessibility and convenience and we run the most secure elections in the country.”
Georgia voters have already shattered multiple turnout records, but that did little to temper Democratic critics of the new rules for the 2024 presidential cycle put in place by the state’s GOP officials.
“I was just in Georgia. You know they passed a law that makes it illegal to give people food and water for standing in line to vote?” Vice President Kamala Harris told a rally crowd in Michigan earlier this week. “The hypocrisy abounds. Whatever happened to ‘love thy neighbor,’ right?”
Meanwhile, President Biden called Georgia’s election security laws “Jim Crow 2.0” in 2022.
Georgia’s Republican-majority legislature passed several laws since 2020 to increase security around the voting process after the Peach State was thrust under scrutiny in the previous presidential race.

As advocates of the new Georgia law have repeatedly said, it makes it easier to vote, but harder to cheat — and it’s that latter aspect of the law that Abrams and other Democrats deplore. There was massive “ballot harvesting” in Georgia in 2020, but they won’t be able to play that trick this year, which is one reason why Team Trump feels pretty confident about Georgia. Another factor that should help Trump in Georgia is the disgrace of Fani Willis, whose RICO case against Trump got wrecked in the courts. Let me put this as gently as possible — there’s Atlanta, and then there’s the rest of Georgia. Folks out in the hinterlands of Georgia don’t want anything to do with Atlanta, and Fani Willis is a perfect example of why people in the rest of Georgia despise Atlanta.

Polls close at 7 p.m. ET in Georgia, which means it will be an early indicator of which way this election is going. You can look at the county-by-county percentages from 2020 on Wikipedia and match them against what’s reported tonight, and from that county-by-county comparison figure whether Harris is under-performing Biden or not. Remember that Biden (allegedly) won Georgia by less than 12,000 votes, so even a slight shift in Trump’s direction would flip Georgia “red.” If Trump then holds onto North Carolina, all he would need is to win Pennsylvania and that’s it — 270 Electoral College votes, no matter what happens in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona or Nevada. Furthermore, I think Mark Halperin is correct in saying that we’ll probably see the battleground states go one way or the other — it’s unlikely there will be a split decision.

A clear win for Trump in Georgia — say, 51%-47% or better — would be the first clue tonight that Kamala Harris is losing, and I think we should have a definite sense of that by 10 p.m. ET. Say a prayer.



 

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Election 2024: Be Prepared for Anything

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The old Scout motto has always been wise advice, and as we brace ourselves for Election Day — to be followed by Election Night, and then perhaps Election Week or even Election Month — we ought to psychologically prepare ourselves for all possible contingencies.

We have now entered that phase of the campaign where there is nothing to be learned by checking Real Clear Politics for the latest poll data. Every major pollster has already released their final numbers and whatever predictive value polls may have is already incorporated into our expectations. About a week ago, a solid source passed along word that the Trump campaign’s internal polling showed them leading in Pennsylvania by three points — just shy of the four-point lead they would consider “safe” — and that in general the Trump team is “cautiously optimistic” about the election. Despite what Byron York calls the “final torrent of BS” in the past week, probably nothing has happened to alter that calculus, mostly because early voting is running so far ahead of any previous election year. What should we make of this report?

With just three days until the election, former President Donald Trump’s campaign remains unsettled about his prospects in North Carolina, a Sun Belt state that he’s claimed in two consecutive presidential elections.
When asked why, a Trump campaign official put it bluntly.
“If there’s one state that could bite you in the a–, it’s North Carolina,” the official said.
At the same time, Vice President Kamala Harris’ team, which less than two weeks ago feared the Tar Heel State was “a little bit slipping away,” is now seeing it as “very much in play,” a senior campaign official said.
Their dueling outlooks emerged as both campaigns landed in North Carolina, with the candidates rallying voters in a margin-of-error contest that’s raising the stakes in every battleground. Of late, Trump has deviated off course and into states like Virginia and New Mexico in the final days of the campaign, declaring he could expand his map.
Yet he’s made a plan of returning to North Carolina each day until the election.

My first thought: Head fake.

For weeks, I’ve been repeating the obvious: If Trump wins Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, that’s it, he’s the next president, and the outcomes in the other battleground states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada — would be moot, in terms of the Electoral College arithmetic. Anybody can look at the polls and see how solid Trump looks in Georgia now, which leaves North Carolina and Pennsylvania. As I said before, Team Trump feels pretty good about Pennsylvania and so they are devoting extra attention to North Carolina, just to make sure they don’t suffer a surprise loss in a state where the public polls have shown the race much closer than Georgia. And this move has the added benefit of encouraging the Harris campaign also to devote time, money and energy to North Carolina — if Trump’s worried about it, maybe she’s got a chance there — which means less of their attention is available to Pennsylvania, the state that will almost certainly decide the election.

Although I have long despised Nate Silver, his recent criticism of “herding” by pollsters deserves consideration. Even while there is a 6-point spread between the “outliers” of national polls — WSJ has it Trump +3, while Morning Consult has it Harris +3 — the polls in most battleground states seem to be bunched up, as if predicting that Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, etc., will all be nearly tied. As I say, Trump’s looking strong in Georgia, but even there, a certain amount of “herding” seems to be happening, as if many pollsters are afraid of showing Trump ahead by more than a couple of points. The “herding” effect appears most evident in Pennsylvania, where pollsters seem reluctant to go out on a limb and say either Trump or Harris could win by more than two points. If it comes out 51%-48% either way, the polls will generally have underestimated the margin of victory, and several of them will be wrong about who wins, but none of them be off by more than a six-point margin, and the most wrong of them will be able to say they weren’t alone. Everybody’s cheating on the final exam.

But what if Pennsylvania turns into a comparative blowout? What if, instead of a one- or two-point margin, it opens up to a four- or five-point margin? What if it’s Trump 52% to Harris 47%, or vice-versa? In that case, the pollsters showing a two-point lead for the candidate who loses will be somewhat discredited, but not utterly disgraced, while the pollster who shows a one- or two-point lead for the ultimate winner will puff out his chest in pride of his vindication: “Nailed it!”

Given the problem of “herding,” is there any way we can discover auguries from these particular entails? Well, here’s just a tiny clue: In their poll published October 12, New York Times/Siena College had Harris +3 in Pennsylvania, leading 50% to 47%. The latest NYT/Siena poll came out this morning, and it’s Trump +1 — 48% to 47%.

The word for that is “YUGE.” First of all, it represents a net shift of 4 points toward Trump, and secondly, does anyone think the New York Times would publish its final poll showing Trump ahead in Pennsylvania — which everybody knows is the crucial battleground — if there was any chance of a Harris win there? No way. Stick a fork in her, she’s done.

If my interpretation of this is correct, it would explain why the Trump campaign has added extra stops in North Carolina — they’ve got Georgia and Pennsylvania locked up, and they just need to avoid a surprise in North Carolina to assure they’ve got 270 Electoral College votes. But then again, I could be completely wrong: “Be prepared.”

However this election turns out, I don’t think we’ll know the result on Tuesday night, and we might not know on Wednesday, either. “Too close to call” will be endlessly repeated by the TV talking heads, as they point to the results in various “bellwether” counties, talking about how many precincts have yet to report in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, etc. Even if Trump were to ultimately win a popular-vote majority and run the table in the battleground states — maybe even flipping New Hampshire, Virginia or New Mexico into the “red” column — such an outcome wouldn’t be conclusive enough for the media to call it a win on Election Night. Therefore, no matter how optimistic we may be, we must psychologically brace ourselves for disappointment. Even if it’s four years of President Kamala Harris, we can cope with it, somehow.



 

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Can We Stay Sane a Few More Days? (Also: Has Trump Always Been Winning?)

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Craziness is breaking out everywhere — ballots burned in Oregon, fake GOTV operations, voter suppression in Pennsylvania. For weeks I’ve been warning against getting too emotionally involved in all the election hype. Go vote, do whatever you can to help, but don’t let it drive you insane. Even as Democrats are struggling with existential dread of Orange Hitler, a lot of Republicans are paranoid about another stolen election.

“A few more days for to tote the weary load,” as the song says. Just do whatever it takes to maintain your grip on sanity, and maybe by this time next week, it will all be over, one way or the other. Either we endure another four years of Democrat blundering, or we’ll be laughing at the tears of MSNBC hosts and CNN panelists. Of course, we know which outcome we’d prefer, but I’m confident we can deal with whatever.

Maintaining my pose of sanguine optimism, then, what about this latest Quinnipiac Poll of Pennsylvania, with Trump 49% and Harris 47%?

A mere six weeks ago, Quinnipiac had Harris leading Trump in Pennsylvania by five points, 51% to 46%. Has there really been a net seven-point swing toward Trump since mid-September or — as I rather strongly suspect — has Trump actually been leading Harris in Pennsylvania the whole time? Political junkies are overdosing on poll numbers, clicking onto Real Clear Politics several times a day to see if there are any new polls to satisfy their sick craving for data.

While the data-addicted let the zig-zagging numbers send their moods swinging from manic hope to depressive gloom, it might all be an illusion. My gut hunch is that the vast majority of voters made up their minds which way they’d vote long ago. It seems evident that, after Democrats dumped Biden and subbed in Harris — remember when it was a “right-wing conspiracy theory” to suggest they were planning such a switch? — Democrats got a temporary boost, as some of their core voters were more enthusiastic about Kamala than they had been about Joe. But was this boost really enough to shift the entire dynamic of the election?

If you were watching the polls, you saw Kamala zoom ahead of Trump by mid-September, when the RCP national average had her leading by a solid two points, and there were two polls (Morning Consult and Reuters/Ipsos) that had her six points ahead, as well as others (NBC News and Susquehanna) with Harris +5. Really? C’mon, really?

Here we are now, at the end of October, and the current RCP national average has Trump ahead by a fraction and, of the 14 polls comprising this average, six have Trump leading, four have Harris ahead, and four show an exact tie. That’s the national vote, mind you, but we know that the election will actually be decided by a handful of battleground states. Right now, RCP shows Trump with more or less decisive leads in both Georgia and Arizona, two states Biden (allegedly) won four years ago. Harris leads slightly in Wisconsin and Michigan, while Trump leads by one point or less in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Nevada.

We don’t know what the final outcome will be, but if Trump does win, we’ll have to look back at those September polls and ask, “Was that real? Was Kamala ever actually ahead? Or are pollsters just playing the old game of shifting their numbers in late October, to avoid looking like fools for their ridiculous pro-Democrat slant?”

Five more days. Stay sane, my friends.



 

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BOOM! We Are So #Winning!

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Of course, I must add the necessary “don’t get cocky” disclaimer, but ladies and gentlemen, this news is YUGE:

Democrat presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris is waving the white flag in North Carolina, surrendering the state to former President Donald Trump as her campaign withdraws nearly $2 million in planned ad buys from television stations statewide one week before the election.
The more than $1.7 million in canceled ad buys by Harris’s campaign in North Carolina suggests that her team believes, given polling data and early vote data, that the Tar Heel State is no longer in play for her.
Trump’s senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita jumped at the news on Tuesday morning, celebrating Harris’s team giving up on the state one week before the election . . .

It is fact, by the way, that polling shows Virginia now a lot closer than it was in 2020, when Biden won it by 10 points. There are important House races on the ballot in Virginia that Democrats can’t afford to lose, and it may indeed be that they’re making this move to “try and stop the slide” in Virginia. More important, of course, is the apparent surrender in North Carolina, the only “battleground” where Democrats were trying to flip a state that went for Trump four years ago. If indeed, Team Kamala has waved the white flag in North Carolina, that means they’re not strictly playing defense, trying to hold onto states that Biden (allegedly) won.

Weeks ago, it was clear that Trump had a straightforward path to victory — hold North Carolina, flip Georgia and Pennsylvania, and nothing else mattered. Even if Trump were to lose Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin, he’s still the winner (exactly 270 Electoral College votes) with the NC/GA/PA trifecta. Georgia has looked pretty solid for Trump all along (thank you, Fani Willis), and a source told me this week that the Trump campaign’s internal polls have them up by three points in Pennsylvania. That’s a little closer than they would like it, but they are “cautiously optimistic” in Pennsylvania. Now, Team Kamala surrenders North Carolina? YUGE! That frees up Republican resources for the late push in Pennsylvania — and Michigan, Wisconsin, etc.

My hunch — and it’s not a completely uneducated guess — is that Trump’s got Arizona nailed down and he looks like a winner in Nevada, too, but that’s likely to be a lot closer. Michigan is at least close enough that Democrats there are still sweating it. If Harris wins Michigan and Wisconsin, and Trump wins Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada, then Pennsylvania is the whole game. Meanwhile . . .

Today, I went and voted early. I don’t live in a “battleground state,” but I do live in a competitive House district, so it matters. What made me decide to vote today was that I watched the video of Steve Bannon’s press conference after he got released from federal prison:

 

If that doesn’t make you vote, I don’t know what will.



 

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The Schadenfreude Smorgasbord

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The resignation of Robert Kagan, in response to billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos ordering the paper not to endorse Kamala Harris, is a preview of the open intermural warfare we’ll see among Democrats if Kamala Harris loses next month. Failure in politics requires scapegoats, and Harris herself is exempt from blame because (according to the rules that Democrats impose) anyone who criticizes her is a racist and a sexist and, perhaps, literally Hitler. Forbidden to blame the candidate who led them to defeat, therefore, Democrats will point the finger of blame at each other, and we will witness a Carnival of Recriminations — if, as I say, Kamala loses. The fact that the Washington Post is imploding now, less than 10 days before Election Day, is a sort of signal of which way the winds are blowing. Robert Kagan wouldn’t be resigning his job if he didn’t think a Trump victory was highly probable.

What’s going on here? Professor Glenn Reynolds floats the theory — relevant to Bill Clinton throwing shade on Harris — that there’s an internecine combat between the Clinton clique and the Obama clique, with the Clintons aiming to get a measure of revenge. Team Clinton wants to make sure that they get none of the blame for an expected Harris defeat. But what about this thing at the Washington Post? Certainly it strikes me as an omen of a Harris defeat — Bezos wouldn’t have held back the Post‘s endorsement if he thought Harris was on her way to the White House. And, in examining this — again, hat-tip to Professor Reynolds — Ann Althouse mentions the similar non-endorsement by the Los Angeles Times:

According to the daughter of the paper’s owner — Patrick Soon-Shiong — “This is a refusal to ENDORSE a candidate that is overseeing a war on children…. For me, genocide is the line in the sand.”
So, this may be all about Israel. The papers don’t want to elaborate the reasons for supporting Harris because they would need to avoid or somehow deal with the topic of Israel’s war against Hamas. Harris can’t explain her position very well either. She needs help, and she’s not getting it. She’s evasive, and the newspapers are — in this endorsement avoidance — evasive too.

Kamala is complicit in “genocide”? Who is saying this?

Nika Soon-Shiong, the outspoken pro-Palestinian activist daughter of Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, defended the paper’s non-endorsement of a presidential candidate on Friday . . .
The 31-year-old progressive activist for causes like Palestine and guaranteed income is a divisive figure in the Times’ universe, where her influence on editorial decisions has stirred internal controversy.

You can read her anti-Israel rant on X here. But if the LA Times didn’t endorse Harris because Harris is too pro-Israel, my hunch is that the opposite is more likely the case with Bezos and the WaPo. That is to say, I believe Bezos is, if not adamantly pro-Israel, certainly not pro-Hamas, and — this is pure speculation on my part — I’d furthermore guess that Bezos has been offended by the blatantly anti-Jewish nature of campus protests since last year’s October 7 massacre. Bezos has also seen Amazon targeted by various pressure campaigns, demanding he cut off any business with Israel, and perhaps that has alienated him even more from the pro-Hamas “progressive” movement. Whatever the case may be, the explanation for the non-endorsement of Harris at the Washington Post is likely to be much different, if not directly opposite, of the reasons the LA Times didn’t endorse her. And that’s fine with me.

Whenever there’s infighting among Democrats, the important thing — from a conservative perspective — is not to choose sides amongst the factions. Certainly I would never defend the sold-out and morally bankrupt establishment leadership of the Democratic Party, but at the same time I have nothing but contempt for the wild-eyed fanatics and fringe ideologues of the party’s left-wing grassroots. The really important thing is that (a) we defeat the Democrats at election time, so that (b) the simmering tensions between the Democratic Party’s establishment and the left-wing grassroots burst into open conflict, thereby (c) inflicting permanent damage on the Democratic Party’s coalition.

You should probably stock up on popcorn. Just sayin’ . ..



 

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‘A Routine Patrol’ in Rafah

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In March, Kamala Harris had a warning for Israel:

In a wide-ranging new interview with ABC News, Vice President Kamala Harris suggested there could be “consequences” for Israel if it moves ahead with a planned invasion of Rafah in its pursuit of Hamas fighters. . . .
“We have been clear in multiple conversations and in every way that any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake,” Harris told ABC News’ Senior Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott in part of the interview that aired Sunday on “This Week.”
“Let me tell you something: I have studied the maps. There’s nowhere for those folks to go,” Harris said.

Well, what happened? Last week, the Hamas leader who masterminded the October 7 massacre was killed during a “major military operation in Rafah.” The most interesting aspect of this was that, while the Israelis had been hunting him for more than a year, it wasn’t any kind of targeted raid that finally put an end to his terrorist career:

It was a routine patrol for a unit of Israeli soldiers in the southern Gaza Strip. Then a firefight erupted and the Israelis, backed by drones, destroyed part of a building where several militants had taken cover, Israeli officials said.
When the dust cleared and they began searching the building, the soldiers found a body that bore a striking resemblance to someone they had not expected to find, a man their country had been hunting for since Oct. 7, 2023: Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas.
For more than a year, as tens of thousands of Gazans were killed, Mr. Sinwar had eluded the full force of Israel’s military and security establishment, which had dedicated every means at its disposal to finding and killing him. Many believed he was hiding underground in Gaza and had surrounded himself with hostages taken from Israel.
In the end, the Israeli officials said, he was killed above ground on Wednesday, alongside two other militants, with no sign of hostages nearby. The Israeli authorities said they had confirmed his death on Thursday, using dental records and fingerprints. His DNA was also tested for confirmation, according to one Israeli official and the White House.

Good-bye and good riddance to this murderous monster, but if Israel had listened to Kamala Harris, Yahya Sinwar would have been safe in Rafah.

Gosh, it’s almost as if Kamala is pro-Hamas, and yet there are still Jews who will vote for her — liberalism is a suicidal psychosis.



 

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