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Notes -
A comparison I haven't seen posed: Kamala vs Hillary. I think the comparison points to a Donald victory. Since he beat Hillary, he'll beat Kamala. (Meta: why is it that Trump is rarely referred to by first name?)
Hillary has the stronger resume: U.S. senator (2001–09) and secretary of state (2009–13) for Obama. Compare to Kamala: attorney general of California (2011–17), U.S. Senate (2017–21), VP (21-). Or, maybe it's a tie, if you're somehow impressed by her time as VP.
Criticism of Hillary's demeanor is around being elitist and robotic, which beats Harris's positionless word salad.
Trump 2016 was much scarier: as a total unknown, it was at least a little more credible he'd do, uh, much more than be in office while three Supreme Court judges died.
No it doesn’t. Hillary seemed like a bitch on a personal level, whereas Harris seems like a wine aunt with a xanax problem elevated beyond her station in life, which is fundamentally more sympathetic.
People (including many people who were not on the hard right, like average New Yorkers) hated Hillary, or at least saw her as a megalomaniacal, power hungry social climber willing to do anything (even eg humiliate herself during Bill’s affairs) to advance her own ambitions.
Nobody seems to really hate Kamala; they may think she’s stupid or incompetent or a standard “woke” Democrat, but she isn’t personally repulsive in a way that the average politician isn’t, but in which Hillary was.
I’ve always thought that “at least he isn’t X” as a particularly good long term strategy. It marginally works when neither candidate is exciting their base well, and the Not-X candidate is at least a competent seeming middle of the road person who will do nothing more than keep going down the path. But if not, then it’s really more of a choice between X but he’s doing thing people like, or Not-X and incompetent.
There’s really nothing in the Kamala campaign that’s telling us she wants to do anything as president. When she makes her campaign stops, she’s talking about how scary and weird the other guys are. Well, after the concert anyway. But after nearly ten years of “he’s terrible, horrible, they’re evil” and him doing very little of evil, terrible, horrible things, it’s not landing anymore. Outside of the breathless true believers, nobody thinks Trump is evil. And now that this is gone, what’s left to scare people to the polls to vote Kamala? They don’t hate her, but what is there, besides the rapidly failing “Orange Man Bad” meme is there to get people to actually choose to stand in line for an hour for Kamala?
Conversely, if Kamala wins, does that mean you underestimated the power of Orange Man Bad?
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