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Kamala wanted to run the country. In the end, she couldn't even run her own campaign.
Apparently, the Harris campaign is $20 million in debt despite spending at least $1 billion over the last 3 months. On the other hand, the Trump campaign was frugal - spending only about 1/3 or 1/2 as much as Kamala (quibble about the exact numbers all you want). Staffing in particular seems to have been a major difference with Harris spending perhaps an order of magnitude more than Trump. Harris hired high paid consultants while Trump relied on free labor from passionate supporters.
It gets worse.
The Harris campaign has been accused of paying celebrities for exposure. Surely, already rich celebrities like Beyoncé and Oprah would be happy to support their favored candidate for free. Right? Apparently not. Fox News has reported that the Harris campaign paid Oprah a million dollars to interview her. Lizzo and Cardi B have also been singled out as receiving payments.
Is it any wonder that these celebrity endorsements don't work when they are so fake?
Contra Scott's too much money in dark almonds piece, I think the reason that political campaign donations are relatively low is that it's really hard to buy an election. Bloomberg tried to back in 2020 and his campaign went nowhere. Money does matter, but the candidate matters a lot more. $1 to Trump makes a bigger difference than $3 to Harris. And Trump appearing on Rogan might have been worth $100 million, but he didn't have to pay a cent.
yeah. Hype is overrated, as is money in politics. Look at all the hype over bitcoin over the past 3-4 years yet the price has hardly done anything; meanwhile unsexy SPY/voo crushed it. VC/crypto bros showered $ on Trump for his support; if i had to wager, they will see big fat zero for their efforts. It's hard enough to pull the levers of power by the very people who are are in power...good luck doing it indirectly. Politics in the US is influenced by seniority and connections, which is how such underwhelming choice as Harris got so far anyway. She had paid her dues.
Hype can certainly help. Without some positive attention even the best product will sit on the shelf. On the other hand most people will be smart enough to notice when the sales pitch is overselling the actual product.
Kamala had a lot of negatives that were pretty obvious. She’s annoying and has a nervous laugh that’s obnoxious. She can’t give interviews, and when she does, her obvious non-answers are barely comprehensible. She cannot generate enthusiasm for her own ideas. Her rallies needed concerts just to get people to show up. At the end of the day, all the marketing in the world can’t make New Coke taste good.
She is a caricature of everything the right attributes to the left. But we're talking an extremely shallow pool of choices.
It continues to strike me as odd that a party that dominates the Ivy Leagues and Wall Street has had to field back to back candidates that went to Delaware and Howard grads.
And the party that loves the uneducated went with the Ivy League; both Bushes went to Yale and Trump to the University of Pennsylvania.
And Vances is OSU>Yale IIRC. A path generally only for the hyper gifted.
Undoubtedly he’s smart, but hillbilly kid who enlisted and became a military journalist in Iraq is one of those stories Yale admissions would love, not that I’m sure he didn’t also do very well on the LSAT.
You would think so, but actually admissions stats indicate a strong discrimination effect at Ivies against rural kids.
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