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Notes -
The Harris Campaign Gives Their Side of the Story
Harris campaign staff joined establishment Democrat podcast Pod Save America for an election post-mortem.
What sticks out is how unsurprising everything is. These people are exactly the type of out-of-touch elite consultants that populists on both sides are always whining about. They come off as less woke than popularly imagined, but are every bit as uncreative, process oriented, and unaccountable as expected. Being on mobile due to the Thanksgiving holiday, I’m not in position to mine the transcript for key quotes, but clips from this podcast have been going viral on Twitter. A few highlights from memory:
Campaign staff had no preparation for Biden dropping out of the race.
They knew that the campaign message wasn’t getting through to young men. They still decided to prioritize on-the-ground campaigning in swing states over going on any of the bro podcasts. In their telling, Kamala was willing to go anywhere, but they simply ran out of time.
They flat-out couldn’t figure out a response to the “Kamala is for they/them” ad. Nothing they tested seemed effective.
They still think Liz Cheney is an avatar for moderate Republicans.
I am starting to think that the "they/them" ad will be long remembered. In a very close race one could point to any number of issues and proclaim it The Difference, but this was the last one; the one that drove a vital few thousand waffling voters, without an effective response.
I keep seeing progessives like Krystal Ball, Kyle Kulisnki and Jon Stewart parroting the new party line that "Kamala never ran on trans issues, so it's unfair to say she lost the election because of trans issues." They keep repeating the same "debunk" that Kamala never uttered the word trans in the last 3 months of her campaign or whatever.
However nearly everyone lived through the last 4 years of the Democrats expending massive amount of political capital pushing trans issues. The Biden admin "reinterpreting" Title IX to mandate how all publicly funded schools handle trans kid, which means penises in girls locker rooms, biological men in girls sports, and violating parental rights with secret transitions in schools. The Biden admin leaned on WPATH, already an organization with few guardrails due to their ideological biases, and had them remove all age guidelines on child transition. They appointed a trans pediatrician who's top priority as Assistant Secretary for Health seemed to be transitioning children, and even gave her a phony rank in the armed forces to have some fake historic "first".
And Kamala Harris said she would do nothing different than the Biden administration.
James Carville came out recently, to much derision from progressives, for claiming in his folksy way that if you govern a certain way, even if you don't run on it, the other sides gets to beat you upside the head with your record. And the Biden/Harris regime had a record of one of the worst crimes against humanity in history in promoting the sterilization and mutilation of children.
Trans is a great attack surface against Democrats. They are constitutionally incapable of backtracking due to the culture and composition of their coalition. They can ignore the issue — many of them would like to ignore the issue — but they cannot answer the question, “why was my daughter posted-up by a 6’2” man during her high school basketball game?”
The Dems probably thought the Republicans were incapable of backtracking on abortion, but Trump pulled it off.
Trump is Nixon in the "only Nixon can go to China" sense, on many many issues -- the Democrats habit of casting their Nixons into the outer darkness works against them here.
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Only Trump could do that, though. The democrats don't have a similar figure. Who is their great MAGA king?
Democrats have a bad habit of marginalizing all their most promising candidates early on so they can’t compete with party flacks. Hell, even Barack Obama only broke out by accident, that wasn’t how that election cycle was “supposed” to go.
Reminds me of the Bolsheviks being so scared of “Napoleonisation” (i.e. that a strong and charismatic party leader would upstage everyone else) that they hamstrung their most popular and effective guy, Trotsky, and were much the worse for it.
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