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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.
Is anyone supposed to be convinced by that? What's next, "The New England Patriots didn't play on the far half of the football field, so it's unfair to say they lost the game because of that."?
The pundits are claiming that she abandoned a powerful and convincing topic because...why, exactly? The fact is that Trump did run on Kamala's stance on trans issues, and got some easy wins from that.
Yes, 100% this. I've largely stopped paying attention to election campaigns because the major parties have extensive track records on exactly the things I'm concerned about instead of a proxy measure like how well they can focus-group and make promises. I still check up on independent candidates and the individual representatives, but it hasn't shifted my vote yet.
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