Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I was working on a post in a desultory manner but decided to wait until tomorrow. Plus it’s snowing fairly heavily in Chicago so everything is a big mess of sloppy ice water.
BUT: this is excellent news if you have any neurons (click to read):
The NYT:
Matt Gaetz, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s contentious choice for attorney general who had faced a torrent of scrutiny, said on Thursday that he was withdrawing from consideration for the role.
“It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on X. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle.”
Mr. Gaetz, who visited with Republican senators on Wednesday to help make a case for his selection, said in the post that the meetings were “excellent,” and that “momentum was strong.” But he added that “Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1,” referring to the Justice Department.
He added, “I remain fully committed to see that Donald J. Trump is the most successful President in history. I will forever be honored that President Trump nominated me to lead the Department of Justice and I’m certain he will Save America.”
Mr. Gaetz was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for sexual misconduct until he resigned from the House on Nov. 13, after Mr. Trump announced his intention to nominate him.
Mr. Trump, in a social media post, said he appreciated Mr. Gaetz’s attempts to win over senators and be confirmed as attorney general, adding that he thought Mr. Gaetz “was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the administration.”
House Republicans voted yesterday to block the Ethics Committee report on Gaetz, but the momentum for withdrawal was strong. I am glad because I always thought that Gaetz had the greatest potential to harm America among all the cabinet members, followed by Pete Hegseth (Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense), and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (proposed Secretary of Health and human services.
I’ve always been a big fan of James Carville, the political strategist who turned 80 last month. I love his Louisiana accent, his curmudgeonly behavior and pull-no-punches discourse, and his inevitable appearance on television wearing a Louisana State University shirt, the place he went to college (he was also in the Marines).
You may remember Carville in the 1993 movie “The War Room” as a main strategist, along with George Stephanopoulos, of Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign. That film was great, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary (it didn’t win). Here’s Carville giving his minions a peptalk the day before Clinton’s election. He tears up a little as he gives his message:
But we forget that Carville was also the advisor to several losing Presidential campaigns of Democrats, including John Kerry in 2004, Hillary Clinton in 2008, and Colorado Senator Michael Bennet in 2020.
Carville wasn’t involved directly in Kamala Harris’s campaign, though he contributed to the effort, but right up to the end he thought that Harris would win, and said so loudly and confidently. Here he makes his prediction only five days before the election. (I still love his straightforward style of speaking.) Carville disappears in the middle of the video, but returns at about 5:50 to reaffirm his optimism, promising that the women of America will take Harris over the top.
Yes, Carville’s confident predictions were wrong.
Below you see his postmortem with Amanpour on CNN after the election, acting somewhat sheepish (“winning is everything,” he says) and branding the Democrats as “losers” and now an “opposition party”. His analysis: Harris didn’t sufficiently distinguish herself from Biden, a failure that proved “decisive.” He also blames the lack of an open primary process and the failure of Harris to layout new policies. Finally, he says at the end that the Democrats have been tarred for a long time by the party’s wokeness, and though Harris pivoted a bit towards the center, her party was still tarred with the “stench” of wokeness. As he says, “It’s gonna take more than one cycle to get this stench off of the Democratic Party, and it’s a STENCH of the highest order, let me tell you.” (He throws in that the Party could have given a much stronger economic message.)
But he knew this stuff already when he appeared in the video above! He was simply wrong, and this somewhat detracts from his ability to read politics. Yes, a lot of people were wrong, as the election was close, but somehow I’ve always put my faith in Carville.
But, at eighty, Carville still vows to fight on as a member of the disloyal opposition. He’s already thinking about the 2026 midterms, and about what the Democratic Party has to do to win some Senate and House seats. Ceiling Cat bless this Bayou Curmudgeon!
I have never singled out a single factor that I considcered crucial in Trump’s victory against Harris, because there were so many factors in play. These include immigration, the economy, wokeness among Dems (loudly decried by Trump’s ads), Harris’s failure to choose Josh Shapiro as a running mate, Biden’s failure to resign, the word-salady nature of Harris’s campaign and her refusal to answer questions like “How would your administration differ from Biden’s?”, and, of course, the blame people affix to Republicans, saying that they are simply misogynistic, stupid, and nationalistic yokels. A change in any of these factors might have changed the election’s results, but, in truth, we don’t know. All we can offer is post facto analyses. That’s why I simply post a diversity of takes so readers can hear all viewpoints.
In response to one public post I recently put on Facebook about Laura Helmuth leaving Scientific American after going on an expletive-laden post-election rant that demonized Trump voters as “fucking fascists”, as well as “mean, dumb, and bigoted,” I got one comment that basically agreed with Helmuth:
I think the outcome of the election was abysmal, dreadful, and maybe the trans activists were a small part of the problem, but a much bigger problem is the poor state of American education and the country’s persistent religiosity. Again, not the fault of the left.
In other words, this commenter agreed with Helmuth, throwing into the mix the high religiosity of Americans. I haven’t talked to enough people in my elite “bubble” to know how pervasive this feeling is.
In the 38-minute video below, a segment of Dan Senor’s “Call Me Back” show, New York freshman Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres, only 36, says that the Democratic left basically scuppered the election by infusing the party with progressive ideology, refusing to address the two issues that really mattered to the middle- and lower-class voters: immigration and inflation. Torres represents the South Bronx, and his district is characterized by Wikipedia as “by one measure the poorest congressional district in the United States.”
A couple of quotes from Torres:
“My diagnosis is that we have to Stop pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter and Tik Tok than it is to the real world and start listening to working-class people of color—working class people in general—who have historically been the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.”
“The movement of ‘defund the police’ has done almost irreparable damage to the brand of the Democratic Party. . . . if the objective is to win elections in the real world, then we have to marginalize the far left in favor of working class Americans.”
Torres is not hesitant to criticize Biden or Harris, calling Biden’s actions on immigration “political malpractice”, which aroused clear signs of popular discontent well before the election.
Senor, who comes from a Jewish background, then brings up an issue that most commenters have neglected: the Jewish vote. As he notes, Jewish voters went for the GOP in higher proportions than previously, so that in this election Jewish voters were largely “up for grabs”—unsure about how to vote. Slogans from the far left like “globalize the intifada,” or “from the river to the sea,” says Torres, alienated Jewish voters, most of whom support Israel.
Torres theorizes that the Jewish vote may have been decisive in states like Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona, all of whom went for Trump. He adds that the says far left “chose to wage an antisemitic smear campaign in an attempt to sabotage Josh Shapiro, simply because he was a Jew who spoke out against the antisemitism after October 7. . . . The far left’s hatred for Donald Trump was exceeded only by its hatred for Israel and for any Jew who identifies unequivocally as pro Israel. And that to me was the ultimate example of how destructive the far left can be to our ability to win elections.”
Torres argues that Harris herself wasn’t anti-Israel, but a mainstream, pro-Israel centrist who was falsely painted as anti-Israel by the far left. Nevertheless, as you may know, Harris talked out of both sides of her mouth, always mentioning the suffering of Palestinian people when she defended Israel. As Senor says, Harris was, on the Gaza War, talking out of both sides of her mouth to appeal to both sides. Senor argues that this kind of moral equivalency, or moral equivocation, cost Harris Jewish votes.
Torres chimes in eloquently, saying that in all politics, candidates must espouse “moral clarity”, and Jews didn’t feel Harris’s pious mouthings “in their kishkes“. (Torres gets extra points for the Yiddish.)
30 minutes in, Torres goes on an eloquent tear, including stuff like this:
“The fact that the far left would wage an antisemitic smear campaign against the most popular governor of the most pivotal swing state: that should have been a wake-up call that the far left is willing to sacrifice what is best for the Democratic party on the altar of ideological purity and anti-Zionism.”
Senor adds that pro-Hamas and anti-Israel protests weren’t just a Jewish issue—that others look at people celebrating Hamas and Hezbollah and get turned off by the far left. Torres thinks that the failure to deal with such protests undercut Americans’ sense of safety and convinced them that government cannot keep people safe. This, he sayus, was an indictment of the governments of both New York State and New York City.
In the end, since people of color, both middle-class and impecunious ones, are Torres’s constituents, he concludes that, at least in his district, the cost of living far, far outweighed their concern for a war 5,000 miles away.
I recommend this video not because it gives the reason why the Democrats were routed, but why they were routed in a poor, black district. And, to me at least, having sympathies for Israel, it makes Torres look like a guy with an exceedingly bright future in Democratic politics.
Everybody has their own theory about the most important factor leading to the Democrats’ loss a week ago. People blame Biden, Harris, the Republicans (whose supporters are characterized as fascistic racists), the left-wing press, and the wokeness of Democrats, which pushed Harris and the party away from the center towards the “progressive” (far Left) side.
In the 40-minute video below, Sam Harris zeroes in on the last factor—the fulminating wokeness of Democrats. Make no mistake about it, Harris was a vehement opponent of Trump, but here he is—as I often do—noting the problems with “Democratic” views that make them lose elections. In this case, it’s wokeness, especially the brand centered on “trans” issues.
Sam’s overall take: the Left “did not pivot to the political center in a way that the voters found credible.” He adds that the planks of Harris’s platform were “rotten”, especially those supporting identity politics. As he says, “identity politics is over, nobody wants it.”
In particular—and for this Sam will be excoriated for transphobia, though he’s not transphobic—he says that “activism about transgender politics has deranged our politics as long as Trump has been in politics.” Harris emphsizes that he supports transgender rights (meaning “legal rights”), but thinks the electorate rejects the idea that males identifying as females should be competing in sports against biological females. Neither do I and neither does Sam, but he adds that “if [that] sounds like transphobia to you, then you are the problem.” He goes on to characterize gender activism as a “new religion” or a “cult”, but again emphasizes that it is the excesses of that movement that turns him off just as it repelled potential voters for Harris. (Sam says, as an aside, that “We should help those who are truly gender dysphoric.”)
Where readers might disagree is Sam’s emphasis on gender activism as THE factor that turned off centrists and moderates, and may have swung the election. As he says,
“A shocking percentage of Democrats imagine that all the controversy about trans rights and gender identity in kids is just right wing bigotry, and a non-issue politically, whereas it is obvious that for millions of Americans it might as well have been the only issue in this election–not because they’re transphobic assholes, but because they simply do not accept the new metaphysics, and even the new biology, mandated by trans activists and the institutions that htye have successfully bullied and captured. . . . Congratulations, Democrats: you have found the most annoying thing in the fucking galaxy and hung it around your necks.”
Sam has apparently abandoned the calmness accompanying the meditation he practices, for the piece is larded with uncharacteristic profanity, including Sam’s peevish claim that if we Democrats continue this way, “You’re going to get President Candace Fucking Owens some day.” But I applaud the increasing use of profanity in such podcast, for that’s the way people actually talk.
Sam then appends the claim that cultural issues, not inflation or the border, may have been the crucial factor that swung the election towards Trump—although of course there may have been many factors, each of which, if mitigated, could have changed the course of a close election. These include the following:
a.) The degradation of major cities run by Democratic mayors, who don’t do anything about homelessness or pervasive theft in retail stores.
b.) The lack of policing or criticism of policing in many places. As he says, officials “won’t police the streets but they police the language.”
c.) The failure of Democrats to take Islamism, and terrorist organizations like Hamas, sufficiently seriously. “Democrats needs to figure out,” he says, “that civilization needs to be defended from barbarism.” While he notes that both Biden and Harris did support Israel, during the election they—and by this he means Kamala Harris—”talked out of both sides of their mouths.” Indeed she did, for I paid close attention.
In the end, Sam concludes that “Democratic moral confusion cost the Democrats millions of votes.” While you may say that equivocation and both-sides-of-the-mouth talking is the heart of politics, Sam is saying that the moral rectitude was not rocket science, but comprised centrist and populist views that wokeness prevented Democrats from espousing. And the GOP picked up on this moral weakness, making it the subject of many pro-Trump ads like the one below.
I recommend that you listen to Sam’s audio here. I’ve put two extra items below it.
Here’s one of the Trump ads that excoriated Democrats for wokeness, concentrating on Kamala’s support for government-funded gender surgery for incarcerated immigrants who entered the country illegally (yes, she did say that):
And here’s a kerfuffle at CNN showing how vehemently some liberals take gender activism. One guy goes ballistic when the speaker, Republican Shermichael Singleton, suggests that boys (who assume the female gender) shouldn’t be able to compete in in women’s athletics, saying “they’re not boys”. And then the room explodes, with the moderator demanding “respect” for that view and suggesting that the athletics ban is “transphobic”. Singleton keeps saying that this is what “regular people” think, and he’s right. It’s the insistence on that kind of misguided activism that, says Harris, is precisely why the Democrats lost. Well, weigh in below.
“I am NOT going to listen to transphobia at this table!”
CNN panelist loses their mind over “slur” used by Republican strategist during trans sports debate. pic.twitter.com/5PXnSJW4A0
Here’s Bill Maher’s 7-minute comedy/news bit from Friday’s “Real Time.” The title of the episode refers, of course, to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s statement at a Trump Rally in NYC: “”There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” It was not funny, and did not go down well, though of course nothing hurts Trump.
In this bit Maher is calling attention to the human-caused “death of the ocean”. He avers that un-polluting the ocean will be much harder than curbing global warming. And what we see on the surface (there’s one “garbage island” the size of France!) is only the tip of the iceberg: 70% of the garbage, much of it plastic, sinks to the bottom.
Curiously, Maher avoids discussing the election results save to say that Harris was part of the only party that even deals with the environment, yet she never mentioned pollution and even reversed her earlier anti-fracking position. Maher clearly sees oceanic pollution—and environmental pollution in general—as critical but ignored issuea. Recycling, he says, is a crock, since only 9% of plastic gets recycled.
. . . and here’s his 3½-minute monologue about the election itself:
Despite the calls of both Presidential candidates to “unite America”, the calls of many to “reach across the aisle” and confect bipartisan legislation, and the advice of some that it’s time to discuss America’s differences instead of hating one’s opponents, we are now hearing calls from Democrats and liberals to boot those who voted for Trump out of our lives.
I disagree. I know some of those people, and although I don’t like the way they voted, I don’t think that’s sufficient to avoid them forever, or to give them sharp lectures that they are fascists and tried to ruin America and our livelihood. There are, as I’ve pointed out in the nooz over the last few days, a diversity of reasons why people voted for Trump: wokeism of the Left, their own economic problems due to inflation, immigration, and so on—reasons that can be debated but not dismissed.
Sadly, we have some on the Left becoming haters like this. One such person is discussed in a column on by Jonathan Turley written on his website. Turley is a professor at George Washington University Law School, an attorney, a legal scholar. and, I believe, a libertarian. As noted below, Turley wrote a recent column in The Hill about the “liberal rage” that is spreading now that Democrats have started to internalize the election debacle. In that piece Turley made a reasonable point:
It is important to note at the outset that there is no reason Democratic activists should abandon their values just because they lost this election. Our system is strengthened by passionate and active advocacy.
No, not everyone who voted for Trump is a fascist racist, or misogynist. (For crying out loud, a huge number of women voted against Harris.( In fact, more than half of all Americans voted for the Orange Man, since Harris apparently lost the popular vote. I am embarrassed before the world that we chose Trump to hold the most important job in the country, but there it is.
Ergo the rage. In his new column, Turley note a particularly striking and offensive (to me) example of that rage: a resident in psychiatry at Yale. Turley’s words:
With women pledging to break up with their boyfriends and divorce their husbands over the Trump victory, Yale University chief psychiatry resident Dr. Amanda Calhoun is advising that it may also be necessary for your mental health to cut off your family and friends who supported Trump. In that way, you can avoid being “triggered” by opposing political views — much like Yale itself.
As academics, we are dealing with the election on campuses across America. After the election, I had some valuable discussions with students who supported Harris and some who supported Trump. I wish there would be more interaction between the two groups. That is why this story stood out for me. I do not believe that further separation or isolation will help this country or these individuals.
Dr. Calhoun went on MSNBC’s Joy Reid to offer the curious take on good mental health. Reid has spent the week condemning the majority of voters (particularly minority voters) in the nation as racists and misogynists for the Trump victory.
Reid joined a rising tide of rage, which I discussed in my column this weekend. Dr. Calhoun added her voice to the madness.
“So, if you are going into a situation where you have family members, where you have close friends who you know have voted in ways that are against you… it’s completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why…
…You know, to say, ‘I have a problem with the way that you voted because it went against my very livelihood, and I’m not going to be around you this holiday. I need to take some space for me.’ I think you should very much be entitled to do so, and I think it may be essential for your mental health.”
There is another possibility. You can try to resolve those feelings with people who you previously liked or loved. It may actually help to discuss these issues outside of the echo chamber of your political associations.
If you want to hear Calhoun, who is African-American, actually say what she said above, click on the screenshot below, which will take you to the Fox News column showing a video of Calhoun speaking to Joy Reid on MSNBC. Yes, the words she said are indeed the ones above:
Turley adds this and touts his book, which I haven’t read:
Across the country, women have been cutting their hair and joining the Korean 4B movement—bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no dating), and bisekseu (no sex). One is quoted as saying, “I fear The Handmaid’s Tale will become our reality.”
It is a curious response since figures like Reid blame white women for the loss. Trump won white women voters by eight points at 53 percent. Harris actually fell slightly in the support of women overall. Conversely, roughly 43 percent of men voted for Harris. Yet I watched one deranged voter say that she is thinking of buying a “Glock” and shooting the first man who comes near her. If so, she would have an over 4 out of 10 likelihood of shooting a fellow Harris supporter.
None of this is good for our nation’s mental health and suggesting that people retreat further into their silos does not make for particularly healthy advice.
As discussed in my book, The Indispensable Right, we have become a nation of rage addicts. Taking another hit of rage will do little to break that addiction.
Now I didn’t vote for Trump, of course, but I am not prepared to either lecture people who did, telling them that they were attacking my livelihood, or telling them that I don’t want to associate with them. I suppose it’s okay to say that “I want to take some time for myself right now,” without giving the reason, and then trying to have a discussion later.
Of course people can sever any relationship they want over the election, but that sort of attitude doesn’t seem to me conducive to mental health—even though Calhoun is a shrink—and it’s certainly not good for the Democrats. After all, a common element in post-election analyses is the idea that the elitism of Democrats, combined with their characterizing their enemies as yokels or fascists, are factors that turned off centrists and leftish Republicans.
There will be some lively discussion around the Thanksgiving and Christmas groaning boards, but Calhoun’s table will be emptier than usual.
Like many Americans (and readers) this morning, I woke up, fumbled for my computer, and read the results in a state of shock. The Republicans had won everything: the Presidency, the Senate, and, most likely, the House (see NYT results below). As one of my friends wrote me, in the first email of the day, “I did not see this coming.” Neither did I. Click the headline below to see the NYT story (archived here for free)
A pessimistic take from the NYT:
Donald J. Trump rode a promise to smash the American status quo to win the presidency for a second time on Wednesday, surviving a criminal conviction, indictments, an assassin’s bullet, accusations of authoritarianism and an unprecedented switch of his opponent to complete a remarkable return to power.
Mr. Trump’s victory caps the astonishing political comeback of a man who was charged with plotting to overturn the last election but who tapped into frustrations and fears about the economy and illegal immigration to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris.
His defiant plans to upend the country’s political system held appeal to tens of millions of voters who feared that the American dream was drifting further from reach and who turned to Mr. Trump as a battering ram against the ruling establishment and the expert class of elites.
In a deeply divided nation, voters embraced Mr. Trump’s pledge to seal the southern border by almost any means, to revive the economy with 19th-century-style tariffs that would restore American manufacturing and to lead a retreat from international entanglements and global conflict.
Now, Mr. Trump will serve as the 47th president four years after reluctantly leaving office as the 45th, the first politician since Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s to lose re-election to the White House and later mount a successful run. At the age of 78, Mr. Trump has become the oldest man ever elected president, breaking a record held by President Biden, whose mental competence Mr. Trump has savaged.
His win ushers in an era of uncertainty for the nation.
To roughly half the country, Mr. Trump’s rise portends a dark turn for American democracy, whose future will now depend on a man who has openly talked about undermining the rule of law. Mr. Trump helped inspire an assault on the Capitol in 2021, has threatened to imprison political adversaries and was denounced as a fascist by former aides. But for his supporters, Mr. Trump’s provocations became selling points rather than pitfalls.
As of early Wednesday, the results showed Mr. Trump improving on his 2020 showing in counties all across America with only limited exceptions. Mr. Trump had secured the necessary swing states — including Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — to guarantee him the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.
Republicans also picked up at least two Senate seats, in Ohio and West Virginia, to give the party a majority in the Senate. Control of the House of Representatives was still too close to call.
Here are the results by state, with a few still undecided (the last update was at 5:45 a.m. Eastern time). As everyone expected, Illinois, as well as most of New England, went blue, while all the swing states with called elections (notably Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia) went for Trump. But he already has 277 Electoral-College votes, 7 more than he needs to win. Harris has not yet conceded nor made any announcement, though I heard on the news that she will speak this morning. Click on the map to see the state-by-state results:
Yes, America elected a man who, I think, is unstable and afflicted with narcissistic personality disorder. He is the first felon elected as President of the United States. Who knows what will happen? I was never a big fan of Kamala Harris, but I see Trump as unpredictable enough to plunge us into war. For the next four years we will face the Republicans enacting their agenda, making their laws and verifying them via a Republican-controlled Supreme Court.
I am not a political pundit, so all I can do is give my own personal reactions. Until recently, I thought that this election was Trump’s to lose, even though I knew it would be a squeaker. But Trump’s behavior over the last few weeks—the dark language, the execrable performance during the one debate, his laughter at the idea that reporters might be shot, the vows to overturn America starting on Day 1—all of this made me think that there is no way Americans could elect such a man.
They did.
On the other hand, I sometimes thought that this election was Harris’s to lose. What the American people wanted, I thought, was not only somebody likable (I don’t see Harris that way, but as someone who panders and dissimulates), and, most important, we—and by that I mean centrists, Democrats, and Republicans who don’t like Trump—wanted Harris to espouse a policy. But instead of hearing that, we heard a woman unable to answer questions, who pandered to the electorate using identity politics (which she’d seemingly foresworn), who seemed to be hiding the fact that she was really on the Progressive Left, and, in general, did not seem able to convince the public that she could handle the most important job in the world. She did not earn her nomination, but inherited it, and subsequently did nothing to show that she deserved it.
Still, all along I felt that she was a far better candidate than was Trump. She lost, I think, because she was not sufficiently centrist, and because she didn’t show, as Presidents must, that she had the ability to think on her feet. If there is a lesson for Democrats here, it is to recalibrate their message and move towards the center, and listen to the American people when they speak about things like immigration and the economy (no, tariffs—also Trump’s solution—are not the way to solve that)
Did wokeness cost Harris the election? Who knows, and I’m not prepared to assert it. (Note that the NYT above considers this a blow against “the elite.”) But I think the era of identity politics (an integral part of wokeism) has come to an end. Harris largely avoided them, but she still lost, for she did not lay out a program that would appeal to all Americans, which was what she promised to do. Perhaps, given the divisions in America, such a program is impossible.
Donald Trump ended his first term in disgrace, hit with a second impeachment after his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The 2022 midterm candidates he endorsed—Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz, Kari Lake—all went down in flames. In 2023, he was declared guilty of sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll in a civil case. This past May, he was convicted in a Manhattan court on 34 felony counts for improperly reporting hush money payments. Overall, he has faced 116 indictments. Even now, the New York State attorney general is trying to punish the Trump Organization with nearly $500 million in fines, claiming that he unlawfully inflated the value of his properties.
And yet here he is: America’s 47th president.
. . . . Trump’s mastery of political imagery [they describe four “iconic photographs,” including his punching-the-air photo after a bullet nicked his ear] stands in sharp contrast to Vice President Kamala Harris, who kept making gaffes when she needed to demonstrate basic competence. One such howler came at a rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan, eight days before Election Day. As the crowd chanted “Ka-ma-la! Ka-ma-la!” the vice president implored her fans: “Now I want each of you to shout your own name. Do that.” The cheers stopped. Then Harris offered an awkward laugh and, like a comic having to explain a joke that didn’t land, she said, “’cause it’s about all of us.”
In one stumble, you have a synopsis of what went wrong for the Harris-Walz ticket in 2024. Here was a friendly audience, raring to go, in a must-win state, brought to stunned silence because the candidate apparently hadn’t thought through a throwaway line at a rally. In the home stretch of the election, Harris couldn’t close the deal even as the media graded her on a curve.
In some ways, the Democratic Party should have seen all of this coming. In the perilous four weeks between Biden’s disastrous debate performance and the selection of Harris to replace him on the ticket, a number of Democratic insiders publicly proposed an abbreviated primary campaign to avoid anointing the vice president. Harris was seen by many Democrats as a liability. At the beginning of the summer she had a 37.9 approval rating, along with a reputation for being terrible to her staff and pathetic when it came to thinking on her feet.
A key part of her strategy was a disciplined avoidance of the media. Harris didn’t do her first solo television interview as her party’s nominee until five weeks after her selection on September 13. And until October, she largely avoided saying what she would do if she won the White House.
That turned out to be a good strategy. Because once Harris started to open her mouth, she reverted to form. Consider her October 8 appearance on The View, when she was asked the most obvious question of a vice president serving in an unpopular administration: What would you have done differently than President Biden? Her response: “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”
Is there any good news? Only that we won’t have a January 6 situation again! But joking aside, and despite all the anguish of my friends and most Democrats, I am strangely hopeful—hopeful that yes, the Republic can and will withstand four years of Trump and Republican rule. Somehow my faith in America has immunized me against the results of this election.
Beyond that, I can make no predictions save that Trump will not be elected again.
Here are the results of our poll from two days ago, and some readers have already sent anguished comments and emails. Harris was favored by more than six to one, and she was predicted to win by 62% of those who voted:
Finally, I listened to most of this two-hour podcast yesterday, created by The Free Press and moderated by Bari Weiss. It shows Sam Harris making the case for electing Kamala Harris, and Ben Shapiro making the case for Trump. This is about the best discussion I’ve heard, and I was convinced by Harris, especially his arguments against Trump. But Shapiro was no slouch, even though his case against Harris was better than his case for Trump.
Again, all I can think is this: “Our Republic will stand.” Ceiling Cat bless us all.
You are welcome to comment below. I’ll put up the Hili dialogue in an hour or so.
