The Collapse of Kamala Harris | Opinion

On July 26, in the aftermath of the Democratic Party’s ruthless midsummer coup of their own democratically elected presidential nominee, this column predicted that the elevation of dimwitted cackler-in-chief Kamala Harris to the party’s presidential slot would “spectacularly backfire.” More specifically, I wrote: “Practically, the path to winning 270 Electoral College votes still runs through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is frankly bizarre for Democrats to swap out the man who talks ceaselessly about his hardscrabble Scranton upbringing for a Californian who boasts the most left-wing voting record of any presidential nominee in modern history.”
I’m feeling pretty good these days about that prognosis.
Harris recently campaigned in Erie, Pennsylvania—a crucial regional hub in this election cycle’s most important battleground state. Conspicuously absent from that snoozefest was incumbent Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-Pa.). Harris tried to pass off the snub as a nothingburger, suggesting that Casey was doing the more important work of knocking on doors and getting out the vote. This doesn’t pass the laugh test. Facing a spirited challenge from Republican hopeful Dave McCormick, Casey has clearly concluded that Harris’ immense Bay Area lefty baggage—her history of endorsing the Green New Deal, a national fracking ban and crippling electric vehicle mandates—is an electoral albatross around his neck.
It’s tough to blame Casey. Other vulnerable Senate Democratic incumbents, such as Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.), reached the same conclusion a while ago. Such a conclusion makes a great deal of sense: A recent Marist national general election poll, for instance, shows Trump up a whopping 10 points on Harris with registered independents. If that margin ends up being anywhere near accurate, it is extraordinarily difficult to see a scenario in which Trump loses.
Harris has recently been engaging in what the psychology profession calls “projection,” ludicrously criticizing Donald Trump for avoiding the media when it was actually Harris who infamously avoided a single one-on-one sit-down interview for weeks on end following the Biden coup. In reality, Trump recently sat down for two interviews with TIME magazine, whose owner is a vocal Harris donor. Harris declined a Time interview, nonetheless. Prior to this week’s desperate, last-second change of course, which saw her sit down with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Harris had only deigned to sit down with the most obsequious media imaginable.
One can only wonder how bad the Harris-Walz internal polling must be to impel her to ditch the far-left “Call Her Daddy” podcast and the friendly ladies of “The View” for the considerably more mainstream Baier. Desperate times sure call for desperate measures. Democrats routinely blast Republicans as misogynistic, but their own chronic misandry is so bad that Kamala is apparently considering a sit-down with podcast king Joe Rogan, whose own brand of woke-skeptical irreverence sharply clashes with Harris’ identity politics obsessions and overt race-based pandering. The tables sure have turned. Will the last person hanging around Harris-Walz campaign headquarters please turn off the lights?
Snark aside, this race isn’t over yet. But the Harris-Walz camp cannot possibly be feeling too good right now, either.
Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for their predicament. Throughout this interminable campaign season, they have studiously avoided substantive discussion of the four issues that Americans consistently tell pollsters are most important to them this cycle: the economy, inflation, immigration and crime. Instead, they have repeatedly attempted to shift the electoral terrain back to the few issues that poll in their favor: namely, abortion and the Jan. 6 jamboree at the Capitol. In this, they have completely failed. The American people still care above all about the same four basic quality-of-life issues that they have cared the most about for years now. It is Democrats’ own fault that they are so woefully out of touch with the voters’ sentiments on those issues and that the Biden-Harris administration’s track record polls as poorly as it does.
Perhaps, if the Harris-Walz ticket does go down in flames, Democrats will pause and take a long, hard look in the mirror. Perhaps they will recognize that promising late-term abortion is a peculiar way to pander to women, that pledging mass amnesty for illegal aliens is a counterproductive way to pander to Hispanics, and that dangling marijuana legalization is an outright offensive way to pander to blacks. Perhaps. But if history is any indication, they probably won’t.
Josh Hammer is Newsweek senior editor-at-large, host of “The Josh Hammer Show” and “America on Trial with Josh Hammer,” a syndicated columnist, senior counsel for the Article III Project, and a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation. Subscribe here for “The Josh Hammer Report,” a Newsweek newsletter, as well as Josh Hammer’s Subtext text message group. X: @josh_hammer.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.