White House Race- August 31, 2024

66 Days Until Election Day

Labor Day traditionally marks the beginning of a general election, but in reality, the general election has been underway for months now. Actually, there have been two general elections. One was Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump which looked very close, then turned sharply in Trump's favor. Now, it has been Trump vs. Kamala Harris, in which all the momentum has seemingly been with Harris. However, nobody should be persuaded into thinking this is not still a very close race. Some metrics may favor the Democrat, but both Joe Biden who won, and Hillary Clinton who lost, were doing even better on Labor Days past. National and state polls have shown movement in Harris's direction, yet it is a fact that most polls understated support for Trump in both 2016 and 2020.

Democrats will say that they have over-performed  polls more recently, and that is partly true. However, the Trump general election voter may be a specific and harder entity to gain a handle on. We can be sure though that during this homestretch, Trump will continue to issue wild statements, outlandish remarks, and crazed rants, both on social media and in front of microphones. How much of that will matter?  We have seen his act for nine years now. People have either decided a long time ago that they hate it (which they should), that they love it, or that it is irrelevant to them, because the other side's policies scare them more.

Harris and the Democrats still need to close the deal. Yes, they need to make the prospect of Trump in office for four more years, and without guardrails, such a scary prospect, that all their voters turn out to vote against him and many who have reservations about Democrats, decide they have to take a chance to vote for them in this special circumstance. While Harris is clearly a stronger general election candidate than 82 year old Joe Biden (which is not saying she is as strong as a 78 year old Biden in 2020), there seems to some genuine skittishness in how her campaign is having her and her running-mate engage with the media and with voters. While Trump and JD Vance make negative headlines on a daily basis, some Democrats think that should be enough. Politically speaking, it potentially could, but that is a very cynical view of politics.

This week, Harris and Walz sat down in Georgia with Dana Bash for an interview that was pre-taped and lasted 27 minutes. Most on her side were relieved she got through it without any major gaffe or bad moment. The truth though, the performance was middling and her answers vague. The optics, which seems to have been the one thing that the campaign might have had more control over, were not perfect, with the Vice President seeming to be slouching in her chair. Harris gave some interesting insights into her conversation with Biden (and I made some brief remarks about that on here a few days ago) but still talked about the concept of "change" as if she and her party and especially her Administration has not been in power for nearly four years now. She tried to finesse the issue of having her changed her mind on things like fracking, without really giving  a viable reason. I suppose that might be the best they can do and just have to try to move on from whatever political liability it is. There should be little doubt that the pandering, far-left positions that Harris took as a Presidential candidate in 2019, when she was trying to compete with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are not good ones for a general election. She needs to walk away from those, but there should at least be a short, concise, narrative as to why. Something along the lines of , "When I became Vice President, I truly realized how much bigger this country is than just my state of California. and I am interested in what we can accomplish in a bipartisan matter together..."

 

Republicans will hit Harris as a "flip-flopper" but they really have no room to talk on that. Trump has famously been on many sides of nearly every issue. Just this week, he seemed to take two different positions on Florida's upcoming abortion referendum question.  First, he seemed to indicate that as a Florida voter, he would vote to protect "abortion rights" in his state because "six weeks is too short", which is the standard currently under state law. Then, social conservatives got quite upset and the next day Trump had to clarify that he would vote no on the question because Democrats are otherwise extremists on the issue. It has all led to a lot of confusion and evidence of wanting to be on both sides on every issue. Are single Pro-Life voters really going to stay home though?  Every vote will count in this close election, but my feeling is that Evangelical voters and the Pro-Life movement have sadly come to terms with what Trump is a long time ago and are still willing to go along with the con, just to keep the other side out of office. Some might say he could personally perform an abortion on Fifth Avenue and still keep their votes.

Even crazier this week is that Trump, fearful of the abortion issue in general, came across for federal government funding of IVF. That is something far more to the left than Barack Obama and the liberals could have ever really tried to get done when they wrote health care laws. I also believe that the left has disingenuously but smartly tried to tie the issue of fertility treatments to abortion. I do not think they really have anything to do with another, but they have been able to manipulate the issue in such a way and there are some pretty dumb folks on the far right who go along with threatening IVF as a way to "own the left."  As a Pro-Life conservative, I happen to have zero moral objection to IVF and am very glad that so many people in need can turn to it, but I do not think the government should pay for it. Such a plan would raise the health care premiums of all Americans, including the vast majority who will never use IVF. This is not conservatism whatsoever. It is far closer to socialism How ironic for Trump and his supporters to cry bloody murder about socialism and communism, and want to have the federal government pay for fertility treatments.

Each week, I could fill this entire column with examples of Trump's deplorable insanity. He continues to be very rattled by having Harris as his opponent, instead of Biden, the concept of not being "way ahead in all the polls", and having an opponent be seen as more of a political celebrity than he is. So, he continues to say outrageous things that are thinly veiled racial, sexist, and sexual attacks on his opponent. To be fair, he also says insane things about Tim Walz. As a side-note, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith indicted Trump again this week on some election interference charges, trying to get around a recent Supreme Court ruling, but that is pretty much considered minor news these days.

I had written this whole post and realized I forgot to touch on the much talked about incident which saw Trump visiting Arlington National Cemetery to "honor" the servicemembers who tragically lost their lives three years ago in Afghanistan due to horrific mistakes by the Biden Administration, by positing for photographs smiling and giving the thumbs- up on their graves. There was also an alleged physical dust-up between Trump campaign staff and a cemetery employee who was trying to prevent them from illegally making a campaign ad at a place where such a thing is explicitly not allowed. Yes, I could say a lot more about that whole thing, but I think I already said enough.

How will Harris and her campaign deal with Trump down the homestretch? They seem to be willing to, and in fact, wanting to get him to talk himself into trouble. They seem to welcome him being as outrageous as he possibly can. I think that can be a risky strategy. Yes, it may work, but the Vice President, and America as a whole, may be worse off for it too.

With Harris being about as less forthcoming on policy matters than any Presidential nominee in history, the debates, one of which is scheduled to take place on the rapidly approaching date of September 10, will be quite important. We know that Kamala Harris has done great with a teleprompter at rallies and at her convention, and that such a thing has greatly improved her political image and energized her party. How will she do face to fact against Trump? Many of her spontaneous interactions with the media have again, been far from stellar going back several years now. Expectations will be high for her, considering her background as a prosecutor, and higher than they were for the elderly Biden.

There has been a lot of silliness in my view this past week over the debate rules. Months ago, the Trump and Biden campaigns agreed to hold the debates without a studio audience and with microphones being shut off when it was not your time to speak. Democrats wanted both conditions, and Republicans acquiesced. That turned out to be a mistake for Biden, but looking at the other side of the coin, it did force them to change candidates. Now, Harris wants to change the rules to not have the microphones shut off. Trump's campaign is fighting that saying the rules have already been set, even though Trump himself has said he prefer they not be shut off.

I understand that Harris is trying to goad Trump into agreeing to something, only to see him act the fool on the debate stage and suffer a backlash for it. I get that,  but I also think that is unnecessarily risky and an un-Presidential waste of time. She should be prepared to face him with mics muted or unmuted. For the sake of any possibility of actual informative discourse (as rare as that may be with Trump on stage), the mics should be muted, as they were a couple months ago. If Trump cannot control himself at the time, it will be seen by all on the split screen television shots. I know that Harris wants an "I'm speaking (so STFU)" moment but if she is truly prepared to be President, she needs to have the confidence to debate him on the substance, and under any extenuating.circumstance.