Staff Reports
The political landscape of the upcoming 2024 presidential election is shifting dramatically as the campaign under Vice President Kamala Harris begins to face the cold, hard truths of its impending doom. Leading figures in her camp are finally coming to grips with the fact that the odds have favored President-elect Donald Trump from the outset, a revelation as surprising as finding a salad on a Chicago deep-dish pizza.
Dissatisfaction with the current economic situation, combined with a general discontent with the direction of the country, has proven too much for the Democrats to navigate. Joy and hope? They’re as useful as a chocolate teapot here. This month, Harris’s team raised the white flag, acknowledging that they simply couldn’t pull off a win in this exceedingly short time frame. Harris campaign Chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon expressed that the campaign was on the verge of what they had hoped for regarding turnout and support. However, the one glaring detail they’ve overlooked is that they gamely lost every key battleground state and the popular vote, primarily due to the lack of a coherent strategy apart from the recycled Biden platform.
This is the reality tho. The current Democratic party was fundamentally incapable of nominating someone who could beat Trump this election. pic.twitter.com/ahZzr4MCF4
— Ian Martiszus (@IanFelipeSays) November 8, 2024
The odds were not in her favor, and it didn’t help that Harris, herself, was playing it safer than a squirrel crossing the road. Meanwhile, Trump, facing potential jail time, poured the gas on fervent media engagement targeting indifferently inclined voters. Harris was left struggling to define how she would distinguish herself from the uninspiring old man she had been serving under for four years. Ostensibly, there’s only so far a press release can take you when your resume includes overseeing unproductive VP duties.
In a world where new voter engagement is crucial, Harris’s campaign missed the mark. She entered the race floundering, with barely over three months to make herself appealing in the shadow of the presidency she was meant to inherit. The party’s window-dressing strategy relied mainly on throwing out Harris as the new ‘face’ of an old agenda and praying viewers would eat it up. Unfortunately for her, the problems plaguing the nation—soaring inflation, a chaotic border, and a fracturing party—made attention spans shorter than a TikTok video.
Harris aimed to build upon Biden’s supposedly magical coalition, which had delivered 51.4% of the vote in 2020, but without the foil of a pandemic or Trump in the mix, the cracks became apparent almost immediately. However, the reality is that Trump, regardless of the obstacles thrown his way, was still able to unite various factions under his banner much more effortlessly than Harris could. While Biden steadied the boat, he didn’t exactly provide lifebuoys, as internal polling suggested Trump’s grip on 400 electoral votes might’ve been more solid than predicted.
When Biden finally acknowledged the sinking ship, and rather hastily left the race, the implications of lackluster polling were glaring. A last-minute scramble for battleground state data unearthed grim realities, indicating the Democratic crown jewel—Joe Biden—was floundering in critical states like Virginia and New Mexico that were not even on the Republican radar for a fight. It’s almost comedic how the whole party was operating under a delusion, blissfully ignoring the depths of their own disaster.
Even as Harris secured Virginia and New Mexico, winning by razor-thin margins of 51.8% and 51.9%, respectively, many are quick to note that these states were precariously dangling by a thread. And who knows? A Rust Belt governor might have pulled off a miracle. In the end, as Democrats lick their wounds, they’ll have to reconcile whether the million-dollar fiasco of the Harris experiment was worth the price, or if it was mainly a venture destined for the bookshelf of low-stakes political history.
