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“The View” Cost Harris the Election
Despite the show’s raging Trump Derangement Syndrome and strident support of both Biden and Harris, the signature moment of the Harris campaign occurred on The View. During a sugar-coated interview, Harris was unable to muster a response to a simple question: “Would you have done something differently than President Biden?”
Let’s go to the videotape (go forward to about 1:10). In response to the request for something she’d have done differently she stumbled, hesitated, and declared, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”
The inability of Harris to separate herself from the clearly unpopular Biden has been cited by many Dem operatives as the proximate cause of her defeat.
But the momentum advisers insisted she’d built failed to materialize. She never sufficiently buried Biden’s ghost, severely hamstringing her ability to sell voters on the idea that hers was the turn-the-page candidacy.
It happened, simply, because Harris refused to make a clean break from the last four years when voters indicated that’s what they wanted. Worse, she hesitated to draw any daylight between herself and her boss on Biden’s biggest vulnerability — his stewardship over the economy — nor identify any specific way her presidency would be different from his tenure beyond naming a Republican to her Cabinet.
The video from The View helped cement that impression in the minds of voters. And it played over and over and over as the centerpiece of se real Trump commercials. So if the above analysis is correct, the ladies of The View played a pivotal role in the undoing of their favorite candidate. There is something of the Greek tragedy about it.
Published in General
Actually … I think it’s much deeper than that. The Trump victory was, IMO the product of a fundamental shift in the cultural & political landscape of America. But the shadenfreude is delicious.
This is an interesting hypothesis, and I’d like to see it promoted to the Main Feed.
“There is something of the Greek-tragedy about it.” I disagree. The key aspect that defines Greek tragedy is the tension between two competing “goods” or virtues, and only one of them that can be sustained or upheld at the conclusion. Also, the principal advocate for the losing virtue dies, and sometimes those representing the winning virtue, too. (Think of Sophocles’ Antigone.)
Harris getting sunk by her appearance on “The View” is certainly ironic, given their universal support for all things “Kamala.” But neither the panel nor Harris represents a competing virtue; both are expressions of the same vile philosophies. Yes, as a result of her interview, Harris “dies” politically. But there is no corresponding virtue affirmed by the survival of “The View” as a television program.
I was on a much shallower level. Trying to help they inadvertently destroyed the thing they loved.
@stevenhayward has been using this as a sign-off on the Three Whisky Happy Hour since it happened because of it’s significance. He used it for the last time Tuesday night and commented about it.
The Ruthless Podcast guys, among others, came up with myriad ways this could be handled. You go to Joe and explain that you need to distance yourself from him for the election and then pick one area you can focus on. Then when the question is asked, and it’s obvious that it will be because you are running as a change candidate, you answer that you love what Joe has done, but think Area A could have been handled a little differently and this is how you want to handle it. Who cares if it’s true or not, you’re a politician. Sell the lie, but don’t say that you’d change nothing. Maybe even say that you’d wanted to go a certain way and tried to persuade Joe, but ultimately he picked a direction and as VP you dutifully sold his program.
Eh, someone was going to ask that question eventually. It was Harris who torpedoed her campaign with that answer. It was such an obvious question, and she failed to have an answer.
I assume the yentas on “The View” thought she’d have any answer but the one she gave.
(Another obvious question that she blew was when she noticed the decline in Biden’s cognitive ability. I think it was Brit Hume who asked that; her answer was evasive.)
First time I’ve seen it. Those harpies led to the auto-destruction of their own girl.
Delicious. Just delicious. Schadenfreude is a dish best enjoyed cold.
Maybe. I think there were a lot of voters in 2020 who said, “This pandemic sucked. We need a new president.” In 2024, I think a lot of voters said, “This post-Covid inflation sucks. We need a new president.” Throw in millions of new illegal aliens and little willingness from the Democrats to stop them, and you have a formula for the loss of millions of votes.
Some people forgot about it. Some people never even saw it.
Some people helped them remember.
She was willing to knock her boss and patron off the ticket, yet she wasn’t able to identify any area of policy difference (or at least to articulate it publicly). Criticizing Biden would seem to be a minor thing compared to defenestrating him. But that is the perfect encapsulation of progressivism – all that matters is power, not the policies. The policies are merely a tool to destroy the powers that stand in your way, such as conservatives, traditional families, churches, good local schools, and on and on.
She deeply admired his mental acuity.
I know. I know. But don’t harsh my buzz.
It is a misread to say it was her failure to separate. It was the hesitation. The panic, the body language. It was the worst example.
The answer just confirmed. She couldn’t think of anything because she wasn’t involved and never even read the news. Which she caught herself revealing so she then she emphasized that she was involved.
That hesitation and the “you know what I mean” – which was a cover for she herself not knowing what she meant and couldn’t box out of the corner- made it obvious that there’s nothing going on up there. Literally nothing coming to mind.
The answer was bad but showing fear and panic was much worse.
She defended Biden’s fitness when Robert Hur questioned whether Biden would be able to participate in his own defense on document mishandling charges.
And Bret Baier’s answer, “No, I don’t know what you mean,” was the perfect response. It articulated in a few words what everyone was thinking and wanted to shout at her. And he said it with a calmness and matter-of-factness that I could never have mustered.
Like a parent to a teenager
Today I heard a story, at 3rd hand, about Kamala Harris’s last visit to Michigan a few days ago. It may be somewhat garbled. I know most of the people in the chain of information, and some of them may have been Harris voters, but I’m not sure.
Anyhow, she met with a farmer’s organization and talked to the attendees about how she wanted everything to go vegan, thus losing in an instant any support she might have had from that group. Obviously I don’t have the exact words she used.
Whether she didn’t know who her audience was, or misjudged her audience, or what, is the subject of speculation. But she was apparently out of touch.
I’ve spent a bit of time trying to find something about that meeting on the internet, with no luck so far. But I wouldn’t trust local reporters to report any faux pas, anyway. I am curious about which farmer’s group it was, though, as I like to be aware of the political leanings of the various farm organizations. It presume it wasn’t a closed event at that point of the campaign, but if it was, the person who told about it may well have been in a position to be there to see it at first hand. That was implied, but I’m not sure I understood correctly.
“Out of touch” is one of the nicer things anyone could say about her.
She did an appearance with a Muslim social media influencer in the last days of the campaign to win over the Arab vote in Michigan, and they talked about cooking since she is a foodie. She touted the virtues of bacon, and he pushed back on her about how Muslims don’t eat bacon. But she just barreled ahead trying to convince him about using bacon in cooking.
She is more airheaded than most progressives, but they all live in their bubble of cluelessness.
As I heard it described, she was claiming that bacon was just “a spice.”
Well, bacon *is* really yummie.
I’d love for this to be so but I think we might be over reading the election. Kamala Harris was a monumentally bad candidate. She’s so politically toxic she dropped out of the 2020 primaries before a single vote was cast. She was anointed rather than elected the Democrat candidate this year. She can’t handle even softball interviews from friendly media, actively repels whole classes of voters (“You are at the wrong rally” to a Christian), was the most extreme leftist Senator in Congress, and makes a fool out of herself every time she opens her mouth. Joe Biden may or may not have been actively trying to torpedo her campaign (“garbage”), but his effect was disastrous in any case. Her opponent is a master of political communication and trolling, and was the survivor of several assassination attempts, one of which produced what might be the most iconic moment in Presidential election history. To top it off, while the media keeps saying the economy is great, ordinary Americans don’t think so and that was their top issue in the election. Harris simply had nothing to say about the economy in her word salads.
And yet Trump did not win in a landslide. He got 74 million votes to Harris’s 69 million. That’s still 69 million Americans who voted for a far left individual who could not have been a worse candidate had Republicans created her themselves. Trump won all the battleground states, but not by much. He won Michigan 49.8% to 48.3% and Pennsylvania 50.5% to 48.5%. How would the election have gone had the Democrats run a candidate who was just a bit more plausible and didn’t self-destruct? By divine Providence or pure luck the stars all aligned to give Trump perfect electoral circumstances, and he won a solid but but by no means comprehensive victory.
Republicans better take bold and decisive action in the next couple of years before the 2026 elections. History says that the party out of power does well in non-Presidential elections, and we have enormous problems that Trump is going to have difficulty addressing, like inflation and the national debt. We are whistling past the graveyard if we think the deep polarization in the nation has changed, or kid ourselves that there isn’t a near majority of Americans who are sympathetic to leftist ideas. We’ll find out if the Democrats manage to run relatively normal sounding and looking people in the coming elections.
One of the scenes in The Chosen I enjoyed was the disciples sitting around a campfire waiting for Jesus to return. To pass the time they tell about sins they’ve done. One disciple announces that he’d had pork, explaining that he’d visited a gentile village. When asked how it was, he replies, “It was delicious.”.
The Democrats had a convention. They could have run anyone they chose.
They chose Kackles.
She wasn’t chosen at the convention, at least by voters. Biden essentially forced the selection by endorsing her after he resigned.
But that doesn’t really matter. The point is that Republicans should not mistake an election victory due to an historically bad opposition candidate for a fundamental shift in the political culture.
That might have been a trial shot at cultural relevance. She was going to claim to have been the 5th Spice Girl, but her staff got the venue wrong for the rollout.
Yeah, I don’t think this election portends any sort of cultural shift. The media has been mis-portraying the country as further left than it is, and they just suffered a correction.
Dumb Spice? Phony Spice? The only one of the originals I can recall is Posh.
By late Reagan, it bothered me that Republicans kept winning this and that, not because they had good programs to offer but because the Democrats (such as Dukakis) were so bad. That luck can’t continue forever, I thought. Republicans need to start offering something positive. This is difficult when what you want is smaller government, but it is possible. They didn’t do anything, though, and their luck in having repulsive Democrats to run against didn’t last, either.
That may have given her frontrunner status, but a truly open convention would have not only been honestly democratic, but would have been compelling TV as well. They passed on a floor fight and settled on a coronation instead, complete with manufactured “joy.”
Even a fake fight would have been more interesting.
Posh, Sporty, Topsy, and Flopsy.