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The Autopsy Begins
Once a campaign fails, the knives come out.
This morning, Christopher Cadelago, California Bureau Chief for Politico, tweeted this out:
Kamala Harris’s campaign ended with at least $20 million in debt, per two sources familiar. Harris raised over $1 billion and had $118 million in the bank as of Oct. 16.
So, where did the money go? The internet is rife with rumors and none of it is well sourced. When the final FEC filings come out, we’ll really get an inside look at who got what.
There were indications last week that the Harris campaign was in a panic. National sales managers with large station groups were telling reporters that Harris was canceling large ad buys in North Carolina and moving them into Virginia. Then they heard that buys would be made on a daily basis.
This morning, the Thursday after the election, The New York Times reports that Future Forward, a progressive Super PAC, was telling Bill Clinton that Trump’s ad featuring radio host Charlamagne Tha God complaining about Harris’ support of taxpayer-provided transgender surgeries was moving the needle among black and Latino men by over 2.7 points. Clinton begged the campaign to answer, and they assured him the ads weren’t as effective as he thought they were. That’s malfeasance.
And there will be more to come.
Published in General
Of course, many of the excuses are lame. “Biden was too old”–my father is 94. He’s far sharper than Biden. Biden is feebleminded, not the same thing. Plus people hated his decisions even before dementia was obvious.
“Inflation was high all over the world. It wasn’t his fault.” Because center-left governments all over the world used fiscal heroin to deal with Covid. And center-left governments all over the world got their rear ends kicked.
“Can’t rule out racism”–want to compare Harris’s results to Obama’s? And 2008 was sixteen long years ago, when this country would have been even race-ier.
“Harris was unfairly tagged with things she said and wrote five years ago”–Republicans get tagged for trying to cop a feel in high school 40 years ago.
No matter how much money Harris might spend on advertising, people were still suffering from the high inflation that the Biden/Harrison administration failed to tame. Harris also couldn’t hide her complicity in the influx of illegal immigrants.
it is also abundantly clear that the electorate perceived the lawfare against Donald Trump as political persecution.
Still much work to be done though, since it was only 51/49 or 50.5/49.5 or whatever.
Umm, Gary, who was in charge of the US government during the height of Covid?
Republican President, Republican House, Republican Senate.
Isn’t inflation principally a monetary phenomenon?
How would any President “tame” inflation? I don’t think that the President has the tools available to do so. It’s mostly a matter of Federal Reserve actions.
In a word, deregulation.
The high number of regulations that were cut at the federal level was a great achievement of the first Trump administration. It’s on the record, and it’s irrefutable. It lowered the cost of doing business tremendously.
The regulatory burden in this country is terrible, and it does raise prices.
Of course, some regulation is good. But too much is counterproductive and costly.
2020: Rep Senate, Dem House
2021: Dem Senate AND House
Who was in charge of the US government when they tried to force the entire workforce to take a vaccine or lose their job? Who fearmongered the “We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated—for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm.”
Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., et al.
Don’t buy into his premise. Ask him when he thinks the “height of Covid” occurred. (The answer will very likely come down in your favor, one way or another, trust me.)
When you’ve forced him to answer, then take him on. Arguing with him on his very likely false premise is just pointlessness.
Don’t buy into his premise.
Democrats had control of the House in 2020, after the 2018 election.
A presidential administration has tools to reduce inflation, including lowering taxes, reducing spending, reducing regulation. the situation is, of course, complex. But the Biden Harris administration was in place for four years so it gets the public’s blame.
Substantially reducing the number of illegal immigrants in the country is also something that a Presidential administration can do (just by simply enforcing long-in-place law), a policy that would noticeably reduce inflationary pressures on a wide range of goods and services.
I have no idea where all the money went, but watching them beat the ____ out of each other over it is going to be fun.
Harris was given an easy layup on “The View”. — What would you have done differently than the Biden Administration?. She blew it by giving an honest answer –Nothing. She should have lied, and said she would have done the policies that were disasters differently, and the ones that were unpopular: I would have executed the Afghanistan withdrawal more effectively and not abandoned the Afghans who supported us. I would have stimulated the economy without feeding inflation. I would have united the country by demonizing Republicans and Conservatives more effectively. Etc. She never took the opportunity to distance herself, however dishonestly , from Biden’s failures.
However, what the Democrats will take out of the election is that they should have sacrificed more babies to Moloch.
Over the last month every time I listened to a Ricochet superfeed podcast it was preceded by a Harris ad. That was truly money down the drain. Obviously they had money to burn and they did.
I know you know this, but it can take a while to settle the accounts from a political campaign.
The campaign laws and accounting rules are just unbelievable. The state-level campaign I helped out on really opened my eyes to the overregulated life of a candidate.
Plus, the campaigns use a lot of freelancers. Those payments can take time to sort through too.
That said, I hope the press does follow up. $20 million is a whopping debt.
As I said, social media was rife with rumors. When the FEC filings are finalized we’ll see exactly how much the campaign paid to pull off their celebrity stunts.
What if they got someone else to pay Beyonce, etc? Legally that should be reported as some kind of campaign donation, but if it’s not, will it really be chased down?
What if that wasn’t the problem? What if we wait until the next quarterly filing is posted?
Which Clinton, Bill?
I’ve always considered him to be the most consumite politician of the last 50 years. Never agreeded with his policies, I was always willing to admit to his superior political instincts. If they ignored Bills advice that is quite telling
To the contrary, I believe the Obama administration did a lot to move the country in a more race-conscious direction then it had been previously. This gets misunderstood as “racism” (when expressed by whites).
But as I’ve said for years, minority groups need to be careful about pushing racial identity politics, because when that becomes the norm, white people get to play too.
To put it another way, a billion dollars in campaign spending just doesn’t buy what it used to.
Her frequently repeated answer when asked why she had switched positions on several policies such as fracking “My values haven’t changed”.
Umm, that’s pretty much what worried me – her “values” haven’t changed, which was a very clear message of “I’m lying about my positions until after the election” <wink wink>.
Didn’t Hillary’s campaign end up over $50 million in debt?
$20 Mill is only a lot because of the magnitude of the money she raised.
By stopping the printing of phony money! This is so simple. Didn’t the Feds print something like 8 Trillion Dollars out of thin air? Even mathematically challenged people can understand that when you flood the market with counterfeit dollars, the dollars themselves get devalued, hence INFLATION!
I don’t think she was purposely trying to be honest. I think she was just too slow-witted to know what to say.
Less than 2% of the $1 billion + raised and spent. So even if $20 million is the final number, it doesn’t strike me as an excessive screw-up.
That she didn’t have a prepared and memorized answer to insert into such an easy-to-anticipate question struck me as major evidence that she had no idea what she was doing. If her campaign staff didn’t anticipate such a question, that would indicate how terrible Harris is at selecting and leading staff. Maybe her staff did anticipate such a question, but Harris is notoriously unwilling to listen to people around her, so maybe Harris ignored any advice staff provided.
Energy. Energy is life and prosperity. We went from energy independence and net exporter to clamp down on production and increased regulation.
When you raise the price of energy, you raise the price of everything! From the fertilizer used to grow our food and animal feed to transportation costs of moving everything to market. Not to mention household costs of driving to work and heating/AC of our homes.
Stop printing funny money and drill baby drill.
There probably is a lot of accounting yet to be done, both on the expense side and on the receipts side.
The Three Martini Lunch podcast guys have had fun reporting on the emails and texts that “Doris” has been getting from Democrats and Democrat-affiliated groups. (Somehow the contact information for one of the podcast guys got onto a Democrat contact list under the name “Doris,” so he has had fun relaying to the podcast listeners what Democratic communications “Doris” received.) He reported Tuesday that even on that day, “Doris” was receiving urgent pleas to donate money. Had “Doris” responded and sent in money on Tuesday, that donation likely won’t show up for a while in anyone’s bookkeeping.