VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Harris is recycling the 2020 Democrat campaign

Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election through a successful tripartite subterfuge.

One, Biden never really campaigned. His handlers rightly assumed that the more the public and the media saw a debilitated Biden in the flesh, the less they would want him as president. So the Biden campaign used the COVID lockdowns to ensure that he stayed safe in his basement office.

Biden strategically distanced himself from disinterested journalists, using COVID as an excuse to avoid public appearances. It allowed him to run a 19th-century, front-porch sort of virtual campaign. In his place, the liberal media, Democratic grandees and the billionaire donor class served as Biden campaign surrogates — vastly outspending, out-advertising and out-lawyering the underfunded incumbent, President Donald Trump.

Second, again using COVID as a pretext, well-funded Democratic legal teams altered the voting laws during early 2020 in key swing states to encourage non-Election Day voting. For the first time, majorities in many key states voted by mail-in/absentee ballots and during weeks of early voting.

We now know why the left was so motivated to push through radical balloting changes that were otherwise impossible prior to 2020 but have been mostly institutionalized since.

Non-Election Day ballots outnumbered Election Day ballots. They were far more likely to be cast by Democrats. And as the number of such ballots soared, the traditional rejection rate of non-Election Day ballots prior to 2020 fell — even as registrars were swamped.

Once obscure terms such as “ballot harvesting” and “ballot curing” became mainstream. Ballot deadlines were extended. There was lax enforcement of incorrect ballot names and addresses or auditing the registrars’ rolls.

Rich liberal entities, such as Mark Zuckerberg and his $419 million in 2020 cash infusions, sought to absorb the work of state registrars. His aim was to “improve” voter turnout through partisan “assistance” — from funding drop boxes to monitoring non-Election Day ballots.

Three, in 2020, the enervated left-wing Joe Biden was reconstructed as a vigorous moderate, “ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton.” Biden’s stealth script was to provide a temperate veneer to the new hard-left Democratic Party.

His 2020 campaign claimed Joe was for “unity” and “moderation” — even as it camouflaged an otherwise extremist neo-socialist agenda to be implemented after November.

Can the Democrats repeat that winning formula for Kamala Harris in 2024? Only partly.

Even without the excuse of COVID, Harris certainly will not agree to unscripted, ad hoc interviews with nonpartisan journalists. She is unable to speak extemporaneously and off the teleprompter without appearing childish.

Her handlers will ensure few opportunities for Harris to burst into cackling or to stream her puerile musings about yellow school buses or kindergarten geography.

Yet the third element of Biden’s 2020 strategy will be difficult to replicate.

The Bay Area leftist Harris — unlike the Biden of the 1980s and 1990s — never had any reputation, feigned or not, of being a “centrist” or “moderate.” Her entire political career was one of pandering either to leftist Democrat voters in 2020 or ultra-liberal Californians in her statewide races.

She is on record of opposing fracking and off-shore drilling, private health care, border enforcement and the traditional close U.S. relationship with Israel. She proudly promoted the radical Green New Deal, defunding police forces, mandatory buybacks of private guns and mass amnesties.

She gratuitously championed the swindler Jussie Smollett and his fraudulent claims of being a victim of systemic racism. During the horrendous riots of 2020, she sought to provide bail for violent rioters and looters who had been arrested.

On CBS, she egged on the 2020 protests that had already turned violent with deaths, law enforcement injuries, arson and mass looting — despite the pathetic efforts of partisan fact-checkers to claim otherwise.

Harris gushed of the turmoil: “They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. They’re not going to let up and they should not, and we should not.”

What did Harris mean by “beware?” Was the BLM- and antifa-led mayhem really just a “movement”? Why boast that the turmoil might be endless — both before and after Election Day? And why connect the massive disruptions to the upcoming Election Day — unless she believes that unrest in the streets could weaken the election chances of the then incumbent president?

In sum, Harris, like Biden, is certainly capable of running a remote stealth campaign. She will surely take advantage of 2020’s revolution in non-Election Day balloting.

Yet, unlike Biden, Harris has no credible moderate veneer — only an unapologetic radical past and a corpus of hard-left boasts.

So 2024 will hinge on whether Republicans will expose Harris’s lifelong, hard-left ideology and extremist agendas. She is a poor substitute for the successful bait-and-switch 2020 con of “ol’ Joe Biden,” the fake moderate “uniter” from Scranton.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact at authorvdh@gmail.com.