VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Harris was always doomed
The presidential race was not unpredictable, as the now once again discredited polls swore to us. Instead, the great Donald Trump comeback victory was clear by the last weeks of the campaign.
The Republicans had made massive gains in voter registrations since 2020, when Trump had lost the Electoral College by only a few thousand strategically placed votes.
Republicans began to master the transition to non-Election Day balloting — first engineered by the left in 2020 under the pretext of COVID. They not only vastly exceeded their early/mail-in voting totals of 2020, but by Election Day, they often outpaced Democrats.
For months, it was widely reported, albeit grudgingly, that there were large defections in Hispanic and African American voters from Harris.
The betting odds over the past three weeks usually favored Trump.
Harris simply could not run on anything she had so emphatically promoted in the past — given these left-wing, unpopular and failed policies had no majority support.
So the chameleon Harris renounced her prior 30 years of earlier radical advocacies that, along with her race and gender, had forced Joe Biden in 2020 to select her as vice president.
There was no way Harris could still support banning fracking, defunding police, opposing border security and the wall or calling for mass amnesties and an end to the Border Patrol. Nor could Harris still promote racial reparations, ending private health care insurance or advocating for higher income and capital gains taxes and a wealth tax.
Much less could Harris still boast of wanting mandatory “buyback” or confiscation of some semi-automatic weapons — including entering private homes to seize them.
So given all that, Harris simply flipped — and serially lied about who she was, renouncing her entire political career. Indeed, Harris began to copycat Trump’s own positions. And so, she never convinced the electorate that she would not flip back to her earlier radicalism once elected or even in defeat finishing out her vice presidential term.
There were three damning realities that even if Harris had been a gifted politician and an adept speaker, she could never have changed.
One, Harris was preposterously running as a turn-the-page, new-generation candidate. But why had she not sought to implement such a “new chapter” for the prior 45 months as an incumbent vice president, especially while in office during the campaign itself? Voters knew the answer: The entire Biden-Harris tenure was a far left-wing utter disaster, one for which the radical Harris 1.0 had for three-plus years claimed co-ownership.
Two, why did Harris avoid all impromptu interviews and the media for most of the campaign — only to reverse course and seek out reporters when her polls eroded? Did it hurt Harris more to avoid the media — or meet with them and thus confirm her inanity to millions of viewers and listeners?
Three, why did Harris serially lie to America that Joe Biden was hale and vigorous — until hours before his senility prompted leftist donors and party insiders to force him off the ticket? And why could she not declare her independence from the historically unpopular Biden? Harris instead chose to terrify voters to vote against a demonized and “fascist” Trump rather than to vote for Harris and her make-believe agendas.
But even in demonizing Trump, the maladroit Harris hit a wall. By campaign’s end, Trump’s favorables were often higher than her own. His prior four years as president polled higher than the current Biden-Harris train wreck.
Trump, the purported “racist,” won more Hispanic and Black voters than past “moderate” Republicans such as Bob Dole, John McCain or Mitt Romney.
It was hard to damn Trump as a crazy fascist when iconic liberal figures such as Robert Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard were campaigning for him.
Trump had reinvented the Republican Party by substituting ecumenical, middle-class solidarity for polarizing racial tribalism. Elitist Democrats were left to cater to the interests of their well-off and very rich donors as well as the subsidized poor.
Finally, workaholic Trump campaigned nonstop for two years, won all the primaries and was endorsed by his two chief primary rivals. In contrast, the Harris “nomination” was the product of a coup that, in 48 hours, removed from the ticket an incumbent president, nullified the will of his 14 million primary voters and coronated Harris, who had neither won nor ever entered a primary. That late July forced abdication of Biden lent an air of illegitimacy to Harris’s candidacy, as well as truncating the time available to campaign.
Finally, Harris’s first major decision was to nominate as her vice president the buffoonish and inept Tim Walz. His radicalism, serial lying and herky-jerky “weirdness” proved a force multiplier of her own mediocrity. In contrast, the calm, empathetic and astute J.D. Vance eviscerated Walz in their sole debate and did the same to the media.
Add it all up — and Harris and her star-crossed candidacy were simply and rightly doomed.
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.