From the Article:
For weeks following Joe Biden’s disastrous performance, his campaign publicly maintained the illusion that he was still well-positioned to defeat Donald Trump. Privately, they knew otherwise. As Pod Save America co-host Jon Favreau revealed days after the election:
After the debate, the Biden people told us that the polls were fine, and Biden was still the strongest candidate. They were privately telling reporters, at the time, that Kamala Harris couldn’t win. […] Then we find out, when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign, that the Biden campaign’s own internal polling, at the time when they were telling us he was the strongest candidate, showed that Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes.
The implications of this are staggering, and it should be treated as a massive scandal.
It definitely seems like the real problem wasn’t that Harris didn’t make a good or compelling case that her opponent was unfit, it’s that they didn’t spend any time building up their own case for what they would do differently and instead tried to court the vanishingly small number of undecided moderates and, for some reason, Republicans who will still hate them no matter what they say.
There was plenty of time to run a good campaign after Biden got replaced, they just chose not to for some reason. Can’t agree more that these guys should not be involved in politics anymore if they tried to prop up Biden for an entire month after the debate and bury their heads in the sand when he was polling in the toilet the entire time.
Harris was asked multiple times what she would do differently than Biden and she had no answer.
No, she came out saying that she’d do the same. Specifically, she wouldn’t change the approach on Israel / Gaza.
I was worried about the election results due to alienation of young people when protesters were getting brutalized last spring. They did this to themselves and we’re all going to suffer because of it. Dems fucked us.
She came straight out on TV and said she wouldn’t do anything differently. That was her case. “You know Biden? The President 60% of the country hates? Great guy! Did nothing wrong.”
She was the VP for four years and if you pull up her highlight reel it all sucked. Going south of the border and telling war refugees “Do Not Come” like some kind of reverse Statue of Liberty. Calling student protesters opposed to the Gaza Genocide anti-Semitic while she hides from Netanyahu during his psychotic Congressional address. Letting Manchin and Sinema walk all over her in the Senate.
What kind of campaign was she going to build on top of that legacy?
Dems told their dud QB to hand the ball off to a lame running back and watched her crash face first into a Joe Rogan’s Audience full of dorks crying about a dead squirrel. I don’t think it is possible for these people to run a campaign better than “We’re not Trump”, which is what they ultimately choose to do.
Why would Harris do anything different? The Biden policies were working. He literally prevented us from a goddamn recession, and because a handful of companies (nearly all of which donated considerable sums to Trump) jacked up prices for consumers, people act like it was Bidens fault. If you think the miracle Biden pulled off is bad, you’re not gonna like whats in store for us under Trump
Presidents have emergency powers to cap prices, prosecute private interests for exploitative behavior, and even nationalize industries in the face of a domestic crisis. Biden sat back and allowed greedflation to sap the goodwill that his Inflation Reduction Act was intended to engender. And then Harris - who very early on floated the idea of capping prices and taxing gougers - ran away from the idea in the face of corporate media pressure.
Sitting back and taking it as the conservatives fuck you is a policy failure. Same with Israel (where Netanyahu actively campaigned for Republicans while Democrats ran around apologizing to them) and with Musk and Thiel (Biden kept rubber stamping contracts to Starlink and Palantir even as Silicon Valley dumped billions in media resources into Trump’s lap).
These are policy failures. Giving your political enemies tens of billions of dollars to fuck you with is a policy failure. Biden failed. Harris failed. The Democratic Party failed. That’s why they lost.
Handing out cheap loans and subsidies to private industry isn’t miraculous. We’ve been doing it since the FDR Administration (arguably since the Lincoln administration) to keep the engines of industry pumping. Fucking Dipshit Donny figured out how to pull the “Cheap Money” lever all the way back in 2019 when COVID was threatening a collapse.
But when all the money flows into the pockets of the rich, while food and rent and gas costs inflate, you’re going to have a bad time even if NOT doing keynesian economics would have made things worse.