Did Trump Run an Actually Good Campaign?
Consider the possibility (though Democratic strategists might not) that Donald Trump actually ran a pretty good campaign and Kamala Harris ran a pretty poor one.
Not on libertarian grounds, in terms of which policies each candidate was advocating, but in terms of what would be salient to the people whose votes they needed. Trump focused, quite aggressively, on border and cost of living. He created a plan for deporting those who are in the country illegally and dispatched his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, with talking points as to how this would happen. He conscripted literal rocket builder/Tesla creator/memelord Elon Musk to his cause, who started doling out his megabucks to voters pledging to vote and to respect the Constitution. Trump had some kind of odd yet relatable things he became obsessed with—no taxes on tips, for example—which is kind of par for the course with him. (Remember how, years ago, he was obsessed with how efficiency standards and how many flushes modern toilets require?)
It took Harris—who never had to win over her party or prove her ability to meet the moment via a primary—quite a bit of time to begin to populate her website with policy proposals. When she did, the policies failed to meet the moment: tax credits that would help developers build more starter homes, down payment assistance for buyers that would merely subsidize demand, lip service in favor of YIMBY policies—decided at a more local level—but not much more. She talked about taming grocery prices not by working to remedy inflation (and eschewing policies that would worsen it again) but by cracking down on…those greedy grocers and their price gouging. (The government can simply set price controls, she offered.) She ran much of her campaign on “joy” and vibes, picking a not-so-strategic running mate in Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and she managed to walk back some of the most progressive positions she had touted in 2019, the first time she ran for president, casting herself as a tough prosecutor on the side of the law—opposite Trump, a convicted felon.
On one of the most salient issues—abortion—Harris just didn’t have as much of an advantage. Though her team kept trying to strike fear into the hearts of moderate pro-choice voters, claiming Trump would institute a nationwide abortion ban if given the chance, Trump embraced abortion moderation (and the Republican Party platform to some degree followed, pissing off the pro-lifers).
But the Democratic Party, riven by Israel/Palestine and progressive criminal justice policies and identity politics, doesn’t look very unified right now, nor is there a clear sense of what message is needed to persuade voters. Trump-support vote totals in traditionally blue areas—including cities like New York—were shockingly high this time around; it’s like high cost of living and a perception of high crime and disorder lead to voters being bearish on Democratic policies.
Don’t try to buy people’s votes! This sure looked like an inflation election in which people saw a vote for Donald Trump as a repudiation of not just Kamala Harris, but the policies put in place by the Biden administration, which she represents. And part of what the Biden administration did was pass the American Rescue Plan in 2021, which cost $1.9 trillion and doled out several rounds of stimulus checks to middle- and low-income Americans (defined quite generously), purportedly to help them bear the economic turbulence—job losses, business closures—that came from the pandemic.
At the time, it was very popular. But then the bill came due, as it always does, in the form of inflation. In June 2022, inflation peaked at 9.1 percent; since plenty of the developed world dealt with high inflation too, it was attributable to things beyond “my government tried to curry favor with me by handing me cash.” In fact, the Biden administration kind of
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