Wednesday, Nov 6, 2024

Trump-Harris Race Going Down to the Wire

 

Fear is now gripping the Kamala Harris campaign, and her joyful “vibes” are draining away as prominent Democrats, as well as the liberal media, have publicly acknowledged that Harris is faltering as she reaches the finish line.

In recent weeks, the Harris campaign has been dropping in the polls, and even her fellow Democrats are criticizing the lack of substance and vague and often incoherent rhetoric in her last-minute spree of media outreach.

Many Democrats are increasingly worried that the momentum Kamala Harris enjoyed following her selection to replace Joe Biden, has completely slipped away.

According to the widely followed Real Clear Politics average, a week before Election Day on November 5, Harris’ narrow lead in the national polls has completely evaporated. She now trails Trump in the polling averages in most if not all of the crucial swing states, including the Democrat “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Democrat Senator John Fetterman warned in an interview with the New York Times that Trump’s message is connecting as strongly as ever in his state of Pennsylvania, which, with 19 votes in the Electoral College, is widely considered to be the most crucial of the battleground states.

While Fetterman was careful to praise Harris’ campaign, he also recognized the “astonishing intensity” of Trump’s appeal to the working-class voters in his purple state and the importance of Trump’s endorsement by Tesla CEO Elon Musk who, in some ways, Fetterman said, is “a bigger star than Trump.

“And now Musk is joining him. I mean. . . that’s the world’s richest guy. And he’s obviously, and undeniably, a brilliant guy, and he’s saying, Hey, that’s my guy for president. That’s going to really matter, [to the outcome of the election],” Fetterman predicted.

HARRIS LOSING GROUND IN THE LATE POLLS

Meanwhile, during the final weeks of the campaign, Harris has been steadily losing ground to Trump in the polls. Especially in the battleground states, the vice president has largely given up on trying to defend her record when she was a Senator and the failed policies of the Biden administration in which she played a crucial role. Harris has also reverted to the failed Biden tactic of characterizing next week’s election as an opportunity for voters to choose “whether we are a country that values a president who respects their duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States,” and she also claims that “Donald Trump would terminate the Constitution of the United States.”

According to polling, Harris has been largely unable to make any more inroads with independents or with the remaining undecided swing-state voters, after her initial burst of support upon inheriting the Democrat nomination from Biden in July.

Furthermore, in the key “blue wall” battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, in which Biden carried the independent vote by 5 points in the 2020 election, Trump is now leading by 1 point, for a significant net 6-point swing in what are widely expected to be toss-up races once again this year.

Meanwhile, Trump has been making further inroads with working-class voters, especially black and Hispanic males, and younger voters, largely based upon the superior record of his presidency in growing the economy without inflation, keeping illegal immigration under control, and keeping the rest of the world at peace.

WHY HARRIS IS RESPONSIBLE FOR BIDEN’S FAILED RECORD

By contrast, as Biden’s Vice President, Harris cast several crucial tie-breaking votes in the U.S. Senate passing Democrat legislation, which was responsible for the economy crumbling, and inflation reaching 40-year highs. Harris’ inflation problem is best summarized by Heritage Foundation economist E. J. Antoni. He cites federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that “cumulative inflation since the 4th quarter of 2020 exceeds 20%, eclipsing earnings growth so that [a typical worker’s] larger paycheck buys you less; you’re demonstrably worse off — almost 4 years and no progress.”

Antoni argues that the real cumulative effect of inflation over the past four years is even greater than the official statistics indicate because “Trump-era deregulation led to marginal decreases in the cost of living which were not captured by official inflation metrics in 2019 and 2020.”

Harris served as Biden’s border czar when illegal immigration exploded, and the weak Biden-Harris foreign policy spawned military conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East in which the United States is involved.

Because of her ultra-liberal past positions as a U.S. Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Harris doesn’t dare run on her own record, and as Biden’s vice president, she can’t credibly separate herself from his failed policies, which, taken together, makes it impossible for Harris to present a coherent message on many important national issues.

To this day, even after the Harris campaign has spent about $1 billion on ads trying to define her, many undecided voters still say they need more information before making up their minds about whether she is suitable to hold the highest office in the land.

The Harris campaign has also failed in its effort to turn the tables against Trump on the age issue, after they forced out Biden, by claiming that Trump, at 78, is also too old and feeble to carry out the duties of the presidency. The accusation is simply not credible to anyone who has watched Trump deliver one of his typical hour-long campaign rally speeches, delivered while standing without the help of a teleprompter and filled with humorous asides and spur-of-the-moment quips. And he does them day after day as he swings back and forth across the country.

As a result, the Harris campaign has now been largely reduced to regurgitating all of the accusations against Trump, most of them false or grossly exaggerated, that Democrats have been making since he announced his first run for president in 2015, and which have been echoed by the liberal mainstream news media each step of the way. But there is hardly a registered voter in this country over the age of 30 today who is not well aware of these constant assaults on Trump’s character, and who has not already formed their own opinion of him.

Yet, the fact that roughly 50% of American voters view Trump as a viable candidate for president means that the massive and still ongoing Democrat effort to discredit him must be viewed as the greatest messaging failure in modern American political history.

At this late point in the presidential election cycle, the vast majority of voters in this country have had plenty of time to make up their minds about Donald Trump but are still being denied the specific information they need to properly evaluate the credentials of Kamala Harris to be the next president, and the policies that her administration would seek to impose.

According to the most recent polls, a week before the November 5 election, the two sides remain so close that the outcome will be determined by the small pockets of voters in the swing states who are still undecided between Harris and Trump, or between voting and not voting for either one.

These still undecided voters are the most difficult to reach, which is why both the Harris and Trump campaigns are reaching out to them through every available means, including TV, radio, podcasts, print media, online ads and websites, social media, mail, email, as well as traditional campaign events and canvassing neighborhoods door-to-door.

Then again, the polls have been wrong before and may very well be very wrong again. Many neutral observers see the real potential for a Trump Electoral College landslide.

TRUMP SUPPORTERS CELEBRATE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN

This explains the political logic behind Trump’s decision to devote so much of his precious time and resources during the final days of the campaign to events outside the battleground states, such as his massive rally held Sunday in New York City’s iconic Madison Square Garden arena.

No serious political analyst accepts Trump’s claim that he believes he could win New York State next week. His real motive for staging the elaborate event was to force the corporate news organizations and liberal cable news outlets, such as CNN and MSNBC, to televise the event live, enabling Trump’s message to reach a large national audience of Democrats and other Kamala Harris voters and give him a last chance to try to change their minds about him.

Almost 20,000 enthusiastic Trump supporters packed the Madison Square Garden rally. Before Trump took the stage to deliver a typically entertaining hour-long campaign speech, the event featured all of the major figures in Trumpworld, including a rare campaign appearance by his wife, former First Lady Melania Trump and their children, Trump’s eloquent young vice-presidential running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, RFK, Jr. Tulsi Gabbard and other prominent Trump supporters from the real world rather than the world of politics. As Trump had intended, they gave the high-profile event the look and feel of a second GOP national convention and forced embarrassed reporters to explain to their liberal viewers why they felt obliged to grant their favorite villain, Donald Trump, unfiltered, direct access to their TV audience at such a crucial stage of the campaign.

In what amounted to a closing campaign statement, Trump repeated the classic question posed by Ronald Reagan to the television audience in his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, in which he asked them whether they were better off than they were four years ago.

Trump also added to his tax relief proposals for the benefit of working-class families. In addition to his proposals to exempt income from tips, hourly worker overtime pay, and Social Security retirement benefits from federal income taxes, Trump announced at the Madison Square Garden event that he would “support a tax credit for family caregivers who take care of a parent or a loved one. He concluded with a promise to his audience, with regard to the state of America today, that “Kamala broke it and I will fix it.”

TRUMP’S THREE-HOUR PODCAST WITH JOE ROGAN

Liberals grew even more pessimistic after Trump’s highly cordial podcast interview over the weekend with social media personality Joe Rogan. It ran for three hours and amassed a staggering 17 million YouTube views in less than 24 hours after it was posted online, including 300,000 during the first 30 minutes.

The conversation with Rogan covered a wide range of topics. It touched upon most of Trump’s campaign issues, which Trump wove into a wide assortment of other topics primarily of interest to male voters, with whom Trump is especially popular, and who make up most of Rogan’s audience.

By comparison, Kamala Harris canceled her scheduled interview with Rogan, while her appearance on a popular women’s podcast has attracted just 685,000 views in the two weeks since it went live.

A MEMORABLE VISIT TO A FAST-FOOD RESTAURANT

Trump again demonstrated his genius for public relations when he responded to Harris’ dubious claim to membership in the working class, based upon her alleged brief stint as a young college student working at a McDonald’s restaurant. Trump made his point by scheduling a visit to a suburban Philadelphia McDonald’s restaurant to demonstrate that he is in touch with the concerns of working people.

In front of the news media, Trump donned an apron and went to work at the French fry station. He then served McDonald’s Happy Meals to customers at the drive-thru window. It was clear that Trump was thoroughly enjoying himself interacting with the fast-food franchise’s employees and customers. He also further endeared himself to thousands of delighted Trump supporters who had gathered spontaneously on the streets outside the store to witness the event.

While Trump’s leftist critics tried to condemn the McDonald’s event as a contrived political stunt, it turned into a major campaign event that generated millions of dollars’ worth of free, positive news media coverage for Trump over the next three days. It also reinforced Trump’s support among millions of working-class voters who feel that their needs and interests have long been abandoned by a Democrat Party now dominated by college-educated, progressive liberal elites.

Trump proved once again that, despite his privileged upbringing and vast wealth, he remains in close touch with the hearts, minds, concerns, and sensibilities of the common American working man and woman and shares their goals and values. Trump’s stubborn and defiant resistance to the relentless attacks on him by the Democrats and the media has instilled his supporters with open feelings of pride in their candidate rather than the shame that Democrats had hoped would deter them. His politically alienated, former Democrat-voting supporters are more convinced than ever that his presidency is the only cure for a federal government that, according to the polls, all Americans, by a nearly 40 percent margin, believe is “on the wrong track” and no longer responds to their needs.

They now realize that today’s Democrat Party has long abandoned its working-class roots and is waging a political war on their economic and cultural interests. In the name of global free trade, they have betrayed the manufacturing and supply chain industries which had long been the main source of good jobs in the American heartland, sending them to communist China or other low-wage third-world countries in the name of industrial efficiency and greater corporate profits.

TRUMP’S RECENT CAMPAIGN WINNING STREAK

Meanwhile, Trump has managed to dominate virtually every news cycle, effectively countering the Harris campaign’s huge financial advantage and the uniformly hostile and one-sided media coverage with imaginative and effective campaign events.

The recent streak of positive news coverage for Trump began with his unexpected endorsement by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in September. It was followed by Trump’s role in bringing aid, with Musk’s help, to the victims of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, while the Biden-Harris administration was being criticized for its delayed response to the natural disaster.

Musk provided Trump’s campaign with a major infusion of cash, cutting into the Harris campaign’s funding advantage. Musk also accepted Trump’s offer to appoint him, if he wins the election, to head a commission to eliminate waste in the federal government with the goal of cutting wasteful spending by up to $2 trillion.

Trump also picked up the endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.), an outspoken liberal opponent of the federal government’s health policies benefitting the pharmaceutical industry and big agriculture, after the Democrats conspired to prevent him from mounting a viable primary challenge to Biden’s nomination for a second term.

The Trump campaign also benefitted from a major revision of FBI crime statistics verifying his claim, which the Harris campaign had disputed, that the violent crime rate during Biden’s first full year in office (2022) had increased by 4.5%. It did not fall by 2.1%, as the earlier FBI estimate had claimed, and supported Trump’s claim that liberal Democrat and Biden administration “Defund the Police” policies, which Harris had supported, resulted in a nationwide crime wave.

Also, in 2022, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) showed a stunning 29.1% increase in violent crime nationwide.

Team Harris had been hoping to make gains with her exclusive town hall with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, which was held in place of a scheduled September debate in which Trump refused to participate after Harris replaced Biden as his Democrat opponent.

But it was Harris’ inability to provide clear answers to both domestic and foreign policy questions, throughout the 90-minute broadcast, that even had CNN’s left-leaning analysts blasting her performance.

Veteran Democratic strategist David Axelrod, who helped get Barack Obama elected and then served as one of his top advisers, summed up Harris’ performance as a “word salad city.”

Van Jones, another Obama administration veteran-turned-CNN analyst, who was one of the first to recognize Trump’s unique political skill set early in the 2016 presidential campaign, also admitted that Harris’ “word salad [answers] gets on my nerves,” and then added, “‘I think some of [Harris’] evasions are not necessary.”

Veteran CNN political analyst Dana Bash also said afterward that “if [Harris’] goal [for the town hall] was to close the deal [with the voters, Democrats] are not sure she did that.”

REVIVING THE BOGUS FASCIST AND HITLER ACCUSATIONS AGAINST TRUMP

Harris also endorsed a claim by Trump’s disgruntled former White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, accusing Trump of aspiring to rule America as a fascist. Kelly was quoted by newly published articles in the Atlantic magazine and the New York Times as saying that Trump is “certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators,” that he fits “the general definition of fascist,” and that he once said he needs “the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

Harris then said at a press conference that the quote was “further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is … We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power.” She followed that with similar comments on Trump during a town hall broadcast on CNN. Harris said plainly that she considers Trump to be a “fascist,” and believes that most voters do not want to have “a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

She added, “I also believe that the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted.”

New York City Mayor Eric Adams slammed her comparisons of Trump to Hitler and asked Harris to tone her rhetoric down.

“I know what Hitler has done, and I know what a fascist regime looks like. I think, as I have called for over and over again, that the level of conversation, I think we can all dial down the temperature,” Mayor Adams added.

WHY HARRIS CUT SHORT HER FOX NEWS INTERVIEW

During a contentious televised interview with Fox News reporter Bret Baier two weeks ago, Harris condemned Trump for suggesting that the U.S. needs to defend against “the enemy from within” and the potential need to handle them, “if necessary, by the National Guard or if really necessary by the military,” calling the comment a threat to American democracy.

At the same time, Harris stubbornly refused to answer Baier’s insistent questions about the many changes in her past positions. She denied having noticed any deterioration in President Biden’s cognitive abilities since they took over the White House almost four years ago and refused to accept responsibility for the flood of illegal immigration during Biden’s presidency, while trying to shift the blame for the problem at the border onto Trump for opposing a highly controversial Senate immigration bill earlier this year.

Harris also told Baier that she does not believe in decriminalizing border crossings, a reversal of her position in 2019, when she said in a televised interview that she was “in favor of saying that we’re not going to treat people who are undocumented [and] cross the borders as criminals.”

The interview, which was broadcast on Baier’s daily Fox News program, lasted for only 20 minutes, much shorter than had been planned because she deliberately showed up 15 minutes late. Also, when her handlers realized that Harris was embarrassing herself by refusing to answer many of Baier’s questions directly, they waved frantically in the background to signal Harris to end the conversation even earlier to prevent her from doing further damage to her campaign.

HARRIS’ ALLIANCE WITH NEVER-TRUMPER LIZ CHENEY

Out of desperation, Harris has been campaigning with “Never Trump” former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney in the hope of attracting votes from the former GOP backers of Nikki Haley, who has endorsed Trump for president after mounting the most serious challenge against his nomination in the GOP primaries.

Cheney is highly unpopular and that effort and similar ones have failed to halt Harris’ decline, as have her belated attempts to explain her new campaign proposals and to distance herself, while still acting as his vice president, from Biden’s unpopular policies.

In response to growing criticism about Harris’ refusal to hold open press conferences or to sit for news interviews with independent journalists, her campaign responded by scheduling her for a series of interviews in liberal, anti-Trump venues, but the strategy failed because often she was still unable to come up with coherent responses and resorted to her notoriously meaningless “word-salad” responses.

In an interview with the liberal ladies on “The View,” a popular ABC political TV talk show, Harris was unable to come up with a single Biden administration policy that she regretted, undoing all of her campaign’s efforts to distance herself from the unpopular president.

Her efforts to come up with economic policies of her own to counter Trump’s tax-cutting and regulation-reducing America-first strategy for restoring prosperity, were also disappointing. Either her plans were obvious copies of some of Trump’s own proposals, such as the elimination of income taxes on tips, or unworkable big government schemes, such as imposing price controls on grocery stores to try to bring down the cost of food, and responding to the nationwide housing shortage by providing first-time home-buyers with $25,000 down payment grants that would only further increase the cost of housing.

HARRIS’S SECULAR, ANTI-AMERICAN “WOKE” LIBERAL ELITE AGENDA

The same liberal elites who dictated administration policies to both Biden and Harris disparage America’s traditionally shared Judeo-Christian principles of morality and religious beliefs as obsolete superstitions. Under the pseudo-scientific banner of climate change, they are seeking to undermine the American economy and way of life by the forced, premature elimination of carbon-based fuels before reliable replacement renewable energy sources are available. The liberal elites also accept as secular gospel the recycled Marxist philosophy known as the Critical Race Theory (CRT) which teaches that all aspects of American society, from education and housing to employment and healthcare, are thoroughly corrupted by “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.”

CRT is also the basis of the effort by liberal institutions, such as the New York Times, to replace the traditional understanding of American history as driven by the desire for individual freedom with the claim of the 1619 Project, which has been challenged by most serious historians. The progressives claim that America’s Founding Fathers and its early patriots, such as Abraham Lincoln, were motivated by racism in the form of white supremacy rather than the principles of individual freedom and democracy espoused in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

The woke advocates of the progressive left movement who have controlled the policies of the Biden administration have begun to impose their race-based standards of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) on the entire country. These “woke” advocates condemn the traditional American dream, of providing individuals equal opportunity to achieve success through their personal effort and superior merit, to be inherently oppressive against all kinds of minority special interest groups as defined by race, economic class, and gender preferences. Instead, they have been using the increasingly authoritarian powers of the federal government to impose their socialist-inspired demand for identical outcomes for everyone, regardless of their efforts and ability, as the new version of the American dream.

WHY SOME DEMOCRATS ARE TAKING A SECOND LOOK AT TRUMP

Many lifelong Democrat voters are now taking a second look at supporting Trump because they are beginning to realize that the Biden-Harris administration has been systematically lying to them about the state of this country. As David Deaval, a conservative professor of Catholic Studies wrote on the AMAC website (The Association of Mature American Citizens), “No, the economy is not great. No, crime is not better. No, a ‘handful’ of apartment complexes ruled by illegal immigrant gangs is not acceptable. No, the Trump years were not bad. No, Trump is not senile or weak. No, a vote for a candidate who never received a single primary vote is not a vote for democracy. And no, that candidate, Kamala Harris, evinces neither joy nor the ability to take on any kind of serious job, much less leader of the free world.”

The polls taken since Harris replaced Biden as the Democrat presidential candidate have revealed a major gender gap in this election. That shouldn’t be surprising in a race between a man and a woman in which women’s rights, as epitomized by the continuing controversy over the rejection by the Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices of the Roe v. Wade decision, and which has been the Democrats’ Harris’ most popular campaign issue.

MAKING THE DEMOCRATS’ GENDER GAP WORSE

Democrats have become increasingly concerned about the polling reflecting a serious erosion of support from black and Hispanic males. Their reaction has been to bring in Barack and Michelle Obama and other prominent Democrat minority leaders to publicly scold these alienated men for their anger against the Democrats for having neglected their needs for so long.

But other Democrat political analysts warn that this approach may be counter-productive because many of these working-class male voters have chosen Trump based upon a logical conclusion that they will most likely benefit more from his economic, border control, and law enforcement policies. They also warn that male voters are likely to resent Democrats even more for accusing them of being disloyal to their race by voting for Trump or other Republican candidates.

In order to recover some of the critical lost black votes, Harris has also begun promising a grab-bag of government giveaway programs intended to benefit black men only, including the federal legalization of recreational marijuana, rather than more comprehensive proposals designed to grow the entire American free market economy, as Trump’s proposal would do.

The latest polls have also confirmed the Harris campaign’s alarming erosion of support among traditionally Democrat-voting black men, Hispanics, and young men in general. These groups played a key role in Biden’s very narrow 2020 victory over Trump in the crucial battleground states across the country, where Trump has recently been surging and now holds a slim but consistent lead over Harris.

SOME DEMOCRAT CANDIDATES ARE DISTANCING FROM BIDEN AND HARRIS

As a result, local Democrats, such as Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, are expressing growing concern, as are Democrat candidates who are running on the ballot under Harris next week. They include Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey and Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, who are now quietly distancing themselves from both Biden and Harris.

Harris has also been hemorrhaging support from union leaders who, at the request of their members, have withheld their usually routine endorsement of whichever Democrat candidate appears on the election ballot, as have the liberal editorial boards of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

According to pollsters James Johnson and Callum Hunter, writing in the Wall Street Journal, the trend in the most recent polls shows that more than 60% of self-declared undecided voters in swing states such as Ohio, Montana, Nevada, and Pennsylvania have been breaking in favor of GOP senatorial candidates who had been narrowly trailing Democrat incumbents running for re-election, making it more likely that if Trump is elected to a second term, he will have a comfortable majority of Senate Republicans to help pass his legislative agenda, especially if Republicans also succeed in holding their current slim majority in the House.

LIBERAL ELITES ARE BLINDED BY THEIR OWN PREJUDICES

Meanwhile, according to Republican political consultant Keith Naughton, writing an op-ed in The Hill, “The Democratic elite political class cannot believe they might lose again to Donald Trump. ‘How could anyone vote for that man?’ they complain. ‘He is just so gauche!’

“The Democratic elites are so appalled by Trump they cannot bring themselves to give him any credit for anything. . .

“In a way,” Naughton admits, “they have a point. Trump is gauche. . . But mixed in with the weirdness is some smart campaigning.

“Democrats’ biggest problem,” Naughton claims, “is that their insularity is much worse than that of their Republican counterparts.

“Instead of addressing voters’ concerns, the Democratic political class and their friends in the establishment media continue to focus on Trump’s threat to democracy, his odd behavior, and their own supposed victim status. In short, the Democrats are running on issues they care about, not issues that [most of their Democrat] voters care about.”

As Naughton points out, “For the last two years, [more than 90% of] voters have been telling Democrats that inflation is their top concern. [But] President Biden and the Democratic political class have conspicuously ignored them. . .

“For millions of Americans, high inflation has meant unaffordable rents, the inability to buy a house, diminished savings and deferred retirement. . .

“However, [these same voters recall that] under Trump, inflation was low, housing was more affordable, and real household incomes were rising.”

As a result, Naughton concludes, “For the majority of Americans, voting their economic interest means voting for Trump. . .

“[But] the Democratic political class [remains] focused on form and style rather than substance. Nothing is ever their fault; everyone who backs Trump [must be] delusional, part of a cult or just stupid.”

MANY AMERICANS ARE SUPPORTING TRUMP DESPITE HIS FLAWS

Meanwhile, Democrats have been ignoring the fact that roughly half of this country’s voters are expected to vote for Trump next week even though they are, by now, well aware of Trump’s character flaws. They also know what happened when his supporters rioted at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, as well the “Trumped-up” [pun intended] criminal allegations that politically motivated state and federal prosecutors had tried to use to prevent Trump’s name from appearing on the presidential ballot next week.

Democrats also ignored the fact that more than 70 percent of all voters and 90 percent of independents did not initially want President Biden to run for a second term as president. Biden also suffered from historically negative job approval ratings, and the vast majority of voters told pollsters that they believed the country to be on the wrong track. Yet party leaders rigged their primary system to give him the nomination, before changing their minds after Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate with Trump, and then forced him to step aside and cede the nomination to Harris.

The Biden White House and the Democrat party establishment also ignored the public’s demands for meaningful action to bring down the cost of living which exploded as a result of excess Biden administration-induced spending. Biden and Harris also waited for more than three years before taking executive actions to halt the tidal wave of illegal immigration.

DEMOCRATS MAKING BAD POLITICAL DECISIONS

Naughton also reminds us that, “Insularity breeds hubris, which has compounded the Democrats’ problems. Cutting themselves off from dissenting voices and political reality convinced them they could not possibly lose to Trump again. The result has been bad policy and political judgments” which could result in Democrats losing next week’s election.

One serious political error was the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision, in March of this year, to further tighten car emission regulations. That will effectively eliminate the sale of new conventionally gasoline-powered vehicles in this country by 2032, and doom the jobs of tens of thousands of Democrat-voting automotive jobs in states across the industrial Midwest, especially in the crucial, auto industry-dominated battleground state of Michigan.

As a result, Trump is now campaigning hard on the issue by urging the auto workers whose jobs are threatened to vote for him, even though their union leadership has endorsed Kamala Harris, and is probably fueling Trump’s recent climb into the lead in most of the recent polling in those swing states.

Harris also made a serious mistake due to overconfidence due to her strong initial acceptance upon inheriting the Democrat nomination from Biden by picking as her running mate the ultra-liberal governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz. He has turned out to be a much weaker and more vulnerable candidate than the original favorite for her vice-presidential pick, Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro. He was rejected, at least in part because progressive Democrat leaders disapproved of Shapiro’s tolerance for school choice and his unconditional support for Israel in its righteous war of self-defense against Hamas and other Iranian supported-terrorists.

While Walz might shore up support for Harris in Minnesota, a state that has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon more than 50 years ago, but does nothing to help her next week in must-win Pennsylvania, where Shapiro is, by far, the most popular politician in the state.

Another unforced error by the Harris campaign was its decision to reject the invitation for her to attend the traditional Al Smith Memorial Dinner sponsored by the Archdiocese of New York for the benefit of local Catholic charities. By becoming the first major party presidential candidate to refuse to attend the typically light-hearted event since Walter Mondale in 1984, Harris seemed to confirm accusations that the progressive liberals now running the Democrat Party are using their power over federal government policy to wage a cultural war against the teachings of the Catholic Church and its believers who follow them.

TRUMP HAS SUCCEEDING IN DEFINING HARRIS

According to an analysis by Aaron Zitner, a writer and editor for the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau, Trump has gone from being down by 2 points in the paper’s polling in August to being up by 2 points in the most recent poll, because his advertising seeking to define Harris negatively has been more effective than the pro-Harris ads with the opposite message, even though the Harris campaign and her allies have spent twice as much money on their campaign.

The Journal’s opinion surveys were conducted jointly by Republican pollster David Lee and

Democrat pollster Michael Bocian. Lee’s interpretation of the results is that “the definitional period [for Harris] is coming to an end, and more people are unhappy with what they have learned about her than what they know about President Trump.”

Trump supporters point out that this has become a pattern for Harris. She became one of the first 2020 Democrat presidential candidates to drop out of the primaries, after having begun that race as one of the favorites.

Bocian, on the other hand, believes that Harris can still win the election, “if she can succeed in making this campaign about those images and issues first and foremost, while also continuing to make the case for who’s the best fighter for the middle class.

“All signs point to a race that’s very much up in the air, and the last two weeks will determine who votes and who wins in a close race,” Bocian added.

Because the race is so close, it may ultimately be decided by the ability of the campaigns to get their core supporters to vote. A successful get-out-the-vote operation is particularly crucial for the Trump campaign, which is relying on a surge of support from working-class males in the polling, but who are, historically, less likely than women to cast their ballots.

HARRIS IS CAMPAIGNING AGAINST HER OWN RECORD

Harris has been trying to present herself as the presidential candidate who will help the nation “turn the page” on the past and chart a “new way forward,” ignoring the fact that she has spent the past four years running this country with Joe Biden as his vice president.

But three months after she replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, Harris is still struggling to explain how her administration would differ from Biden’s. That is why, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, a 54% majority of voters say they expect Harris if elected president to continue Biden’s approach and policies, while only 41% said that she would bring her own fresh ideas for governing to the White House.

Ruy Teixeira, the liberal demographer who predicted 20 years ago that the Democrats were on the verge of creating a permanent electoral majority due to fundamental American population trends, now claims that the era of progressive movement domination has now come to an end because of the broad backlash against their extremist ideas and policies that had been endorsed by Kamala Harris before she became Biden’s vice president. These include the Critical Race Theory, the Green New Deal, defunding the police and emptying this country’s jails, Medicare for All, the DEI struggle to impose “equity” rather than equal opportunity, the 1619 Project’s skeptical view of American history, and doing away with the freedoms of speech, religious practice, and gun ownership guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Teixeira, in his “Liberal Patriot” blog, cites progressive Andrew Prokop, who wrote on the Vox website, “The left’s hopes for sweeping change from the 2010s have crashed into the reality of the 2020s. The energy of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns and the George Floyd protests is [now] a distant memory. . .

“Politicians who assiduously cultivated left activists are now increasingly tacking to the center — most notably Vice President Kamala Harris, who has abandoned many of the positions she took while running in the Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary,” Prokop wrote.

FOUR REASONS WHY THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT IS FAILING

Teixeira cites four main reasons why the progressive movement is now falling apart after reaching its moment of greatest triumph at the start of the Biden-Harris administration:

“1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hate it. When Joe Biden came into office, he immediately issued a series of executive orders dramatically loosening the rules for handling illegal immigrants. . .

“The predictable result [was a] dramatic surge in illegal immigration and the diffusion of these immigrants into overburdened cities all over the country.

“2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hate it. In the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd and the nationwide movement sparked by it, the climate for police and criminal justice reform was highly favorable. But Democrats. . . blew the opportunity by allowing the party to be associated with unpopular movement slogans like “defund the police” that did not appear to take public safety concerns very seriously.

“At the same time, Democrats became associated with a wave of progressive public prosecutors who seemed quite hesitant about keeping criminals off the street, even as a spike in violent crimes like murders and carjacking swept the nation.

“3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hate it. In recent years, huge swathes of the Democratic Party, egged on by progressives, have become infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those engaging in them. . .

“This approach is in obvious contradiction to logic and common sense. And it has led much of the Democratic Party to take positions that have little purchase in social or political reality and are offensive to the basic values most Americans hold.

“4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it. . .

“Progressive [Democrats have] promulgated the view that climate change is. . . an imminent crisis that is already upon us and is evident in extreme weather events. It threatens the existence of the planet if immediate, drastic action is not taken. . . including the immediate replacement of fossil fuels, including natural gas, by renewables, wind, and solar [whether or not they are affordable or developed enough to meet the challenge.]”

CONFESSIONS OF A PRO-TRUMP DEMOCRAT

But perhaps the most detailed refutation of Harris’ presidential candidacy was recently provided by successful Wall Street hedge fund manager Bill Ackman in a lengthy tweet sent to “a number of my good friends and family [who] have been surprised about my decision to support

Donald Trump for president [despite my long history as a registered Democrat and as a donor mostly to Democrat candidates]. . .”

[In this post, I] explain the [33] actions and policies of the Biden/Harris administration and Democratic Party that were the catalysts for my losing total confidence in [them.]:

(1) open the borders to millions of immigrants who were not screened for their risk to the country, dumping them into communities where the new immigrants overwhelm existing communities and the infrastructure to support the new entrants, at the expense of the historic residents,

(2) introduce economic policies and massively increase spending without regard to their impact on inflation and the consequences for low-income Americans and the increase in our deficit and national debt,

(3) withdraw from Afghanistan, abandoning our local partners and the civilians who worked alongside us in an unprepared, overnight withdrawal that led to American casualties. . . against the strong advice of our military leadership. . .

(4) introduce thousands of new and unnecessary regulations in light of the existing regulatory regime that interfere with our businesses’ ability to compete, restraining the development of desperately needed housing, infrastructure, and energy production with the associated inflationary effects,

(5) modify the bail system so that violent criminals are released without bail,

(6) destroy our street retailers and communities and promote lawlessness by making shoplifting (except above large thresholds) no longer a criminal offense,

(7) limit and/or attempt to limit or ban fracking and Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) so that U.S. energy costs increase substantially and the U.S. loses its energy independence,

(8) promote DEI ideologies that award jobs, awards, and university admissions on the basis of race, and gender criteria, and teach our students and citizens that the world can only be understood as an unfair battle between oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressors are only successful due to structural racism or a rigged system. . .

(9) . . . allow biological boys and men to compete in girls and women’s sports. . .

(10) encourage and celebrate massive protests and riots that lead to the burning and destruction of local retail and business establishments while at the same time requiring schools to be shuttered because of the risk of Covid-19 spreading during large gatherings,

THE BIDEN-HARRIS RECORD OF TOLERATING ANTI-SEMITISM

(11) encourage and celebrate anti-American and anti-Israel protests and flag burning on campuses around the country with no consequences for the protesters who violate laws or university codes and policies,

(12) allow antisemitism to explode with no serious efforts from the administration to quell this hatred,

(13) mandate vaccines that have not been adequately tested nor have their risks been properly considered. . . [and] censoring the contrary advice of top scientists around the world,

(14) shut down free speech in media and on social media platforms that is inconsistent with government policies and objectives,

(15) use the U.S., state, and local legal systems to attack and attempt to jail, take off the campaign trail, and/or massively fine candidates for the presidency without regard to the merits. . . of the case,

(16) seek to defund the police and promote anti-police rhetoric causing a loss of confidence in those who are charged with protecting us,

(17) use government funds to subsidize auto companies and internet providers with vastly more expensive, dated, and/or lower-quality technology when greatly superior and cheaper alternatives are available from companies that are owned and/or managed by individuals not favored by the current administration,

(18) mandate in legislation. . . government solutions to problems when the private sector can do a vastly better, faster, and cheaper job,

(19) seek to ban gas-powered cars and stoves without regard to the economic and practical consequences of doing so,

BIDEN WITHHOLDING SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL AT WAR

(20) take no serious actions when 45 American citizens are killed by terrorists and 12 are taken hostage [by Hamas last year on October 7],

(21) hold back armaments and weaponry from [Israel] our most important ally in the Middle East in the midst of their hostage negotiations, hostages who include American citizens who have now been held for more than one year,

(22) eliminate sanctions on one of our most dangerous enemies [Iran] enabling them to generate $150 billion+ of cash reserves from oil sales, which they can then use to fund terrorist proxy organizations who attack us and our allies.  Exchange five American hostages held by Iran for five Iranians plus $6 billion of cash in the worst hostage negotiation in history setting a disastrous and dangerous precedent,

(23) remove known terrorist organizations [such as the Iranian-supported Houthis in Lebanon] from the terrorist list so we can provide aid to their people, and allow them to shoot rockets at U.S. assets and military bases with little if any military response from us,

(24) lie to the American people about the cognitive health of the president [Biden] and accuse those who provide video evidence of his decline of sharing doctored videos and being right-wing conspirators,

(25) do nothing about the deteriorating health of our citizens driven by the food industrial complex, the fraudulent USDA food pyramid, and the inclusion of ingredients in our food that are banned by other countries around the world which are more protective of their citizens,

(26) do nothing about the proliferation of new vaccines that are not properly analyzed for their risk versus the potential benefit for healthy children who are mandated to receive them,

(27) do nothing about the continued exemption from liability for the pharma industry that has led to a proliferation of mandatory vaccines for children without considering the potential cumulative effects of the now-mandated 72-shot regime,

(28) convince our minority youth that they are victims of a rigged [economic and political] system and that the American dream is not available to them,

(29) fail to provide adequate Secret Service protection for alternative presidential candidates [such as Donald Trump],

(30) litigate to prevent alternative candidates from getting on the ballot, and take other anti-competitive steps including threatening political consultants who wish to work for alternative candidates for the presidency, and limit the potential media access for other candidates by threatening the networks’ future access to the administration and access to ‘scoops’ if they platform an alternative candidate,

(31) select the Democratic nominee for president [Harris] in a backroom process by undisclosed party leaders without allowing Americans to choose among candidates in an open primary,

(32) choose an inferior candidate for the presidency [Harris] when other much more qualified candidates are available and interested to serve,

(33) litigate to make it illegal for states to require proof of citizenship, voter ID, and/or residence in order to vote at a time when many Americans have lost confidence in the accuracy and trustworthiness of our voting system.

KEY JEWISH ISSUES IN THIS ELECTION

When it comes time for you, our Yated readers, to cast your votes on or before November 5, please keep this list of issues in mind, as well as the record of Donald Trump when he was president. These not only include Trump’s unprecedented record of support for Israel, de-funding the Palestinian Authority, and the re-application of economic sanctions upon Iran, but also Trump’s appointment of conservative Supreme Court justices as well as federal regulations to protect our religious beliefs under the Bill of Rights, and Trump’s support for school choice, including government-funded tuition vouchers for the parents of yeshiva students.

 

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