A social media commentator called Caesar listened to a long, long podcast exploring the Harris loss with her chief advisors and the architects—if you can call them that without choking—of her campaign, then summarized what he heard here. His summary is too long to summarize on Ethics Alarms, and based on the little I could stand listening to of the podcast, it seems accurate.
The major ethical use of the jaw-dropping results is as a perfect example of the Ethics Alarms motto, “Bias makes you stupid,” in its full, destructive, mind-blowing glory. There is denial and delusion here in abundance, beginning with Caesars first two summaries of what he heard in the post mortem:
- The campaign was perfect, and
- Harris was perfect.
They also tell you how warped the perception of these presumably intelligent people was and is.
Another unavoidable takeaway from the summary is that Democrats and progressives should be terrified about the prospects for their party if this stunning blindness is typical of their compatriots. They literally don’t understand, not merely why they lost, but also the nation, American society, our culture, our history, Donald Trump, how to process unwelcome data, the essential skills of self-examination and learning from mistakes, and more.
The summary also supports a conclusion I came to shortly after Kamala Harris was installed as Biden’s replacement as the Democrat’s Presidential nominee. The party will never be able to nominate a male, especially a white male, again until a woman finally is elected President. Like General Burnside’s doomed troops at the battle of Fredericksburg, it will keep charging up the hill with inadequate forcesas if there is realistic chance of victory though each failed charge makes the odds worse.
Ethics Alarms 
Truth be told, I myself wasn’t sure Harris couldn’t win when she was named. I was wary that, no matter what happened, something was going to happen behind the scenes to push her over the finish line. However, her boomlet of popularity when she came out emphasizing joy, etc., proved to be illusory, especially when she never got down to business. There is a saying that every army is ready to fight the last war, and this appears to be applicable to political campaigns also. Last time out they just hid Biden in the basement and hid pretty much everything else, and it worked, with a little assistance from the media and some (unprovable) dirty doings in the blue wall states.
Unfortunately, this time out there was no hiding and the GOP in those states was watching to prevent the same tactics in those states. Plus, last time out Trump was being blamed for both COVID and the George Floyd freakout, both of those circumstances exacerbated by Democratic governors and mayors who made damn sure that the economy stayed locked up tight and the riots got out of control and stayed out of control. They also lied pretty boldly about what a Biden administration would bring. This country bought it because everyone just wanted the chaos that was 2020 to end.
The rest is history, but highlights include the immediate hard left turn by the administration, the hiring of multiple incompetent “firsts,” failure after failure domestically and abroad, inflation, and lies on top of lies about everything, together with a condescending attitude that Americans were just too stupid to “get it.”
It also wasn’t lost on Americans that this brilliant choice of vice President had to be shuffled off stage after the first year and couldn’t be trusted to address a gathering of children because of her persistent word salads. Nor was it lost on the voters that the so-called “border czar” not only didn’t do a thing at the border, but made light of it. Yet this was supposedly the best and the brightest that the Democratic party has to offer, and no one, including Democratic voters, was allowed to question it.
Harris had 106 days to make her case, yet she did everything to AVOID making her case. Not one press conference did she do, not one unscripted interview did she do, and she deliberately arrived late, left early, and dodged and filibustered the whole time she interviewed with a non-friendly agency. Is this, Americans wondered, how she would handle Putin or Xi?
This is before we even get to the twin hammer blows of her saying she wouldn’t have changed a thing and Biden calling the other side garbage.
It also wasn’t lost on Americans that the campaign kept right on lying about everything. Harris was running circles around Trump, she hadn’t put a foot wrong since the beginning and so forth and onward.
Finally, it wasn’t lost on anyone that the campaign ended with nothing but attacks and name calling, which is all but an admission that you have run out of ideas.
When all of this is said and done, I submit the question should not be “how did Trump and the GOP essentially run the table?” It should be “how did Harris still get the votes she did?”
Steve, this analysis is about 98% the same as mine, and neither of us had to be geniuses to figure it out. And yet so many progressives and Democrats can’t. It continues to amaze me.
Jack was right, I was wrong. I thought the Dems would be able to drag Harris across the line as they had Joe Biden. I thought they had the ability to ballot harvest and win all the blue wall states with ease. I thought Harris would be easier to use as a sock puppet once she was elected because at least she wasn’t demented and could read a teleprompter and walk where she was told to walk. I thought Dem voters were so devoted to the entire Dem regime that they’d vote for a ham sandwich. I continue to be amazed Trump prevailed and normal considerations of basic competence appear to have generated the outcome. I thought the AUC and the Dems had everything under control.
Being wrong is a beautiful thing on occasion. This is one of those occasions.
No kidding. Praise Allah!
What’s the 2% I missed?
Steve, you just made laugh out loud. Happy Thanksgiving weekend to you.-
A.
Likewise, Alicia.
Only this: I think it’s clear, if depressing, how Harris got the votes she did. Almost half the country was indoctrinated, propagandized, lied to and emotionally triggered to literally be willing to vote for anyone or anything but Trump. Plus Trump’s obstinate refusal to avoid not being gratuitously obnoxious, or to put “Kick Me!” signs on his back with unforced errors, like having an “edgy” comedian do a set in Madison Square Garden.
I’m not amazed at all, just a little depressed. As you have said many times: “Bias makes you stupid”. The media’s FAILED attempts to lob softball questions that she still couldn’t answer coherently was an obvious failure, but the DNC has been blind to voter preferences since at least the Hillary nomination (advance notice of questions, quashing Bernie, nominating the only person Trump could possibly beat, etc. ) that I’m not convinced they are capable of learning. Democrat voters and Democrat leaders do not have the same view of reality.
I did see a semi-plausible argument that the fault mostly lies with the young college educates staffers. For Democrats, they are super woke and have an outsized influence. The regular politicians are too removed to realize how non representative they are. For Republicans, their staffers just suffered through the excessive bias on college campuses, and are more used to questioning authorities. I don’t entirely buy the argument, but there may be a grain of truth there.
This was some comment on a reddit post about a poll showing that both D’s and R’s believe that the average Democrat believe something different from what polling actually show that they do. In other words, democrats (on average) think their party has different goals from themselves, even though they prefer it to the other party. It was weird, and I’ll be damned if I can find the original link though.
I enjoyed Carville’s comment that if he were running Harris’s campaign and young staffers objected to her being interviewd by Joe Rogan, he would have said, “Shut the hell up and keep quiet. You’re 23-years old and don’t know enough to have an opinion!”
There was a prominent Democrat that recently stated that the Democrats are not be able to get a female Democrat elected as President, but the Republicans can accomplish it.
Bill is right. He’s corrupt and a compulsive liar, but he’s not stupid. If Harris had used him as her chief advisor, she would have won.
The people behind the curtain pulling the levers would never, ever have let Bill Clinton anywhere near the Harris campaign. They are all Obama loyalists. They despise Clinton and the Clintonistas. In addition, I don’t think Harris would have been capable of executing a single idea Clinton might have suggested. She’s too idiotic. Bill Clinton would have urged her to engage. She’s not capable of engaging.
What about engorging? Is she capable of en…oh, nevermind.
Nasty. But funny! Vis-a-vis both Clinton and Harris!
Swallow the leader?
I wonder if he has come to the same realization that I have. It is unethical to elect a black or female Democratic candidate for anything until the Democratic Party, the media, and academia all stop shouting Racism!, Sexism!, Misogony!, Bigotry! at any and all criticisms of minority and female politicians. It is not ethical to elect a politician who cannot be challenged or criticized. I think a lot of people have figured that out. Even horribly corrupt politicians like Tiffany Henyard get the benefit of the racism card. A white, male mayor would have been in jail long ago for 1/10th of what she has done.
A Republican candidate does not suffer from the same ‘protection’. The left wing doesn’t consider them ‘real’ minorities or women, so they are savaged even worse than male Republicans. Any racist or sexist denigration you could think of, the Democrats will heap on a minority or female Republican.
VP Harris was probably perfect as a Democratic candidate. Witless, spineless, and almost completely policy-less (other than the continued butchering and dismemberment of unborn children) are all qualities that make her the ideal, totally malleable, totally controllable President for the un-elected denizens that desire to run this country from behind the curtain.
Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but the fact that she was soundly defeated could stem from the fact that she couldn’t hide those “xxx-less” attributes from the voters and it largely turned them off. A great many people in this country still want to be independent thinkers, and the thought of a President who struggled to string together a cogent sentence (to say nothing of an independent thought) was going to be a tremendous problem. And the notion that she was a “powerful, self-assured woman, ready to shatter the glass ceiling” largely fell flat considering she opened naked thighs to Willie Brown to get ahead.
That she lost by as little as she did is a testament to the relentless work of the media to prop her up, hide her massive lack of qualification, cover for her ridiculous choice of VP, and continually ram “Trump = Hitler” down our throats.
Having written all that, it’s shocking beyond belief that, among those running the Harris/Walz campaign, no one had the hindsight (or maybe the bravery) to even suggest that Harris – while a perfect Democrat candidate – was a wildly horrible choice to put in front of America. And then to pair her with Tim Walz, knowing they’d have to paddle upstream pulling the “Biden” boat anchor. Unbelievable.
Harris’ political career is likely over, but there are Democrats who have floated the idea of “Harris 2028”. As a conservative, I’m begging God to let that happen. If the donors to the Democratic party have more sense than dollars, they will demand changes before signing another check.
I have to say that I think it is misleading to look at this election as ‘close’ and make plans from that perspective.
I think that this was 2024’s version of 1984. Trump had to start from the fact of so much of the electorate really viewing him as a wannabe dictator, plus he didn’t help himself in a lot of ways — the debate with Harris, the Puerto Rican joke, some of his tweets.
He also did some inspired things, like the McDonald’s stunt, and generally restrained himself during the campaign — more I think than in 2020.
If this were a ‘good’ Republican candidate (not talking Romney type ‘good’, but Trump-era) who didn’t have the baggage, then given the economic and foreign climate, he might well have gotten 400 or more electoral votes.
If the Democrats learning curve is as flat as Trump’s, which is what they’re trying to demonstrate, the GOP may have another shot at that sort of landslide.
Ironic the lion in the mirror brought to mind the old Harris Bank logo before they were acquired by Bank of Montreal.
Plus, Harris’s visage and hair cut give her a decidedly leonine aspect.
The progressive elite faithful literally believe that a candidate who merely embodies the qualities of “diversity” and has a “strong story” and “builds community” cannot lose. They have turned all our public and government institutions into factories that produce third rate products, and think they are doing the right thing.
How many more competent people have been passed over for a promotion, degree, or opportunity because of this flawed reasoning? How many people will suffer the consequences of this stupidity?
Blinded by self-delusion, they will continue to fail, and be confounded, because their basic understanding of reality is flawed.
Until they “hit bottom”, and start looking inward, instead of pointing at the speck in someone else’s eye, don’t expect them to change their opinion.
There was a video featured on Real Clear Politics about this same podcast, from Pod Save America. Glenn Greenwald talks about the podcast and how clueless these folks were. Also they (he’s on Charlie Kirk’s show) dissect a clip by James Carville discussing the loss.
I mostly read the transcript from Greenwald. He makes the point that these are all Obama people on the podcast. We know what they think of Biden.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/11/29/greenwald_democrats_walking_away_from_devastating_defeat_without_an_iota_of_self-reflection_or_self-doubt.html
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Personally, I hope that the Democratic leadership is as clueless as these folks seem to be. It would make things a lot easier for the GOP and give them a better chance to really solidify a winning coalition.
Of course, Trump has to have a reasonably successful second term for any of this to matter. That’s still up in the air.
“Personally, I hope that the Democratic leadership is as clueless as these folks seem to be.” I’ve heard that sentiment a lot recently, including more then once on this thread alone. As a Republican voter who is yet a ‘classical liberal’ I hope they aren’t. I fear that any one party with no serious political challenge, no sanely practical alternative, will be bad for a nation of free citizens. I hope the DNC eventually remembers what it means to seek a role of leadership amongst a free people, but I doubt that will happen soon.
Maybe it should be caveat-ed this way: “I hope the Democratic leadership, for so long as they keep embracing these ultra-left policies, [remains] as clueless as these folks seem to be.”
I can agree that one-party rule would never be good, no matter which party, but the manifest anti-American craziness really does need to be defeated…hard.
–Dwayne