Hope you are all having a fantastic day. Wrote yesterday; not a lot of updates beyond my voice being entirely gone. Had two meetings with my boss today about a project I’m on and I’m convinced he didn’t hear a make out I said. I sound like a gay RFK Jr. (it’s hate now homie you’ve cursed me). High ass raspy bitch voice. It’s awful. Topping it all off we have like 5 or 6 remote people coming in tomorrow and it’s supposed to be a fuckfest of socializing. Not sure how that’s supposed to work when I can’t fucking talk! Will let my baby blues say everything, I guess. Maybe bite my lip a little… might as well play into the whole gay RFK Jr. thing. And I’ve got this dry cough like a 50-year tenured smoking hooker. Quite the word picture I’m painting for you fellas. We’re drinking Scotch maybe that’s why the creative juices are flowing out like illegal immigrants in Trump’s future administration. Damn these similes smacking. Shoutout Mrs. Barnes.

We’ve titled this in the usual format; however, aside from the brief debrief this will mostly be what I’d consider an Election Summa. We will dive into Kamala Harris’s campaign, how it differed from Trump’s, and some quick takeaways for the four years to come.

Kamala’s campaign was an abomination. She had a few major things to focus on:

1. Distancing herself from Joe Biden. A wildly unpopular presiding president with dementia out the wazoo and mashed potatoes for brains.
2. Distancing herself from her former self i.e. the primary candidate we saw in 2019 that was wildly left leaning and all too focused on making herself likeable to everyone while really only making everyone dislike her.
3. Persuading the American people to not reelect Trump (this shouldn’t have been too hard as it had been done by the aforementioned potato-brain, but it proved to be due to ignorant tactics, and we’ll discuss).
4. And finally, distancing herself from the fact that she was a woman… or black… or Indian… or whatever.

She accomplished only one of these things: the fourth. And very acutely. She had learned from Hilary whose entire campaign was centered on her genitalia. And very precisely made every correct step along the way apart from having a penis surgically added to her person in a metaphorical “pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey” political strategy. If only… Rhetorically, would a MAGA person consider a transgender man better than a woman? I guess we’ll never know. All the same, while this was important and certainly had an impact on the election, of the four, it was probably the least important. Data might paint a better picture but I’m sure it will corroborate. Although, there are certainly those that will extrapolate even the slightest indication of the potential influence of her sex as the full-blown misogyny of the American constituents.

We’ll proceed chronologically from here. “Distancing herself from Joe Biden” being next on the docket. Some of the major pitfalls of the Joe Biden administration: immigration, the economy (namely, inflation), American pull-out of troops in Afghanistan, and two wars breaking out in his four years (one of which reached heights of full-blown regional warfare). Did Kamala really have anything to do with these things occurring? Absolutely not, the Veep wields no power whatsoever… in most administrations. But the American people were quickly made aware that Biden was not running the country after the initial debate that ultimately led to his removal from the ticket. Does the layman voter know the Veep has no power, really? Probably not. Ergo, the blame was shifted to her. An easy target (targets are one of the most phenomenal tactics used by Trump). So, what did Kamala do to separate herself, make herself not seen as the status quo and appear as someone who would usher in a new era of American polity? Nothing. The most memorable moment of her campaign came from her appearance on The View when she explicitly (either intentionally or not), said “she wouldn’t do anything differently.” Catastrophically shot herself in the foot. That mis-shot was up there with Trump’s assassination attempt and Dick Cheney’s hunting trip. And why didn’t she create any separation? Certainly, she knew Biden loyalists were far and few. Registered Democrats literally wouldn’t have cared if she turned on him. They already had. So why didn’t she? Maybe she misspoke, maybe she was directed not to, maybe she just outright thought that would play better, maybe there was some sense of loyalty (after all, she would have never gotten on the ticket if she weren’t elected as VP… and she should have never been elected as VP). Maybe she really couldn’t because, maybe, it would bring to question even more so who’s really been running the country? Maybe it would bring to question how long the Dems have known about the significantly impaired mental state of the sitting president? Even beyond her “The View” appearance and beyond her being outright asked what she would do differently, she never made an attempt to distance herself. Her campaign did absolutely nothing to improve her standing with the American people as an entity apart from Joe Biden. They propped him up. And for what, after all’s said and done, the party will take him out back and shoot him like a sick dog. After Biden leaves office I do think you will see a lot more Dems outrightly blaming Biden; the party as a whole will be doing more behind-the-scenes, but Biden will get his fair share of blame.

Moving on to #2: “Distancing herself from her former self.” Yikes. She had a lot to work on here. Wildly unpopular in her bid to be on the DNC ticket in 2019. She didn’t even make it to Iowa. She was very left. Very liberal. And in all the wrong ways. Immigration, transgender, economy, etc. Take someone superbly far left like Sanders. Know why he gets elected? Cause he’s left in all the right ways (no pun intended) (and he has targets in billionaires). Kamala was all wrong. It’s obvious she didn’t believe a word of what she said back then. Of course, you might say, she’s a politician. They’ll do more to get in office than a frat fuck will do to get in some drunk girl’s pants. She made a name for herself, and at the time it worked for her… nominated as VP (a horrible choice, not in hindsight). But it worked at the time all the same and her views didn’t bite her. Until 2024. When she couldn’t separate. And it’s not that she didn’t try (albeit not very hard). She didn’t outright retract what she said but she made an attempt to go more to the center. It didn’t work at all. Her bid to go more to the center wasn’t nearly enough: nobody knows who the Veep is, nobody knew who Kamala was (obvious in how her favorability rating skyrocketed after her initial nomination to the 2024 ticket then sunk like an anchor after people heard her talk). She had to let people know who she was but all the things that she had previously said were just too blatantly accessible to Trump. Trump was able to convince the American people that she was 2019-Kamala much more easily than she was able to (ow willing to?) convince the American people that she was 2024-Kamala. Trump convinced the American people that “[Kamala’s] for they/them, not for me or you”, or whatever-the-fuck that Trump ad said that ran about 17 times in a single Jeopardy episode. It was all too easy for him. As previously stated, Trump is very capable of motivating masses against a target. And she had already indiscriminately handed him all his ammunition. Her campaign did nothing to counter this, nothing to showcase her new agenda, the 2024-Kamala. A major shortcoming of her campaign was allowing herself to be defined by Trump and not defining herself (and when she did… see point #1). She was and will always be 2019-Kamala.

“Persuading people to not elect Trump.” This shouldn’t have been too hard. We’ll talk about why it was. And maybe this wasn’t as much an issue of her campaign as it was one that Dems had just sown into any nominees’ campaign who replaced Joe Biden (Biden being potatoes, establishment was on the forefront of the American voter… “who was/[is] running the country?”). Trump is horribly unpopular; unless you’re a Trumper, you don’t like him. I don’t think he has ever had a +50% approval rating (fact-check me). He’s a terribly polarizing figure and you either love him (maybe realistically 30-35% of the voting population truly does), or you hate him (the rest). But he nonetheless has won twice as the lesser-of-two-evils President-elect. And the second time he did so even more sweepingly than he did the first. He represents something beyond the political elite that will forever stir a little feeling of being represented in the common American. Despite being a billionaire and having never been middle-class, he talks, reasons, and ultimately, just through being a political outsider, resonates with the common man. He’s an antagonistic figure of the “establishment” political culture this country has found itself in for decades. And the more the establishment tries to undermine his following or the grasp he has on anti-establishment constituents, the more people follow him. It’s an ironic thing. The more he’s called a “fascist” and a “dictator,” the more people hate those who call him that (not to mention there is an underlying trend of constituents aligning themselves with a Nationalist mindset (discussion for another day)). Though there were effective tactics very far removed from the “fascist/dictator/Nazi” ones. Consider Walz’s “weird” comments: phenomenally effective and striking; not an insult in a really direct, outright sense, but certainly not something you’d want to align yourself with. It was entirely different from the previous “fascist/dictator/Nazi” remarks so many had made previously (until they returned to that at the homestretch, likely after seeing unfavorable forecasts). And it was effective. These sort of tactics, those that weren’t outright insulting/derogative/misconstruing but evocative, made an impact. It’s the reason Walz got the VP nomination, and that one word led to a significant bump in Harris’s polling numbers. And after “weird,” where did they go? What did they do to inspire people to vote against Trump? Nothing. Until the very end when, once again, they returned to their previous remarks and potentially motivated more people to vote for Trump than against. Though it was delicate, this was not a Goliathan task. The campaign had done it once with “weird.” Did they run out of alternative tactics after that one word? Who knows, I’m not sure another explanation exists. All the same, massive misstep. I do not think it would have truly taken much for Kamala to become the lesser-of-two-evils if her messaging was better.

In addition to all the things listed above and maybe most important is the miscalculation made by the Harris campaign that America would elect her on the basis of abortion. It was her only leg to stand on, the only thing she was truly considered to have better views on than Trump, and, in the end, did not win her the votes they sought. “It’s the economy, stupid.” Nonetheless, for anyone who thinks Kamala ran a successful and strong campaign, you are indeed as misguided as a pre-ADA American blind citizen. The fact she had only ~100 days to run a campaign worked in her favor. All said, it was $1B wasted (more than double that spent by Trump).

Where do we go from here? Biden will get his due blame and then be sent to rot away the remainder of his days in Delaware. Who knows what people will make of his political legacy. Democrats will align more with Republicans in the long-run becoming more centrist and focusing on voter-important issues such as the economy, immigration, foreign policy, etc., and far less on social issues such as DEI, transgender rights, etc. And Kamala’s time in the DNC will be done. We will likely not get another woman on the DNC ticket for at least the next 20 years, and I’d put my money on the first woman President being a Republican candidate. Republicans have a trifecta, and immigration will be first on the docket. People will carry on their lives and politics will be as insignificant as it usually is aside from seeing the [un]occasional NYT hate-article about how awful Trump is. I do think the world will improve in the next four years (this is not necessarily an indictment of optimism surrounding the Trump administration but of my pessimism towards the Biden one). A new era of America has shuffled in as it does every time we get the chance to make of voices heard.

Scotch gone 12:58pm. Tomorrow is work and with that seeing the remote folks: lunch and happy hour. Hopefully my voice makes its return. Godspeed fellas, and God bless America.