Nobody wants Kamala Harris to win this election more than do her celebrity media friends, who are willing to forfeit their credibility to drag her across the finish line. ABC News, whose blatantly one-sided “fact-checking” during Harris’s debate with Donald Trump was widely criticized, has seen its ratings tumble in the aftermath.
What’s remarkable is not just the absolute shamelessness of the media’s pro-Democrat bias — they’re so far in the tank for her, their “news coverage” is just an endless campaign ad for Harris — but the fact that it doesn’t seem to be helping. The one story they’re not reporting is the most important: Kamala Harris is losing this election.
The process by which Kamala obtained the nomination was decidedly un-democratic, and then the party … spent weeks hiding the candidate from media curiosity.
Don’t take my word for it. Look at where Harris stands in the polls today, and then compare her numbers to what the polls showed for Joe Biden on the same day in his 2020 race against Trump and for Hillary Clinton in her 2016 race against Trump. In both previous two elections, most polls were slanted in favor of the Democratic candidates, so Trump did better in the final official vote tallies than he did in the polls. This track record of error favoring Democrats provides the proverbial “grain of salt” with which everyone should consume public polling.
Fortunately, Tom Bevan, Carl Cannon, and the rest of the RealClearPolitics (RCP) crew have made it easy for anyone to compare current presidential poll numbers to those in 2020 and 2016. These comparisons show Harris underperforming Biden and Clinton to such an extent that a Trump victory in November is the most likely outcome.
As of Sunday morning, the RCP average of national polls showed Harris leading Trump by 1.9 points, but four years ago on the same day, Biden led Trump by 6.6 points in the RCP average, meaning that Harris is underperforming Biden by 4.7 points and guess what? In the final official tally of 2020, Biden won by 4.5 points, with 51.3 percent to Trump’s 46.8 percent. In other words, if polls have the same predictive value as they did in 2020, Trump would win the popular vote by a slender margin over Harris.
(After I did the above calculation, NBC News published a poll by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies showing Harris ahead by five points, which moved her lead in the RCP average to 2.2 points. However, the comparison factor was scarcely changed since an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from mid-September 2020, done by the same firms, had Biden ahead by eight points.)
Now do the same comparison with polls from the 2016 election. On September 22, 2016, the RCP average had Hillary Clinton leading Trump by 2.6 points, and what happened on Election Day 2016? Although Hillary won the national popular vote by a 2.1-point margin, she got beat by Trump in several key states — notably Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — so that Trump won 304 Electoral College voters to Clinton’s 227.
And when you consider that Harris’s current 1.9-point lead over Trump is less than the margin by which Hillary led at this point in the campaign four years ago, it’s easily possible that Trump could once again get more than 300 Electoral College votes this November.
The same phenomenon — Harris underperforming Biden and Clinton — can be documented not only in terms of poll averages, but also doing apples-to-apples comparisons of results from individual pollsters. For example, the latest Reuters/Ipsos national poll, conducted September 11-12 (i.e., immediately after the September 10 debate), had Harris leading Trump by a margin of five points, 47 percent to 42 percent.
However, in September 2020, Reuters/Ipsos had Biden leading by nine points, 50 percent to 41 percent, meaning that Harris is underperforming Biden by four points, according to the same polling operation. And, keep in mind, Biden’s official final popular vote margin was just 4.5 points, a result that had many key states decided by much smaller margins (officially, I hasten to add, for the benefit of all who doubt the legend of Biden’s 81 million votes).
What about the battleground states that will ultimately decide the Electoral College winner? Take a look at Wisconsin, one of the previously “blue” Democratic strongholds that Trump won in 2016 — shocking Hillary Clinton, who hadn’t even bothered to make a campaign appearance in the state — but which Biden won in 2020 by a razor-thin margin of barely 20,000 votes (less than 1 percent).
The current RCP average of Wisconsin polls has Harris leading by one point, so guess what? Four years ago — September 22, 2020 — the RCP average had Biden leading by 6.4 points in Wisconsin, and on the same date in 2016, the RCP average had Hillary ahead by 4.7 points in Wisconsin. To repeat the caveat I’ve stated before, if the predictive value of polls is the same now as it was in the two most recent presidential elections, Kamala Harris is on track to lose Wisconsin and lose it by a significantly larger margin than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
Similar calculations could be made for Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other battleground states with the same result. Trump will win those states, perhaps with margins large enough that no amount of “ballot-harvesting” shenanigans by Democrats can prevent Harris from suffering a defeat even worse than Clinton’s 2016 loss.
This is, as I say, the most important story of the campaign, and one the major media organizations refuse to report, even though any of them could do the same thing I’ve done, using the tools provide by RealClearPolitics to compare poll numbers and demonstrate how significantly Harris is underperforming compared to Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016.
If any of them did such reporting, they could not avoid the conclusion that Kamala is losing this election, but since they won’t report this, they cannot even begin to answer the question of why she’s losing — which should be equally obvious.
First, Biden’s victory in 2020 was undoubtedly no landslide, no “mandate” repudiating Trump. Even if you accept the final official totals (which most Republican voters still don’t), Biden’s election was the result of his winning by razor-thin margins in five states — Arizona (10,457 votes, 0.3 percent), Georgia (11,729 votes, 0.2 percent), Michigan (154,188 votes, 2.78 percent), Pennsylvania (80,555 voters, 1.2 percent) and Wisconsin (20,682 voters, 0.6 percent) — that Trump had won four years earlier.
Flip the four states with the thinnest margins to Trump, and he wins. Out of more than 150 million votes cast in 2020, then, the election was ultimately decided by a margin of 123,423 votes in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Despite the narrowness of Biden’s victory — and, as I say, most Republicans still don’t believe Sleepy Joe actually got 81 million votes — the Democrats acted as if they had beaten Trump by the kind of sweeping landslide that Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale by in 1984. Biden and his congressional allies swiftly acted to reverse every key Trump policy and implement an agenda nearly as ambitious as LBJ’s “Great Society” crusade in the 1960s.
In many ways, what Biden did in 2021-2022 resembled the similar mistakes made by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in their first two years in the White House, with a Democrat-controlled Congress to rubber-stamp their policies and a news media singing hosannas of praise for their “bold” leadership, until voters had their say in the next midterm election and took away the congressional rubber stamp.
Every Democratic president makes this mistake — misinterpreting their election as a mandate for radicalism — precisely because the media are so in-the-tank for Democrats. Any Republican president can expect to be hectored, harassed, and investigated by the news media, condemned as a hard-hearted villain for trying to do anything remotely conservative policy-wise, and so whatever tendency to overreach a Republican might have, the implacable hostility of the D.C. press corps tends to put the brakes on GOP hubris.
Joe Biden had no such opposition from the media, who consulted their thesauruses seeking new synonyms for “courage” to celebrate Biden’s policy agenda. Because the media had spent the previous four years in a fever of Trump Derangement Syndrome, they viewed Biden as a sort of messiah, the heaven-sent source of political salvation, and his presence in the White House was hailed by his journalistic devotees with quasi-religious reverence.
With the Washington press corps singing his praises, Biden went from one policy disaster to another. Ruinous inflation took hold as a Congress controlled by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer rammed through huge deficit-spending measures that pumped trillions of devalued dollars into the economy.
Arguably the biggest lie of Biden’s administration was naming one of these omnibus spending packages “The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” which had the exact opposite effect announced in the title and was, as Biden himself has since admitted, mostly about enacting a “green energy” agenda.
Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to pass that bill and, therefore, cannot claim she played no part in wrecking the finances of millions of Americans who suffered as a result of Biden’s misguided policies. Harris has furthermore claimed to have played a key role in another of Biden’s disasters, as “the last person in the room” when he made the decision on the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a decision that went against the advice of key military leaders. Thirteen U.S. troops were killed in that catastrophic bungle, which handed more than $7 billion in American military equipment to the Taliban.
As if these economic and foreign policy mistakes were not sufficient to confirm Barack Obama’s judgment of Biden’s ineptitude (“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up”), then there was the matter of immigration.
Here, Biden seems to have assumed that he had a mandate to do the exact opposite of what Trump had done. Whereas Trump had made “build the wall” his signature campaign promise of securing the southern border, Biden threw open the floodgates for an unprecedented influx of illegal immigration.
The result is that the foreign-born population (both legal and illegal) is now grown to more than 50 million (more than 15 percent of the total U.S. population), a historic record both in total numbers and percentage, and continues increasing at a rate of about 2.5 million annually, according to Census Bureau data analyzed by Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies.
As with Biden’s economic and foreign-policy blunders, Kamala Harris is directly implicated in the immigration disaster, having been appointed “border czar” by Biden in March 2021 (a reality that Harris and her media sycophants have striven to “fact check” out of existence).
The Biden administration’s policies are unpopular, and despite her attempts to disown her share in the woes of the past three-and-a-half years — with the slogan “A New Way Forward” — Harris is up to her neck in blame. Then there is the problem that Roger Kimball calls “the supreme oddity of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign,” i.e., exactly how she became the Democratic Party’s nominee.
Despite his advanced age, 81-year-old Biden insisted he was capable of serving a second term as Commander-in-Chief, a belief he refused to abandon after his cognitive decline was exposed in the June 27 debate. For the next 24 days, while Biden and his closest henchpeople (including Harris) kept telling everybody that he was continuing his campaign and was confident of victory in November, the polls showed him headed to certain defeat.
Finally, on July 21, Biden announced he would quit the campaign and anointed Harris to replace him on the ballot. Exactly why and how this happened is a story that probably won’t be fully told until after Election Day, but this candidate switcheroo by the Democrats was decidedly irregular. It was, as every political commentator acknowledged at the time, unprecedented in American history. Democrats held a “virtual roll call” prior to their convention, making the switcheroo official and thus ensuring that there could be no floor challenge to Harris as the party’s nominee.
Nothing quite like this had ever happened before, and the top-down imposition of Harris as the candidate was done by the same party that had spent years claiming that Trump must be defeated (indeed, must be sent to prison!) because he posed an existential threat to “our democracy.” What kind of democracy is it, where party insiders force the incumbent to quit his reelection bid and then pick a substitute candidate who never got a single primary vote for president?
The process by which Kamala obtained the nomination was decidedly un-democratic, and then the party that claimed to be fighting on behalf of “our democracy” spent weeks hiding the candidate from media curiosity. She didn’t do a single interview until a late August hug-fest with CNN, where she was accompanied by her running mate Tim Walz. Even in that ultra-friendly environment, Harris proved evasive and incoherent, giving non-answers to whatever actual policy questions were asked.
This evasive pattern continued in the September 10 debate. Asked about the economy, Harris began her reply: “So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. I am the only person on this stage who has a plan to lift the middle class and working people of America. I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people. And that is why I imagine and have a plan to build an opportunity economy.”
Later in the debate, when Harris was asked to explain her obvious policy flipflops, she reiterated her latest policy stance — she will NOT ban fracking, and never mind her saying the exact opposite a few years ago — before returning to her personal narrative: “As it relates to my values, let me tell you, I grew up a middle-class kid raised by a hard-working mother who worked and saved and was able to buy our first home when I was a teenager.”
Kamala’s habit of not giving real answers to important questions is easily mocked, as in the headline at the Babylon Bee satire site: “‘I Was Born Into A Middle-Class Family,’ Explains Wife When Husband Asks Why The Car Is On Fire.” It’s easy to see why her handlers are eager to keep her away from the news media when, even in the softball context of an Oprah Winfrey interview, Harris served up a smorgasbord of word salad, an all-you-can-eat buffet of embarrassing incoherence.
She is a bad candidate, defending a bad policy agenda and yet, we are told that Kamala Harris is winning. In reporting their latest poll Sunday, NBC News headlined it thus: “Poll: Newly popular Harris builds momentum, challenging Trump for the mantle of change.”
Barely six weeks remain until Election Day, so we won’t have long to wait and see how “newly popular” Harris actually is. Maybe the in-the-tank news media can fool enough people to turn their own hopes into reality. But they don’t fool me, they probably don’t fool you, and something more than a hunch — a diligent inquiry into the predictive value of polling — tells me they probably can’t fool enough of our fellow Americans to push the “momentum” of Kamala Harris to 270 Electoral College votes.
What if my calculations are wrong? What will I say if November 5 turns into a landslide for Kamala? No problem. I’ve got my explanation ready: “I was born into a middle-class family …”
