Campaign 2024

Saturday

Amber Duke

Hunters laugh off the Harris-Walz campaign effort to win their vote

Avid outdoorsmen are slamming a new political coalition formed by the Harris-Walz campaign aimed at winning their vote in the 2024 presidential election. “Hunters and anglers want to support Harris-Walz as much as the fish and game want to be eaten,” one Maryland-based hunter who recently bagged a state record bear chuckled to The Spectator. Governor Tim Walz kicked off the “Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz” group on Friday with an article placed in Outdoor Life magazine. The coalition is described as “a new national organizing program to engage, mobilize a broad coalition of sportspeople, conservationists and rural and gun violence prevention voters in key states across the country.

hunters Embroidered campaign hats of US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

Thursday

Ben Domenech

Kamala Harris’s Frankenstein campaign

Welcome to Thunderdome. When the decision was made to shift from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, the campaign staff was totally blindsided, with the entire Delaware operation shocked to learn about the president’s decision via social media — leading to the now infamous unnamed Democrat staffer’s line: “We’re all finding out by tweet.” It’s a sign of just how insular the Biden operation was, and how confined to the upper echelons of close, trusted staffers known for their tight lips and protective nature toward the old man. The Harris operation in 2020 was anything but that — leading to her epic collapse as a candidate and strewing numerous back-stabbing comments from staffers across the media on the way out the door.

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Tuesday

Ben Domenech

The fall of Nikki Haley’s comet

In the waning days of 2023, the last weeks of the before-time — the moments before the Republican Party would inevitably crown the once and future king who rules upon high from Mar-a-Lago — the billionaire donor class of the Republican Party decided en masse that it would endorse a candidate in a final desperate attempt to block Donald Trump. They settled on Nikki Haley, the erstwhile South Carolina governor turned United Nations ambassador, whose star had risen oh-so-very slightly in early state polling, if you squinted hard enough. She would be their choice for a last stand against The Donald Redux, whose return they publicly claimed to fear and loathe as a threat to democracy while privately admitting they would unanimously support him. The question is: why?

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Christopher Bedford

Inside the 2024 campaign consultant calamity

In the salad days of early 2023, when Ron DeSantis was the clear insurgent candidate to wrest the GOP nomination from Donald Trump, the Florida governor boasted of his ability to rise above the chaos and office politics that had derailed the populist agenda under Trump’s watch. “In terms of my approach to leadership, I get personnel in the government who have the agenda of the people and share our agenda. You bring your own agenda in, you’re gone,” DeSantis said. “The way we run the government, I think, is no daily drama, focus on the big picture and put points on the board.” He has since dropped that line; it’s been too obviously overtaken by actual events.

Friday

Charles Moore

Nikki Haley is respectable. Will she find that inhibiting?

In June 2022, I interviewed Nikki Haley on stage for JW3, a Jewish organization in north London. She was personable, clear, well-briefed and pleasingly normal, with the interesting exception of her Sikh background growing up in small-town South Carolina (she later became a Christian by conversion). Her conservatism seemed strongly felt, coherent and not extreme. I also liked her way — now highly unusual in US politics — of addressing foreign policy and setting it in the context of her general political beliefs. At that time, she was mulling the presidential bid she launched the following year. After Iowa, she remains in the race, but only just. Why would such a presentable and decent person not be preferred to Donald Trump?

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