J.d. vance

Wednesday

Ben Domenech

The winners and losers of the 2024 election

Every election has winners and losers that extend beyond the politicians themselves, but in this particularly unique situation, the sheer number of outside individuals, movements and institutions who can be categorized as winning or losing based on last night’s sweeping result for Donald Trump and Republicans is astounding.  Winner: the bro army and its defenders. The decision to lean so hard into appealing to the American manosphere, with its testosterone-fueled UFC events and a litany of podcasts hosted by comedians with mass appeal to young men, ran the risk of turning off female voters or seeming to only prioritize the frat vote. But it proved absolutely correct — and not just the Joe Rogan interview, though that was a key step in the journey.

winners and losers election

Monday

Spectator Editorial

The 2024 Hobson’s choice

After what seems like four straight years of a presidential campaign, we’re finally here. When we say “here,” we are talking of course of the last stage of grief, exhausted acceptance. One half of the population accepted that their nominee could be replaced without a single primary vote. The other half accepted that their 2020 nominee couldn’t be replaced at any cost. Many this year are casting votes with considerable pain as they select from two less than ideal options. Andrew Sullivan details his grudging support for Kamala Harris; while Bridget Phetasy describes the reluctant undecided voters pulling the lever for Trump. We’re sure they’re not the only ones holding their noses. The lesser-of-two-evils election is nothing new.

2024
letters
The Spectator

Letters from Spectator readers, November 2024

The rise of BlueAnon The adults on both sides have checked out completely and it shows. We are an empire on the decline and there is no denying that now. — Virgil Hilts As a basic foundation for this story you could do no worse than to recall an incident that occurred during LBJ’s campaign for senator in Texas in 1948. He proposed to accuse his opponent of “fornicating with a goat.” When an aide asked if he truly believed it, LBJ reportedly said, “Of course not. I just want to hear him deny it on the radio.” — Richard Lindo The academic legacy of Donald J. Harris It’s astonishing that Kamala will probably win with a true Marxist theoretician in the family — I guess the time is right for the US to get its very own socialist “utopia.

Thursday

Ben Domenech

Kamala Harris embraces a Liz-Cheney-sized mistake

Welcome to Thunderdome. Liz Cheney is campaigning with Kamala Harris today in Wisconsin at Ripon, known as the birthplace of the Republican Party at the Little White Schoolhouse. It was there in 1854 at a church meeting that Whig and Free Soil Party members gathered to form a “great irresistible Northern party, organized on the single issue of the non-extension of slavery.” This was even then pretty aggressive language for the Episcopalian who called the meeting, but not for Horace Greeley, who publicized it to the nation. Whatever Liz Cheney says today about how important it is to elect Kamala Harris will no doubt equal the historical significance of that moment, at least according to Rachel Maddow.

Wednesday

The Spectator

GOP falls in love with J.D. Vance

Republicans who were worried about former president Donald Trump’s selection of Ohio senator J.D. Vance as his running mate are eating crow after Vance’s dominant performance in last night’s vice-presidential debate over Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Immediately after the pick, GOP commentators and operatives feared that the narrative that Vance was “weird” and other Democrat-backed opposition research against Vance could hurt the ticket. But Vance proved himself as an effective messenger of the Trump agenda and demonstrated his ability to be a steady and, well, normal politician, a potentially important contrast to Trump’s sometimes off-putting personality for suburban and independent voters. Conservatives who pushed for Vance, including Donald Trump Jr.

Ben Domenech

A debate night for Vance to remember and for Walz to forget

It’s not always easy to tell who wins a political debate. Sometimes performances need time for people to process them and have key moments emerge that connect with American voters. And sometimes you witness a debate performance so dominant, so one-sided, that one party in the spin room is left arguing more out of hope than belief that debates just don’t matter.  Tonight was one of those nights for Democrats — and this one wasn’t even close. J.D. Vance was smooth, empathetic and emphasized his life experience with hardship and poverty. Tim Walz was nervous and unsteady from the opening question and didn’t seem to find his footing until more than an hour into the debate.

Monday

The Spectator

Biden admin upended by chaotic weekend

The Biden administration is struggling to find its footing amid a series of unfortunate events that are testing the oft-vacationing president and his vice president, who is currently auditioning for the top spot in American politics.Hurricane Helene decimated parts of North Carolina, leaving millions of Americans without power, at least thirty dead and many more missing. Entire towns are practically gone, and pictures of video of the storm’s aftermath show flooding enveloping homes and washing out highways. Local officials are begging for assistance and resources; state Representative Neal Collins, for example, tweeted, “I currently have two people on oxygen needing generators & 1 person on dialysis needing one.

Friday

The Spectator

GOP blasts Kamala for ’too little, too late’ border visit

Kamala Harris is aiming to project strength on border security, but her critics aren’t buying it.For the first time in over three years, Harris is visiting the border, following an onslaught of ads from former president Donald Trump’s campaign that have savaged her record as America’s border czar. Her trip also comes after a bombshell report from Texas congressman Tony Gonzales about how tens of thousands of illegal immigrants with murder and sexual assault convictions are freely roaming America.

zelensky
Jacob Heilbrunn

Ukraine becomes another battlefront in the American election

They were the odd couple, one lumbering in his trademark oversized Brioni suit, the other ripped in his olive green military attire. The two had been engaged in a kind of mano-a-mano verbal combat before their official meeting in Manhattan at Trump Tower. It was getting ugly. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky suggested that J.D. Vance’s plan, such as it was, for ending the war between Ukraine and Russia was “too radical.” Add in Zelensky’s visit to an armaments factory together with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, and Trump and his flunkeys went nuts. House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote a sniveling letter demanding the ouster of Ukrainian ambassador Oksana Marakarova.

Wednesday

The Spectator

GOP demands investigation into Zelensky visit

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky just stopped by an ammunition factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania — which CNN points out is President Joe Biden’s hometown.Now, a group of House Republicans is demanding answers about what taxpayer dollars and US resources were used in what they allege was essentially a campaign event for Democrats.The Hill reports that this past Sunday, Zelensky “was flown to Pennsylvania in an Air Force C-17 plane.” He was also protected by the US Secret Service.

Grace Curley

Tim Walz faces a Yale Law reckoning

The Harris-Walz team has a plan to coax Trump into another debate. According to NBC News, the Democratic National Committee will accuse Trump of being a chicken in the hopes of getting under his skin: “The chicken billboards, which will first appear at Trump’s rally Monday in Indiana, Pennsylvania, include a digitally altered image of Trump in a chicken suit alongside the words ‘There’s no debate: Donald Trump’s a chicken.’” The tactics here aren’t subtle, but considering Trump’s penchant for taking the bait, it just might work. But if Operation Chicken lays an egg, then the last big televised event of this campaign season is next week’s vice presidential debate, when Ohio senator J.D.

Thursday

Ben Domenech

An election stuck in the trenches

Welcome to Thunderdome. In the space of four weeks, the incumbent president was dethroned from his nomination and replaced by his running mate in a behind-the-scenes coup led by the most powerful person in the party (who still insists on the absurd claim it was an “open primary”). Within that time, the nation witnessed the first of not one but two assassination attempts targeting his opponent, the former president who has faced a thermonuclear level of lawfare in an attempt to seize everything he owns and put him behind bars.

tim walz weirdness polling
Roger Kimball

A vindication for our polling obsession

One of the entertainments that every election season brings revolves around polling. Every season seems to bring more and more and more frequent polls. The measure registered voters and (for all I know) unregistered ones. They register people who are designated “likely voters” and they claim to filter for gender(s), age, race, ethnic back, party affiliation or non-affiliation, ZIP code, income, and favorite pastimes, and what seems like a thousand other things.    Like everyone else who is interested in politics, I pay fretful attention to the results of these surveys and questionnaires beginning about a year out from the election itself.

Monday

Ben Domenech

Trump and Kamala are competing over who’s more online

The messaging in the 2024 election has devolved into a contest to determine which campaign is more online, to their detriment. In 2019 (she never made it to 2020), the first Kamala Harris presidential campaign infamously imploded because, among other reasons, her staff and communications strategy were "way too online" — obsessed with the constant progressive social media flashpoints above and beyond the issues fundamental to the primary electorate. Instead of talking to voters about their priorities, Harris’s campaign was too focused on trending topics, memes and crafting the best clips of their candidate for the online audience.

online

Thursday

Amber Duke

The rise of BlueAnon

Someone call the disinformation police! Left-wing conspiracy theories and attempts to manipulate the media are spiraling out of control ahead of the 2024 election. From tall tales about former president Donald Trump staging his own assassination attempt to the lower-stakes speculation that Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is wearing guyliner, “BlueAnon” has reemerged in a big way. BlueAnon is a blanket term coined by some conservatives to describe liberal and left-wing conspiracy theories. It intentionally rhymes with QAnon, the arguably better-known right-wing conspiracy, and mostly arose in response to what many regard as the Russian collusion hoax, the idea that Trump colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election.

BlueAnon
Ben Domenech

Tim Walz’s Minnesota vibes

The first thing a Minnesota political activist tells me when I ask about Tim Walz is this: when he gets mad, he tends to spit when he talks. The blue-state governor’s version of Minnesota Nice leans hard on the aggressive side of passivity, with an abiding predilection for taking offense at questions that fall into the category of what most politicians expect. His superior on the Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris, responds to such queries with awkward laughter in an attempt to buy time for an answer. But for Walz, the very act of questioning is felt as an insult to his character, leading to an unleashing of bitter invective founded in righteous anger that will absolutely lead to a follow-up call from his staff, as it did for multiple people over his years in Minnesota politics.

Walz
James S. Robbins

What does Appalachia mean?

The selection of J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate has made Appalachia the regional epicenter of America’s political universe. But above the social media sniping and political gamesmanship lies a message of diversity, identity and internal conflict at the very heart of what it means to be an American. J.D. Vance, a native of Middletown, Ohio and the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, was immediately criticized by Kentucky governor Andy Beshear as a phony who acts “like he understands our culture” when “he ain’t from here.

Appalachia
Bill Kauffman

A matter of presidents

Virginia spawned four of the first five US presidents. Between Reconstruction and the roaring twenties, Ohio’s executive fecundity earned it the sobriquet “Cradle of Presidents.” But the next time fate, or providence, guides you to western New York, the friendly folks at the Buffalo Presidential Center will set you straight on the most president-haunted city this side of Washington, DC.

presidents

Friday

Cockburn

Will Kamala actually appoint a Republican to her cabinet?

Will Kamala actually appoint a Republican to her cabinet? A rare surprise in the otherwise routine Harris-Walz interview on CNN last night: when asked if she’d appoint a Republican to her cabinet, Kamala said, “Yes I would.” This is perhaps in response to two Democratic presidential candidates from the last decade — Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — endorsing Trump and joining his transition team. President Biden appointed a few Republicans to ambassadorial positions — notably Arizonans Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain — but Harris appears ready to go a step further. The likeliest option would be to appoint a serious-minded ex-military Beltway figure to a role like director of national intelligence or defense secretary: Mark Esper, for instance.

Kamala

Monday

Charles Lipson

Two successive 2024 campaigns in a very strange election year

This is one very strange presidential campaign.  That’s not just because it seems to go on forever. This one seemed to begin shortly after Eisenhower left office. It’s also because there have been two general election campaigns in a row. The first pitted Donald Trump against Joe Biden and ended with Trump’s decisive victory. The clincher was Biden’s humiliating debate performance, which showed the world what his aides, his party and a compliant media had been hiding: the president was suffering serious cognitive decline.  Once voters had peeked behind the curtain, they were convinced Biden could not serve another four years. Indeed, it was questionable whether he was competent to serve now. That question still hovers, unanswered, over the White House.

kamala harris campaigns