Joe biden

I have a confession to make. This year, I practiced electoral abstinence. By that, I mean I mostly tuned out from the election campaign. No posting a spicy GIF every time one of the candidates dodged a question. No clicking refresh on the RealClearPolitics polling average until I could feel the slow onset of carpal tunnel syndrome. It was a serious change of pace. For more than a decade, I was a conservative journalist, and before 2024, I’d covered every election cycle since 2012 (if sitting on my couch in sweatpants watching CNN and writing about it counts as “covering,” which in our current media landscape means yes!). I wrote reaction pieces after each of the Obama-Romney presidential debates. I watched on my TV as the events of January 6, 2021 unfolded five miles up the road.

Republicans have, very foolishly, engaged in “autopsies” after recent election losses. This election, it’s the Democrats’ turn! The Democrats will engage in a circular firing squad for the next couple of years, with all factions doing their best to gain the upper hand by giving their rivals the shiv in the jailhouse shower. Allow me, a Republican political consultant without a dog in this fight, to answer the pressing question: who will Democrats blame for the campaign that inconceivably allowed the bad Orange Man to win and the obviously superior Kamala and Clooney and Oprah to fail? First, let’s start with the obvious — black voters. The people at DNC HQ will be furious that black voters did not obey instructions and vote 95 percent for Democrats.

Nobody ever talks about this anymore, but there was a time when Democrats were floating Kamala Harris as a potential Supreme Court pick. Shortly after the death of Antonin Scalia, the Los Angeles Times published an article about how she may be on Barack Obama’s shortlist. Speculation reached a “fever pitch,” they reported. Harris said she was flattered by the consideration, even as she declined the opportunity. That’s a footnote in American history that’s worth revisiting, now that Election Day is almost here. Imagine the kind of people who would tell us, with a straight face, that Kamala Harris should replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. On the one hand, you have one of the leading legal minds in all of American history.

The latest wisdom from our tottering, angry president was to call Donald Trump’s supporters “garbage.” He was responding to the inexcusable “joke” by a warm-up comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. The comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, stepped all over what should have been Trump’s big story: his triumphant rally. Biden stepped all over what should have been Kamala Harris’s: her effective closing speech on the Ellipse, in front of the White House.  These disparaging references are loathsome, whatever their political impact. They cheapen our public life. But they are also political mistakes.

Washington, DC Vice President Kamala Harris made her last stand at the scene of her opponent Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 address to his supporters: the Ellipse south of the White House on Washington’s National Mall. Her argument was reminiscent of her predecessor as the Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden: eschewing the nebulous “joy” that had characterized her anointing at the Democratic National Convention, Harris opted to intone about the grave threat a second Trump term would pose to America and western democracy. But can that approach work two presidential elections in a row? Attendees waved the Stars and Stripes, with backdrops reading “FREEDOM” and “USA” adorning the riders.

There has been no shortage of coverage of the 10 million-plus illegal aliens who have stormed our borders, the 5 million-plus who’ve been waived into the country and the Biden/Harris administration’s misuse of the humanitarian parole system. But almost nothing has been written about a legal, backdoor entry to the United States that large numbers of migrants continue to exploit: increasingly easy-to-obtain American tourist visas. As I’ve been documenting since 2008, many aspiring migrants find it easy to fraudulently convince my former colleagues at the State Department that they qualify for tourist visas and thus do not need a coyote to help them sneak into the country. But it appears as though this trend has gone into overdrive during the Biden-Harris administration.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is in trouble, which means we may be in for one hell of a post-election fireworks show.   If she loses the presidential election, there will be intra-Democratic Party in-fighting unlike anything we’ve seen before. The recriminations will be extraordinary. There will be finger-pointing, backstabbing, excuse-making and an air of panic that will make even the sleazy, widespread gossip-peddling that followed the late Senator John McCain’s defeat in 2008 look tame.   How do we know this will happen? Because it has happened before, albeit on a smaller scale.