She’s got Trump’s number
How much was sheer dumb luck? Joe Biden might have held to his May 2020 promise to be a “transition” president and bowed out of the 2024 race last year. Democrats might have had a knock-down, drag-out primary season between members of its deep bench of next-generation leaders. The fights might have left the party embittered and weakened going into the fall campaign.
Yes, old party hands helped. They saw handwriting on the wall for the Biden candidacy and convinced him he had to bow out for the good of his party. In late July.
Somehow in spite of themselves, Democrats flipped the script (not in an Aaron Sorkin way) on the 2024 election and turned it from a contest between two, old white men with little curb appeal to one where an energetic, mixed-race, former-prosecutor Democrat faces an aged sexual predator, multiply indicted and convicted, a Republican with dreams of turning the United States into a dictatorship.
Within hours of Biden’s Sunday passing of the baton to his vice president, Kamala Harris, Democrats are unified and reenergized. Harris pulled in $81 million in donations in the first 24 hours, the largest one-day haul in presidential history, anecdotally, many from first-time donors. By Monday night, enough Democratic convention delegates had declared their support for Harris (nonbinding) to nominate her on their first August ballot.
All this without many a pundit’s wet-dream of “a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like.” It’s not just Stephen Miller who has a sad.
“The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins this election,” former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley predicted before Republican primary supporters in January.
Talk about dumb luck, a friend told me.
Now there is no joy in MAGAville. Republicans are stuck after massive investments of time and money into running against “Sleepy Joe” with having to rewrite their scripts for a race in which Donald Trump is the faltering old man in obvious decline, and still convicted and indicted. Team MAGA is in panicked disarray.
“I know Donald Trump’s type,” the former prosecutor told her campaign staff Monday afternoon to cheers.
Never Trumper George Conway reduced the current state of play to a simple formula:
I always thought this election is relatively simple. In 2016, Trump won because Hillary became the issue. In 2020, Trump was the incumbent and he was the issue because of his behavior, because of Clorox, because of everything. What happens this year is whoever becomes the issue loses. The problem we were having was that Biden was becoming the issue when Trump needs to be the issue. Now, Trump isn’t going to be able to avoid being the issue… Now, Trump is the old man in the race. Now, after having raised the issue of cognitive decline, he’s the only one that argument applies to.
When Donald Trump spoke of American carnage, he wasn’t promising to fix it but to bring it.
Get back on offense, Democrats. Yes, sell the brownie. “Paint the beautiful tomorrow.” Young voters care about the cost of rents, groceries, and about student loans. Tout what Biden-Harris delivered and what more help is coming for them and their families. But also make Trump the issue. Make Project 2025 the issue. Make Republicans becoming an authoritarian cult bent on taking your freedoms the issue. Women’s freedoms especially, but everyone else’s too. Make what kind of future we want for our country the issue.
#ShesWithUs Now, go kick ass and take names.
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