DAN MCLAUGHLIN: The seeds of Kamala Harris’ defeat were sown four years ago.
If Trump had been re-elected in 2020, Democrats might have been reaping that reward now. Republicans would probably have lost House seats in both 2022 and 2024; instead, they look likely to hold their House majority and gain between three and five Senate seats. That Senate buffer could make it harder for Democrats to retake the upper chamber in 2026.
Worse, Joe Biden inherited a bunch of bad hands, and played them so poorly that he made them worse. In the process, his party alienated large voting blocs.
The pandemic produced supply shortages due to the interruption of manufacturing and transport, while bipartisan bills in 2020 pumped money into the system while people were at home and unable to spend it all. Inflation was inevitable, and appeared across the Western world. It would have bitten Trump had he been in office. But Biden flooded the economy with deficit spending while his party railed against energy producers. That not only made inflation much worse, it meant that Democrats shouldered all the blame for it.
There was no good way to leave Afghanistan, and Trump was paving the way to do so. There, too, Biden was the one to bite the bullet, then mishandled it to maximise the political fallout. His approval rating never recovered. Meanwhile, war in Gaza produced inevitable fissures in the Democratic coalition, which could have been papered over had it happened on Trump’s watch. By contrast, war in Ukraine may have divided Trump’s coalition much worse had he remained in office.
The Covid vaccines, developed under Trump, were first available under Biden. Heavy-handed Democrat-backed mandates caused a backlash that ended with the likes of Robert F Kennedy Jr defecting to the Republicans.
The pandemic artificially throttled immigration. Trump had capitalised on emergency authority to seal the border. Biden was left to deal with its end, and again, his poor choices created a dramatic migrant crisis.
Finally, Democrats overplayed the hand that Trump gave them on January 6, 2021. Had Trump remained in power, he wouldn’t have faced the same overreaching barrage of criminal prosecutions. Instead, Biden’s own Justice Department ended up trying to jail his opponent while elements of his party tried to get Trump thrown off the ballot. It backfired.
Back in April, the Politico noted that the Trump campaign “will use his trial to attract Black voters,” using “his legal troubles — and issues of race in New York more broadly — to appeal to Black voters by suggesting that Trump, a 77-year-old white man from a family of privilege and with a history of offensive rhetoric, is beset by the same injustices that afflict Black Americans.”
It worked; the New York Post reported yesterday: Trump makes massive gains with Hispanics nationwide and black voters in swing states: exit polls.
Not surprisingly, given the left’s absolute obsession with replacing the Bad Orange Man’s custom-made Brioni business suit with an off-the-rack orange prison jumpsuit, as the Daily Signal noted yesterday, “Voters Saw the Left, Not Trump, as True Threat to Democracy.”