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Good Friday Morning! Especially to the Al Smith dinner in New York. The annual charity event draws in the top political names each year to tell jokes and take jabs at themselves and others. Jim Gaffigan was the master of ceremonies for the event. He started by saying, “The Democrats have been telling us Trump’s reelection is a threat to democracy. In fact, they were so concerned of this threat, they staged a coup, ousted their democratically elected incumbent, and installed Kamala Harris.”
Harris didn’t attend the event, while Trump did. The Donald rarely skips an opportunity to play stand-up comedian and had plenty of lines. One of his better lines was, “I hear that Kamala and her husband carve out some really beautiful alone time at the end of the day for an intimate dinner. Just Doug, her, and the teleprompter.”
If you need a good laugh, it’s worth watching. Check it out on X/Twitter or YouTube.
This week, I will dig into the language differences between Harris and Trump this cycle and why it explains how each is having difficulty with men and women respectively this cycle – links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- One of my favorite pastimes is watching New York Times opinion columnists have meltdowns. David Brooks wrote a panicked piece on Harris late Thursday: “Why the Heck Isn’t She Running Away With This?” His opening paragraph: “Two big things baffle me about this election. The first is: Why are the polls so immobile? In mid-June the race between President Biden and Donald Trump was neck and neck. Since then, we’ve had a blizzard of big events, and still the race is basically where it was in June. It started out tied and has only gotten closer.” If David Brooks had only been reading this newsletter, like you, he might have expected the polling bounces to cool off and things to shift towards Trump (aka the sugar high for Harris disappearing). There are some dense ideological bubbles at The Times.
- The anger by Democrats at Bret Baier for asking Kamala Harris hard questions is hilarious. You can see Democrats calling the interview an “ambush,” “testy,“ “a Trump debate,” and more. Democrats didn’t like it. I give Harris props for doing it, though I don’t think it will help her. But to the point of the media criticism, with some calling Bret Baier a sellout for Trump for how he did this interview – Baier did the same thing to Trump earlier this year. In June, Baier asked so many hard questions that the same people praised him. Ad Week ran a piece quoting prominent media members across the spectrum who praised Baier for asking tough questions and working to get Trump to answer questions he was dodging, which included answers about his active trial cases. In short, all the criticism of Baier is partisan hackery. Baier admitted to one mistake where Fox News aired the wrong clip during the interview, instead of another one.
- On the interview itself: Kamala Harris went on Fox News and drove one of the most viewed interviews of the election cycle (you can view the whole thing on X/Twitter or on Fox News). It’s truly the first time Harris has faced any pushback on her points in any setting at all. She spent most of the interview angry at Baier’s pushback and seemed shocked at times when he’d even bring up some topics. Her staff pushed to end the interview early. She gets props for agreeing to the interview, and I’ve heard partisans say she did well. But I’ve not seen a single independent or undecided voter say the interview was good. And my view was that it was harmful to her.
Where you can find me this week
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Horse Race Ep. 013: Harris Goes On FoxNews | Battlegrounds Shift To Trump | Latest Polls
Americans Owe Israel Thanks For Eliminating Hamas Leader – Conservative Institute
Kamala Harris Scrambles While Losing Men – Conservative Institute
Democrats Believe Harris Is Losing The Race – Conservative Institute
Trump Talks Class, Harris Talks Race & Gender (Or how Men are from Mars, Women from Venus in this election).
There’s been a lot of infighting in the Democratic Party over the last week as we head down the stretch. Why? Two reasons. First, Kamala Harris and Biden’s relationship is “increasingly fraught,” as her side of the party believes Biden’s team is undercutting her campaign. At the funeral of Ethel Kennedy, Biden appeared to tell Obama that Harris was “not asstrong as me,” with Obama agreeing.
However, the larger issue for the last 7-10 days is the Harris campaign’s panic that they’re losing men. That’s led them to go on Fox News, hold town halls with Charlamagne Tha God, and send Tim Walz out for hunting photo ops. This is a campaign that is increasingly losing men across the board, and that includes minorities like Black and Hispanic men.
Politico ran a piece interviewing Black men in Georgia, many of whom said they’re voting for Trump. On his way to the Al Smith dinner in New York, a staple of presidential politics, Trump stopped by a barbershop in the Bronx for a quick rally/photo-op. Everyone there was supporting him. Kamala Harris is skipping the Al Smith dinner, claiming she needs to campaign more than speak there (the event usually draws strong national media coverage, so this excuse makes little sense).
National Review did a long write-up about the Democratic Party’s issues and how they knew about them at the Democratic Convention but didn’t know how to deal with them. And now, in the closing weeks, it’s become the number one issue.
The caveat to all of this is simple: the gender gap between Trump and Harris is genuine. Trump has issues with women voters, hence the all-woman town hall on Fox News, and Harris is struggling with men. The reason the Harris campaign’s problems are so much more pronounced is that: 1) Rank and file Democrats are freaking out across the board, and 2) Trump’s difficulties with women aren’t new – he’s trying to offset those losses with more working-class votes in general.
In short, Trump is expanding his coalition, while Harris is struggling with a group that has been a core part of the Democratic base. It’s one thing to struggle with independent voters, it’s another to have issues with your base.
The path to victory for both candidates is straightforward. John Halpin writes in The Liberal Patriot:
A decisive Trump victory would mean the former president ran up big numbers with irregular and working-class voters across racial and ethnic lines in the most important states while keeping his suburban and college-educated defections to a manageable level. Why? Likely because enough voters rejected the policies of the incumbent administration and got over any trepidations they may have had about Trump’s character and actions as president.
Conversely, a decisive Harris victory would arise from her amassing huge independent and college-educated numbers in the “Blue Wall” and other contested states, more than enough to offset any white, black, and Hispanic working-class defections. Why? Probably because enough voters got over their displeasure with Biden’s economy and immigration policies—and Harris’s past radical positions—but didn’t overlook their negative feelings about Trump and his behavior as president.
Both of these options are still possible. And because we don’t know which voter groups will turn out, it’s hard to tell how polls or people will shift in the coming days. Halpin describes a third path where it’s a highly narrow race decided by a handful of votes, effectively a “chance” election result. That’s possible, but the campaigns are shifting resources to attempt the decisive victory routes. That’s why we know the reasons Democrats are panicking at the last second: they’re playing defense while Trump is working on offense.
I don’t think Harris’s last-minute messaging will work as an appeal to men. It’s just too fake and unserious. What I’ve noticed is that Harris is trying to target men like she does women and minority voters—treat them as a bloc that acts and thinks similarly.
But it seems clear men don’t think that way at all. Trump’s message is purely a class-based message: Everything is more expensive, and Democrats are screwing over the working class by sending money to pet projects and other countries, but not you, the working people of America.
If you view the world through race or gender first, Kamala Harris’s message resonates. If you see class first, you’ll see the universality of Trump’s message.
In 2020, I wrote a piece for The Dispatch in which I described how modern Marxists were shifting how socialist/communist policies work. Under strict Marxist terms, everything is class-based, and he pits the classes against each other. Bernie Sanders speaks this language perfectly and represents the old socialist school. A.O.C., Stacey Abram, and the new cohort view race/gender first and replace the class system with a racial one.
That’s why you get these bizarre things like FEMA discussing disaster recovery with race in mind. It’s incoherent to anyone else, but if you don’t see class as a way to find those who need the most help (aka the poor, working class in traditional Marxist theory), then this actually makes sense. They’ve redefined the most needy by using race, gender, or sexual status while ignoring true economic poverty.
Harris, who I don’t view as a strict ideologue, comes out of that San Francisco progressive milieu. She has this view of the world. The problem is that the rest of the country does not have this same view. The Rust Belt, in particular, does not have the historical background to replace class-based thinking with race – that’s because, between unions, socialists, and more, you can find a rich history of the Midwest everything through a class-based system. Our notions of blue-collar work come from that part of the country.
What’s interesting is that when you listen to the complaints about Harris from traditional Democratic voting blocs, you hear them talking with a class-based approach versus the progressive norms of viewing everything through gender and race. Take these two examples from the Politico piece:
In the back, Joseph Parker said he was thrilled [Bill Clinton] was coming. But it had been nearly a quarter-century since Clinton left office and, Parker said, “Things were really different then.” This year, he said he’s voting for former President Donald Trump, the first time the 72-year-old has cast a ballot for a Republican presidential candidate.
“Trump’s a man of his word. What he says he’s gonna do, he does,” Parker said, after initial reluctance to reveal his preference. “And everything is so high now — groceries high, clothes, everything, gas. And four years ago, it wasn’t that high. And so people see the difference in Kamala Harris and Trump, and they want some of what they had four years ago. And I do, too.”
Arthur Beauford, a 28-year-old from Marietta, said he decided to vote for the first time this election — for Trump, despite his family members still being “Democrat, all the way.” Beauford said it’s not just him, that he keeps hearing similar remarks from other young Black men nearly every time he is at the gym: Comments about Trump being “funny.” “Entertaining.“ Even “brave,“ Beauford said, noting it’s not uncommon to hear his peers talking about an unspecified “they“ who are out to get the former president.
“I’m not necessarily the biggest fan of Trump,“ Beauford said, “but I’ll definitely take Trump over Harris,“ adding that he was impressed by Trump’s business experience, while suggesting that Harris, a former prosecutor, California attorney general and senator, wasn’t qualified and “just seems to have been given everything“ in her career.
The two complaints here are typical of a working or middle-class voter thinking in terms of class. The first man doesn’t like grocery prices and wants the economic prosperity of four years ago. The second man doesn’t believe Harris has earned anything in her career.
Harris is trying to overcome this by emphasizing she grew up in a middle-class family. Still, her campaign is talking in race/gender terms (which has been true for Democrats for years now). Her attempts to break out of this mold appear fake because no one believes her authenticity.
Trump struggles in the opposite direction. He’s talking class while all these college-educated voters, many with white-collar jobs, sitting through annual H.R. lectures on race/gender/sexuality, see the merits in the Harris pitch. It’s common in election analysis to hear the obvious point that there’s an education and gender gap between the two parties. I think part of that reason is because the two main parties have split on how they view the country.
Traditional conservatism has struggled with both of these framings because it rejects class analysis and wants to analyze policies on the merits of whether they advance the best interests of the economy or conserve critical elements of the nation. The left has easily been able to skewer this in the past, as elitist thinking from the rich. Trump’s class approach provides an answer to the race/gender ideology of the new left.
Where is all this heading? I’m not entirely sure. However, The New York Times published a lengthy article on the University of Michigan, its D.E.I. program, and its spectacular failure. The comments are filled with people declaring akin to 1984 censorship and authoritarianism. We could be witnessing the fever start to break on the new left’s approach to politics (with the peak being 2020). T.B.D.
Two-and-a-half weeks away from Election Day.
Links of the week
Kamala Harris’s Plagiarism Problem: The vice president appears to have airlifted sections of her book, Smart on Crime. – Christopher Rufo
NYTimes Hides Plagiarism Evidence From Its Expert Witness To Rebut Plagiarism Claims Against Harris – Rufo on X
Fox News interview with Kamala Harris draws 7.8 million viewers, nearly quintuple average audience – NYPost
Bret Baier Says He Aired Wrong Trump Clip During Kamala Harris Interview: ‘I Did Make a Mistake’ – Mediaite
Here’s the awkward moment Kamala Harris’ aides shut down Fox News interview with Bret Baier – NYPost
Kamala Harris’s Fox News interview disaster shows how the media set her up to fail – The Hill
If You’re Angry at Bret Baier, You’re Telling On Yourself – Mediaite
In Retrospect, I Still Think They Were Bad Veep Selections – Sean Trende, RealClearPolitics
In the campaign’s final weeks, Harris is keeping a focus on ‘blue wall’ states – Associated Press
Finally faced with hard questions on border, Harris has no answers – Washington Examiner
Kamala Harris’s Fox News interview disaster shows how the media set her up to fail – The Hill
Inside Elon Musk’s plan to trigger a ‘red wave’ for Trump – The Washington Post
‘60 Minutes’: Release the Unedited Kamala Harris Transcript: Is CBS guilty of journalistic malpractice? There’s an easy way to find out. – The Free Press Editors
‘Likely To Give Birth Any Day’: Ruben Gallego Served Pregnant Wife With Divorce Papers. She Was Blindsided. The Arizona Democrat also wanted his ex-wife, Kate Gallego, to pay his attorney’s fees – Washington Free Beacon
The Debanking of America: What do Muslims, January 6 rioters, and Melania Trump all have in common? They were kicked off the financial grid. – The Free Press
Have We Reached Peak Human Life Expectancy? A new study suggests aging has its limits – Inside Hook
We Are in Need of Renaissance People: We have created a society of professionals who are experts within their narrow specialties. Those are not the people who get great things done. – Victor Davis Hanson
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
A thread on how the media is memory-holing the first Trump assassination story.
Satire of the week
Kamala Harris Appears On White Noise Podcast In Appeal To Sleepy Voters – Onion
Taco Bell Announces It’s Plumb Out Of Ideas For New Places To Put Beef – Onion
Washington Post Gives Entire Staff Day Off To Mourn Loss Of Hamas Leader – Babylon Bee
Democrats Wondering If It’s Too Late To Go Back To Joe Biden – Babylon Bee
Nice! Person on Reddit Who Had the Same Symptoms as You Followed up on the Thread and Said It Was Nothing – Reductress
Local Jam Session Goes So Poorly Nobody Suggests Starting a Band – The Hard Times
Megalopolis Review: Sheesh, I Hope Whoever Made This Didn’t Waste Too Much Time on It – The Hard Drive
P-Diddy Court Appearance Delayed After Entire Court Has Something Slipped In Their Drinks – Waterford Whispers News
Thanks for reading!