There are a lot of ways you can tell that a political campaign is in trouble. Of course you can look at the polls, and the various models that aggregate those polls. And right now the models do not look good for Kamala Harris. Right now, for example, Nate Silver’s model gives Donald Trump a 60% chance of winning, with a projected 277 electoral votes.
🚨NEW: Democrat-voting pollster Nate Silver releases new Presidential prediction model showing commanding Trump lead:
ELECTORAL COLLEGE ODDS:
🟥Trump: 60.1% (+20.4)
🟦Harris: 39.7% pic.twitter.com/md7Co7lkGQ
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 5, 2024
Who knows whether any of this is particularly accurate. It’ll all change by next week, most likely, and there’s still plenty of time to go. But the more interesting thing about Silver’s projection isn’t the specific figures. It’s that his data, which aggregates all the polls, shows a very clear trend. Kamala Harris is losing ground, quickly, as you can see from that chart. And it’s not hard to see why. When you’re only capable of giving one interview to a friendly news outlet in more than a month — and when you manage to bomb that interview — then people lose confidence in your campaign very quickly. And that’s what’s happening to Kamala Harris right now. She barely got a bounce from the convention. And now she’s in free fall. The media built up a elaborate hype train for Kamala, hoping it would carry her on those tracks to November. But the whole thing was so absurdly fake, so phony, that it couldn’t last. It ran out of steam. And now they’re stuck with Kamala Harris. Not the idea of Kamala Harris — the idea they constructed. But the fact of her as a person. Kamala Harris, the lame, unimpressive, inarticulate politician we all have known.
At the same time, if you’re not a believer in polls or statistical models, there are plenty of other signs that things have taken a very bad turn for Kamala Harris’ candidacy. One of them is that the campaign’s lying is becoming more flagrant and shameless by the day. There’s clear desperation everywhere you look.
Last night for instance, Kamala’s account tweeted an accusation that JD Vance had downplayed school shootings as just a “fact of life.” Here’s what Kamala’s handlers posted to her account, above a video of Vance’s speech: “School shootings are not just a fact of life. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can take action to protect our children—and we will.”
So she’s telling off JD Vance for supposedly saying that school shootings are inevitable and we should all get used to them. Predictably, the Associated Press also promoted the lie about what Vance said. They ran this headline: “JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life.'”
Deleted post: 2.2 million impressions
Corrected post: 100k impressions pic.twitter.com/4Q5tpIoGXn
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) September 6, 2024
Several million people saw this smear and repeated it. The outrage machine kicked into gear, as expected. Eventually Twitter’s community notes feature corrected it, and the AP finally deleted their original post, and updated their headline. Now the AP’s headline reads very differently. It says,: “JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a ‘fact of life.'”
So they suggested that Vance was minimizing the fact that a school shooting had occurred, when in fact he was doing the opposite. As far as lies go, this one was extremely transparent. Anyone could just watch the video to see what JD Vance actually said. But the AP, and the Kamala Harris campaign, went ahead with the lie anyway. And that tells us that they’re desperate — obviously so. They’re in a very bad position and they know it. Campaigns that are confident, and surging in the polls, don’t need to invent fake quotes that are easy to disprove in about five seconds.
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And for that matter, campaigns that aren’t collapsing don’t have surrogates who go wildly off-message all the time. But that’s happening to Kamala’s campaign too. People who are supposed to be promoting Kamala are, instead, sabotaging her messaging at every opportunity.
Here for example is Joe Biden the other day, talking about the Inflation Reduction Act. This is the law that Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote on. But instead of arguing that the Inflation Reduction Act reduced inflation, Biden instead admitted that the law in fact had nothing to do with inflation. Instead he said it was a climate bill. Watch:
Joe Biden just STRAIGHT UP ADMITTED that the Inflation Reduction Act was a TOTAL SCAM that had NOTHING to do with reducing inflation!
Does Kamala Harris agree with this?
"We should've named it what it was!" pic.twitter.com/2WL7N1exN2
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) September 5, 2024
“We should’ve named it what it was.”
If you’re Kamala, that’s not exactly something you want to hear one of your surrogates say on the campaign trail. It’s an admission that Kamala Harris deceived the entire country about the one major legislative accomplishment she claims to have. And once you admit that, there’s no reason for anyone to trust her ever again. There’s certainly no reason to trust her when she says that she can implement her economic agenda — including taxing unrealized capital gains — without destroying the U.S. economy.
And just to underscore that point, another prominent supporter of Kamala — Mark Cuban — just went on CNBC to explain that taxing unrealized capital gains would be a disaster. Watch:
NEW: Mark Cuban gets flustered & says "no" 16 times after CNBC host Rebecca Quick said Kamala is just telling people what they want to hear.
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no," Cuban said.
The "no" comment came after Cuban said Harris' plan to tax… pic.twitter.com/6B1WeqsqvC
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 5, 2024
Cuban went on to say that he’s supposedly spoken with Harris’ team and that they now understand that taxing unrealized capital gains may not be a great idea. But that doesn’t explain why they proposed it in the first place. It also doesn’t explain why they’re still pushing it. Kamala hasn’t explained, in detail, why she still wants a tax on unrealized capital gains. Her team has walked back some of the numbers, but she’s still proposing the tax. Why is that exactly? How can she support a tax that even her own supporters recognized would be a disaster?
We all know the answer to that question. Kamala Harris doesn’t know anything about economics. Ask her one question about unrealized capital gains and she’ll start babbling about equity. She won’t be able to defend the policy even for a moment. Everyone — even her surrogates — understands this. And now they’re comfortable coming out on television and admitting it.
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These are not great signs for the Kamala Harris campaign. But maybe the worst sign of all is what took place earlier this week. Kamala received an endorsement from Liz Cheney, who recently lost her House seat by a margin that was almost unparalleled in modern politics. If there was ever an endorsement that qualified as the kiss of death, this is it.
Here’s the awkwardly filmed cellphone footage of the big moment:
Finally, Liz Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris! Let's go! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸#HarrisWalz2024 #LizCheney #CountryOverParty
pic.twitter.com/wm5n9nXWZu— 𝕭𝖆𝖓𝖓𝖊𝖗 𝕸𝖆𝖓🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@Bannerman104) September 4, 2024
Liz Cheney goes on and on about how Kamala Harris will save democracy and freedom in the United States. And people in the audience pretend to be excited about this endorsement. But if you go back just a couple of years, Liz Cheney had a very different perspective on Kamala Harris. She pointed out that Kamala had explicitly promised to suspend Americans’ constitutional rights via executive order. She explained that Kamala Harris wants to spend trillions of dollars on universal healthcare. And she concluded that she’s a “Radical” to the left of Bernie Sanders who no one should vote for. Watch:
WATCH: Just as Liz Cheney announced her endorsement of Kamala Harris, a video has resurfaced of her SLAMMING Kamala, calling her a radical
"Her voting record is to the left of Bernie Sanders… It's very clear, she [Kamala] is a radical liberal"
pic.twitter.com/fIQFVkyKsS— George (@BehizyTweets) September 4, 2024
This is the kind of endorsement you’d probably rather refuse, if you had the choice. There is no one, on either side of the political spectrum, who covets an endorsement from Liz Cheney. But now it’s the endorsement that Kamala Harris is stuck with. This is the caliber of endorsement her candidacy is attracting, as her surrogates are publicly disavowing her policy positions. As the ship sinks, Kamala Harris is quite literally getting endorsed by the biggest losers in all of politics.
Of course Kamala Harris has no one to blame for this but herself. Because she’s not appearing for interviews, she has to rely on surrogates to explain what she stands for, and why. Kamala Harris herself is nowhere to be found. That’s why people are still digging up clips of her speeches from several years ago, to try to figure out what a Kamala Harris administration would look like. That’s what we’re reduced to, when the candidate is incapable of speaking.
Here’s one of those clips that’s now making the rounds, which is apparently from 2019:
Elon Musk, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard are raising concerns of free speech under Kamala Harris.
In 2019, Harris vowed to use the DOJ and law enforcement to 'hold social media platforms responsible' for 'misinformation' as part of the 'fight against this threat to our Democracy' pic.twitter.com/3XwD8lcoQb
— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) September 5, 2024
As I outlined yesterday, politicians like Kamala Harris demand censorship because without it, their candidacy falls apart. There are just too many obvious problems with her platform that don’t withstand any scrutiny. So she wants to shut down the Internet to prevent people from talking about them.
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Frankly, we are now at the point where Kamala Harris would probably censor her own surrogates if she could. A candidate who isn’t capable of speaking for herself is now struggling to contain the people she’s sending out to do her messaging for her. With just a couple of months to go until the election, more than any poll or statistical model, that’s just about the worst imaginable sign for the Kamala Harris campaign. What that means is very clear, based on what we’ve seen so far: The lying, and the panic, are only going to intensify from here.
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