Erickson: Trump winning

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Democrats, this is just the reality of the situation.

Kamala Harris is running against a man who 100% of Americans have an opinion of and a majority of those Americans hate him.

And she’s tied with him notwithstanding that.

And he tends to outperform his polls.

That is not a position to be in as, essentially, the incumbent. The Biden Basement strategy was not working for Biden, and the team that she inherited seems to have embraced that strategy.

Harris is doing softball interviews with favorable, left-leaning outlets from Call Her Daddy to Stephen Colbert to Howard Stern to The View. In her one substantive interview with 60 Minutes, the only news she made out of it was the shallow word salads of her answers.

These other interviewers’ entire pattern here is to do no harm to Harris. They will not challenge her; too few persuadable voters will even engage with that content.

Trump is barnstorming the nation, focusing on the groceries, the cost of housing, and inflation.

Harris is focusing on housing costs and abortion, playing to the left.

She is trying to maximize the vote of single women to overcome a huge gap with men that transcends race. That is not a good position to be in. She is playing a strategy that is too safe for a tied race.

Her campaign presumption seems to be that the overwhelming majority of likely voters will vote against Trump, which is true, and that Trump’s team does not have the resources and ability to actually turn out the low-propensity voters he depends on to win.

It might be a safe calculation on her part. Team Trump insists it has a powerful ground game, but it does not. In Western North Carolina before the hurricane, the ground game was non-existent. Here in Georgia, few have seen the Trump ground game.

Third-party groups are engaged for Trump, but his campaign’s ground game effort is ?? even as they scream in serious tones that it is brilliant.

But does Trump even need a serious ground game?

Voters are angry. Working-class voters in Philadelphia are shifting to Trump. Men are rallying to Trump. Married women are not as decisively for Harris as they should be. Younger black men and Hispanic men and women are drifting to Trump. A plurality of non-white voters will vote for Harris, but Trump does not need a majority of them—he just needs enough of them.

He might get them.

Harris’s team seems to believe the protective media echo chamber — Trump is awful, everybody hates him, and nobody they know will vote for him.

But friends, it is worth remembering a year ago Democrats were begging Joe Biden to drop Kamala Harris. Even back in February of 2023, Politico reported, “High-level Democrats are rallying to President Biden’s reelection, not because they think it’s in the best interest of the country to have an 82-year-old start a second term but because they fear the potential alternative: the nomination of Kamala Harris and election of Donald Trump.”

Also, from the piece, “There was the senator who said few Democrats in the chamber want Biden to run again but that the party had to devise “an alignment of interest” with the president to get him off the “narcotic” of the office; there was the governor who mused about just how little campaigning Biden would be able to do; and there was the House member who, after saying that, of course, Democrats should renominate the president told me to turn off my phone and then demanded to know who else was out there and said Harris wasn’t an option.”

The Democrat leaders’ political instincts have always been that Harris would be a lousy candidate with bad instincts. Her first significant decision was ditching Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania because, and we all know it is true even though they deny it, he is Jewish, going with Tim Walz instead.

And now, as a Category 5 hurricane barrels down on Florida, Harris is attacking Ron DeSantis for avoiding her phone calls, which DeSantis categorically denies. Accusing DeSantis of “political gamesmanship,” Harris has zero authority over hurricane disaster response. DeSantis has spoken with President Joe Biden. Again, though, DeSantis denies refusing to take Harris’s phone calls, but why would a person with no responsibility for hurricanes be bothering DeSantis anyway except for political gamesmanship?

Her instincts are bad. Elected Democrats know it.

Kamala Haris can still win this thing. But there are twenty-eight days left, and she’s not winning right now.

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