Donald Trump is back. But make no mistake: this was Joe Biden’s defeat.
In elections that go down to the wire, everyone looks back at all the decisions and blunders of the losing candidate for a sign of where things went wrong.
This doesn’t seem that close. Trump is on course to win the popular vote, conquer the swing states and, in his wake, lead several Senate races.
He increases his lead in the red areas and reduces his losses in the blue areas.
Vice President Kamala Harris was, of course, taken on a brilliantly orchestrated handover. But she chose a blind running mate in Tim Walz instead of Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of Pennsylvania.
She also hid from the press, then found herself in interviews and giving “word salad” speeches.
Donald Trump is back. But make no mistake: this was Joe Biden’s defeat.
Ultimately, Kamala Harris was irrevocably tied to Biden. She could not escape her role in covering up his cognitive decline. Nor could she escape his disastrous legacy.
Although none of that seems to have mattered now – because in the end she was irrevocably linked to Biden.
She could not escape her role in covering up his cognitive decline. Nor could she escape his disastrous legacy.
Before Biden dropped out of the race, it looked like Trump would take the lead.
Harris gave Democrats enough enthusiasm to avoid a broader collapse, but she couldn’t change that trajectory. The election ended pretty much where it did in July: a Trump blowout.
Americans have forgiven many of Trump’s misdeeds. Not because they changed their opinion of him, but because they believed he could do better than Biden.
Years of runaway inflation are eating away at family budgets. The border was left open. Crime increased. Afghanistan was left to the Taliban after Americans bled there for twenty years. Putin and Hamas went wild. The crazy gender politics pushed men into women’s sports.
Americans across the map rioted, with Hispanic voters leading the way.
Democrats faced setbacks with working-class whites from the Midwest, Southwestern Latinos, New Yorkers from the suburbs, wealthy Virginians, and Southerners in North Carolina and Georgia. The icing on the cake was the Arab voters in Michigan who abandoned Kamala over the Gaza war.
Vice President Kamala Harris was, of course, taken on a brilliantly orchestrated handover.
But she chose a blind running mate in Tim Walz instead of Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of Pennsylvania. She also hid from the press, then found herself in interviews and giving “word salad” speeches. Although none of that seems to matter anymore.
Every time Biden showed up during the campaign, he made things worse. He said Trump should be locked up and that his voters were “trash.” But he also defended Ron DeSantis when Harris tried to say the Florida governor refused to answer her calls as devastating hurricanes barreled toward the southern state.
Everything the Democrats tried failed. They thought abortion would be a panacea, and – yes – they won some votes on the issue. But overall, voters did not believe they should ignore the economy, the border and national security over abortion. DeSantis even rejected an abortion amendment in Florida (a first for Republicans since the overturning of Roe v Wade).
Everything else — the indictments, the endless whining about January 6, the attempt to throw Trump off the ballot, even the fabricated controversy over a roasted comic who told bad jokes — came to nothing.
It turned out that Americans cared more about themselves than Trump. And they just decided, millions of them, that they were better off under him than they were under Biden.
Biden got a popular majority, control of both houses of Congress, a compliant mainstream media, an atmosphere of national emergency during the Covid pandemic, and historians told him he could be transformational.
He screwed up.
Time for Joe to go to a retirement home. And time for Democrats to go back to the drawing board. This isn’t working – and Americans have had enough.