The Doom Loop of the Harris Campaign

Round and round we go........

Oct 13, 2024

Greetings, Screamers, it’s good to be back on the ‘Stack! Thanks for holding down the fort — it seems to be more or less in the same condition as a few days ago!

As you can see by the headline, today I want to talk about the “doom loop” of the Harris campaign. For those of you who may not be familiar with the term:

Just a few days ago I talked about the Washington Ferry system — which is ‘solving’ its problem of low ridership by raising prices, likely leading to even lower ridership, leading to another round of raised prices……..

This is a classic doom loop.

(In the particular case of the ferry system, the vaccine mandates still play a big role. Understaffed ferries must run at reduced capacity — this led to people literally being left at the docks after Thursday’s Seahawks game. How many of those people will trust the ferry to get home after next game?)

Downtown Portland used to be amazing, but in the last decade or so we’ve seen the area completely hollowed out (covid was a big factor here). As the area gets worse, companies are forced to pull out, worsening the area, causing more companies to flee…..and soon you have:

Doom loop.

But politicians can have their own doom loops. Think back to after the Trump/Biden debate, but before Biden dropped out of the race. Everybody in the media was wringing their hands and wondering what could be done to counteract Biden’s terrible debate performance. Many of them settled on something like this:

The solution was simple, declared the pundits — just have Joe Biden get in front of the cameras for a town hall or press conference for a few hours and let the voters see him in action!

That, of course, was the dumbest strategy possible, because the entire problem was that Joe Biden was UNABLE to give such a performance. Democrats could drug him up and send him out to speak as Angry Grandpa Brandon some of the time, but ultimately (with the nation actually paying attention) they simply couldn’t cover for Biden’s worsening condition.

Biden’s polling numbers cratered, so in the face of near-certain electoral defeat, Democrats forced him from the race and replaced him with Kamala Harris.

That’s how it works — the end of the doom loop isn’t butterflies and rainbows, it’s doom.

When Kamala Harris took over as the Democratic nominee, she enjoyed a huge popularity (and polling) boost as the Democrats were suddenly unburdened by what has been. But as the Summer of Brat party ended, hungover voters realized that not being Joe Biden or Donald Trump isn’t actually a good reason for Kamala Harris to be president.

Not even a tremendous positive media coverage blitz could sustain Kamala’s “popularity” from those first days of her campaign. As her poll numbers slipped, Harris was forced to emerge from hiding and put herself out there to voters.

Thus, she entered the exact same doom loop that had just claimed the political life of President Biden.

First, Harris went on “The View” — which is about as Harris-friendly as any place on the planet. Co-host Sunny Hostin served up this beer league softball question, no doubt to allow Harris to sharply define herself as something other than Biden’s Vice President.

She did not.

This is the supposed ‘make a change’ candidate going onto national TV and telling America that she wouldn’t have done anything differently from the guy polling so badly that they ran him out of the race.

I’m reminded of this article:

But having the media in the bag for you means you’re always going to get a second chance to make a first impression. So Harris went on with Steven Colbert (and drank a beer like a totally normal person!), who generously offered her a mulligan:

Oof.

But maybe Harris can still escape the doom loop by nailing her interview with 60 Minutes — yet another Harris-friendly venue. I mean, it’s only 20 minutes and is pre-taped and edited before airing, so what could go wrong?

Well, the preview clip CBS used to tease the interview was taken SO POORLY, the network LITERALLY SWAPPED HER ANSWER to a question about Israel. First caught by Maze (because of course it was), this video tells the tale:

When the interview actually aired, gone was Kamala’s non-sensical rambling “I didn’t read the book I’m reporting on” answer, and in was a much more concise answer that doesn’t exactly fit the question. (My guess is the aired answer was actually about Ukraine.)

Speculation ran rampant that perhaps Bill Whitaker asked the question multiple times in a second-take situation, so I took Maze’s video, split it up, and synced it to the point where Whitaker asks the question:

Based on this, it’s pretty obvious to me the question was only asked once (or at least it aired that way), making it much more likely that Harris was answering a completely different question in the version that aired on TV.

This, of course, is a HUGE black eye for 60 Minutes, which was already suffering from the effects of Lesley Stahl telling Donald Trump that the authenticity of the Biden laptop couldn’t be confirmed. (I’ve previously talked about how easy the laptop was to verify — the fact that 60 Minutes didn’t do it was a choice, just like this edit.)

In the wake of this scandal, calls are coming — even from Donald Trump — for 60 Minutes to release the full, unedited interview. So far, the network has completely ignored the issue — which makes me think this went much far further than simply editing the answers for time or clarity. As usual, the cover-up looks far far worse than the original crime.

And just so I’m not accused of cherry picking a handful of bad moments out of hours and hours of campaigning, here’s Kamala’s full speech she recently gave in Scottsdale. (Can you handle 17 minutes of Harris? Find out!)

Uniquely unimpressive. I’m once again reminded that Harris ‘skipped over’ the hard parts of campaigning — actually earning any votes. She’s making mistakes that are “supposed” to happen (and be corrected) at a sparsely attended local 4H fundraiser a year before the election. She didn’t do that, so now she’s making those mistakes on the world’s highest political stage.

In a ‘normal’ (sane?) campaign, a flawed presidential candidate might be able to lean on the Vice Presidential pick to smooth over some of these rough edges and better articulate the issues facing Americans.

This is exactly what JD Vance did today on “This Week” when host Martha Raddatz — who sounds exactly like a Harris surrogate — attacked Trump on the situation in Aurora, Colorado.

Unfortunately for Harris, she does not have a JD Vance waiting in the wings to shore up her support. Instead, she has Tim Walz, who struggles to articulate his position on the electoral college:

I’ve watched that clip like 10 times and I’m still not exactly sure what he’s saying. (If you know, please help me out!)

Of course, Walz wasn’t the VP pick because he’s a policy wonk or a great speaker — he was chosen because he’s a regular midwestern dude who does midwestern dude stuff like go hunting!

I am not a big gun guy myself, but I’d think that if you were “shooting a lot of trap” with your new gun, maybe you would know how to load it.

With Harris and Walz both floundering on the election trail, the betting markets for the election have flipped over the last few weeks:

So the desperate Democrats wheeled out their biggest weapon: Barack Obama. (Remember how Obama campaigned for Biden in the last few days of 2020 when Biden was publicly floundering?)

This speech is a lot of things — condescending and insulting are two of them — but what it ISN’T is a good reason for black men to vote for Kamala Harris:

The reason that we don’t see the same kinds of energy for Harris as we did for ‘08 Obama has nothing to do with RACE. Obama promised to sweep away the stain of the Bush years and get America back on track — then immediately turned into Bush III when in office. The idea that black voters don’t understand that is insulting — almost as insulting as saying Kamala Harris ‘went to college with you’ and ‘knows you’.

Kamala Harris has been in office for nearly an entire term. She says that she wouldn’t do anything differently than Joe Biden. Why would black men who want a change vote for her? Why would any of us?

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Bonus video of David Sacks perfectly describing the doom loop, and noting that he first called it back in August!