Kamala Harris Could Actually Win

F rom the very moment that Joe Biden’s historically atrocious debate performance caused the Democratic Party to descend into operatic levels of despair, I have been captured by one overarching instinct as to the likely result of his mistake: that, somehow, the whole mess was going to end up with the Republican Party losing the election.

To save my readers some time, I will preemptively concede all the criticisms that are likely to be hurled my way. I am, indeed, basing this on an amorphous instinct — “vibes,” one might say — rather than on a psephologically sound analysis of the polls. I can, indeed, see that the current evidence appears to contradict my hunch. I do, indeed, strongly dislike the candidates of both parties — to the point at which I struggle to comprehend their appeal. And, like every other human being who has ever lived, I am, indeed, often wrong.

And yet, all of that stipulated, I cannot shake this feeling.

I do not need to be reminded of Kamala Harris’s flaws. For years, I have unironically described myself as “perhaps her No. 1 hater in the United States,” and I remain proudly in that role today. Here, here, here and here, I’ve laid out my problems with Harris’s radicalism, her authoritarianism, and her weird and nonsensical way of talking, as well as her profound lack of talent as a thinker, communicator, speaker, coalition-builder, and more. If the question in play here were solely, “Is Kamala Harris a good candidate?” my answer would be an emphatic, unalloyed “No.”

But that’s not the sole question — or even the material question. The material question is whether Kamala Harris and her as-yet-unappointed VP aspirant can win an election against Donald Trump and J. D. Vance. And I absolutely, unquestionably, categorically think that she can. The Biden-Harris administration is by no means loved: Joe Biden is the most unpopular president in modern history, Kamala Harris is the most unpopular vice president since polling began, and, in the minds of the average voter, the years that those two have been in charge of the executive branch have been stained with inflation, waste, incompetence, a tornado of illegal immigration, a series of crises abroad, and, most recently, a dastardly conspiracy to cover up the president’s senility. And yet, despite all that, voters still do not like the Republicans. Donald Trump is unpopular. J. D. Vance is unpopular. In every Senate contest other than West Virginia and (perhaps) Montana, the Democrat is running away with the race. Insofar as the GOP has a good shot at the presidency this year, it is because much of the electorate dislikes the incumbents marginally more than it dislikes the GOP. That, though, could change.

My unsubstantiated hunch holds that it will. Between now and November, we will witness the most vehement attempt to deify a bad politician in the history of the United States, combined with the return to the fray of an ill-disciplined, aging, and increasingly overconfident Donald Trump. Even in aggregate, these two developments will have only a marginal effect on the election. But, from what I can see, the election is already so marginal that it is susceptible to exactly the sort of small shifts in sentiment that a concerted media barrage is liable to produce. 2 percent here, 1 percent there — in a divided country where both parties disdain the electorate, these things quickly add up. If, as it ought, the Republican Party wishes to prove me wrong in my suspicion, it’s going to have to escape from its post-convention jubilation — and work like hell.