It’s Still the ‘Of Course’ Election

I n advance of Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, the election was, at best, a tossup. But while the outcome of a presidential election between Biden and Donald Trump was unknowable, the results in November, whatever they happened to be, would have come as a shock to no one.

If Donald Trump had bested Biden in November, his victory would have been seen in hindsight as inevitable. Biden was the most unpopular president in the modern history of polling. He had presided over disasters abroad and the steady deterioration of the global threat environment. He had abandoned his campaign-trail pledges to govern as a moderate, transitional candidate, violating his compact with voters and pursuing policies that contributed to the inflationary pressure they hated. He was old, in obvious decline, and unloved by even his own party’s voters. He couldn’t possibly have won reelection. Of course, he lost.

And yet, something similar could have been said if Trump had gone down to defeat against Biden. After all, unseating an incumbent president is no easy task. The fact that Trump lost his bid for a second term is a testament to his failures as an executive and a campaigner. Trump, too, is disliked by a consistent majority of the voting public. He was the first major-party presidential nominee to run for the White House with a felony conviction under his belt. He was easily driven to distraction, he spoke to his supporters in MAGA-coded bullet points no one outside his narrow political tribe could understand, and he was prone to retreat into fanciful unrealities that reminded voters of the inconstancy they rejected in 2020. He couldn’t possibly be returned to the Oval Office. Of course, he lost.

For a fleeting moment after that debate, Trump unambiguously seized the political initiative. Suddenly, one of these two “of courses” seemed decidedly more plausible. But when Biden announced his reluctant decision to exit the political stage, he reset the race. Ever since, Trump and his campaign have been on the back foot, casting about for a means of attack against their new opponent that might stick to her, with little success. Even amid the adoration of her party’s rapturous voters, however, the conditions that could produce a Harris defeat are not hard to envision. In that sense, it is still the “of course” election.

Harris possesses advantages Biden did not, but she is still running for the second term of a deeply unpopular and mistrusted president. She has stood shoulder to shoulder with a figure who presided over an economy Americans believe, however inaccurately, is in recession. That impression is informed by their depleted purchasing power, which is still not growing with appreciable speed. And with today’s news that the U.S. economy did not, in fact, add a staggering 818,000 jobs to the rolls as previously believed, the macroeconomic environment is not giving voters any reason to engage in a reappraisal.

To the extent that Harris has attempted to redefine herself since she became the Democratic Party’s surprise presidential nominee, she has made a half-hearted effort to distance herself from the progressive political persona she crafted for the 2020 presidential election. She is trying to have it both ways, running away from her most unpopular past positions while still crafting an image as a figure whose political instincts are reliably to Biden’s left.

The vice president has endorsed the discredited notion of price controls. She backs a growth-killing hike that would, if passed by Congress, give the U.S. the highest corporate-tax rate among OECD nations. She’s expressed support for taxing “unrealized income,” which is to say that she backs confiscating real wealth based on an arbitrary assessment of potential wealth that does not yet exist. And she has recklessly emboldened the anti-Israel protest movement that has so tormented the Democratic Party, lending credence to the impression that she is easily intimidated. There isn’t a progressive sensibility Harris will not flatter, no left-wing scheme so outlandish that she won’t embrace it.

Lastly, the Vaseline-lens coverage of Harris very much notwithstanding, the vice president is a famously maladroit campaigner. Her refusal to submit to a grilling from the press, or even a town hall populated by her own supporters, is a necessity. Even her allies know that allowing this candidate to riff extemporaneously for more than 120 consecutive seconds is to court disaster. She speaks in mellifluous platitudes native to the self-help genre because that is the environment in which she marinated in California.

Harris ascended the greasy political pole in the Golden State by navigating intra-Democratic politics. Indeed, in her run for U.S. Senate in 2016, she didn’t even face a Republican opponent because of the state’s ranked-choice voting system. When she first ran for California attorney general against a Republican, she won that race by less than a percentage point. And when she ran for reelection, she was saved by her opponent’s gaffes. Harris has rarely had to compete for the majority support of a general electorate against an opponent who is skeptical of the left’s premises, and her political instincts show it.

If Harris loses in November, it won’t come as a shock. She is the quintessential Bay Area progressive whose reputation as the “female Barack Obama” is entirely a product of wishful, superficial thinking. She is closely associated with an unpopular president whose record she embraced and, indeed, promised to build upon in ways the voting public already detests. The fundamentals of this race favor Trump, and the polls have long indicated that the former president is more trusted on the issues that are most salient to voters. Of course, she lost.

Donald Trump remains unchanged. His defects and deficits are baked into the cake. If he goes down to defeat in November, it will come as a surprise to no one. Indeed, in hindsight, his failure will be talked about as though it had been obvious and inevitable. But a Harris loss would be talked about the same way. So when the sun rises on the morning after the election, whatever the result is, everyone will have seen it coming.