Her Turn

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, July 23, 2026

 

An amusing quote from Democratic strategist Minyon Moore, speaking to New York magazine: “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that right now we need leaders that can take us in a different direction and bring us back together as a party.”

 

The leader she had in mind who will supposedly unite the American left and steer it toward new horizons is … Kamala Harris.

 

Literally no one in the Democratic Party is less of a visionary than the former vice president is. Her defining trait is chasing political trends out of expedience, not conviction, which helps explain why she often struggles to defend her positions in interviews.

 

Even her own supporters don’t pretend otherwise. “She is looking for where the wave is going and is determined to ride it,” an unnamed Harris ally told New York of her 2028 plans, summarizing the MO that she’s followed throughout her career. “Her mindset is that I should have won [in 2024], and I am going to do it my way because my way would have won, and it was all these consultants that were telling me to take this position or that position, and it was their fault.”

 

“My advisers made me chase the wrong trends so from now on I’m going to pick the trends I chase” is a very Kamala Harris approach to politics.

 

The trend she’s chasing right now is progressivism, unsurprisingly.

 

Axios reported weeks ago that Harris has been in touch with socialist wunderkinds Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and has reached out to pro-Palestinian activists who resented the Biden administration’s position on Gaza. If that sounds familiar, there’s a reason: Harris also tacked hard to the left in her 2019 primary run, hoping to gobble up support from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

 

Her strategy at the time seemed to be to try to consolidate the black vote (remember her early busing attack on Joe Biden?) and combine it with enough progressive support to make her unstoppable. That playbook is now being dusted off again, it appears, as she and other establishment Democrats inevitably try to ingratiate themselves with the party’s rising DSA wing.

 

“Like It or Not, Kamala Harris Is the Front-runner” for 2028, the New York piece provocatively declared. She has universal name recognition, a ready-made “her turn” narrative after her near miss in 2024, an inside track with her party’s large African American constituency, and a decent lead in nearly every early primary poll that’s been conducted this year. It’s her race to lose, no?

 

Dear God, let’s hope not.

 

Undervalued.

 

I do think Harris’ chances of winning the presidency are undervalued, although I sense I’m in the minority about that. “She will never win an election at a national scale. Never,” another Democratic strategist confidently assured New York.

 

I dunno—she got pretty close in 2024! In a terrible environment for her party, with Joe Biden’s liabilities on inflation and immigration hanging around her neck, Harris came within a few points of winning numerous swing states.

 

She’s a replacement-level Democratic politician, sure. But that was almost good enough to beat Donald Trump, who had a solid economic record and loads of charisma to run on. Why wouldn’t it be good enough to beat J.D. Vance, who will have neither of those advantages in 2028 and who may well end up having to answer for a calamity in Iran?

 

Even some Trump voters are lukewarm about the current vice president. It wouldn’t be hard for Harris to make the case that she’s the lesser evil relative to a postliberal Tucker Carlson acolyte whose economic views aren’t that different from her own.

 

At this point the Harris skeptics will pipe up to say that winning the general election isn’t her main problem. Winning the primary is, and the “lesser evil” approach won’t work for her there. The field will surely include one or more earnest progressives, offering the left a more authentic option than the trend-chasing former VP. And the rest of the Democratic electorate will wrestle with the fact that she did, after all, lose to Trump. She can’t be the most electable option before the party, virtually by definition.

 

Plus, Kamala Harris doesn’t wear well. She almost certainly benefited from her late entry into the race in 2024, as it spared her from having to do more of those cringe-till-you-die interviews for which she’s become known. Had she been her party’s nominee from the start, she might have bled support for months before ultimately losing to Trump in a landslide. That’s the situation she’ll face in 2028 in a Democratic primary, in theory.

 

All of that is fair enough. However.

 

While she failed dismally to consolidate black Democrats in 2019 and underperformed with black voters in 2024 relative to Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, there’s reason to believe Harris will have better luck next time. Her stature has changed, for one thing: As a former vice president and presidential nominee, she’s become the most accomplished and well-known African American politician in U.S. history not named “Barack Obama.”

 

In January, Axios noticed that Harris had begun receiving “rock star” receptions at political events held in the Deep South, where enthusiastic crowds of “mostly black men and women, and white women” turned out to greet her. Local politicians in attendance gushed about her too. Memphis Mayor Paul Young called her “a trailblazer” whom “many of us look up to” whereas John Horhn, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, told her, “You don’t know how much you mean to Mississippi. You don’t know how much you mean to America.” Both men are African American.

 

Stature isn’t the only reason black Democrats might be more likely to rally around her in the next cycle than they were in 2019, though. Redistricting is another obvious one. Majority-minority districts throughout the South have been endangered by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the Voting Rights Act; Congress is now likely to have fewer African American members—maybe far fewer—than it had in the past. With their representation in the federal government shrinking, besieged black voters might see special value in putting forth a black woman for the presidency.

 

Tensions within the Democratic coalition could help Harris too.

 

Black Democrats have been a pillar of their party for decades, but other constituencies may be gaining influence at their expense. There’s the ascendant DSA faction, of course, which is mostly white. And there are Hispanics, a group the left desperately needs to win back after shedding so many of their votes in 2024. If the 2028 primary becomes a contest between factions for dominance over the party, African American voters might have extra cause to favor Harris.

 

Yesterday, for instance, the New York Times reported that party leaders are torn over whether to let South Carolina or Nevada hold the first primary of the 2028 campaign. Nevada appeals to some partly because of its large population of Hispanics—and the head of South Carolina’s Democratic Party, which is mostly black, resents it and isn’t being shy about letting people know.

 

“If Nevada gets elevated over South Carolina, it would be because of their Latino vote,” Christale Spain, the chair of the state party, complained. “So you would then be telling black voters that you matter less than brown voters. And I refuse to believe that our party wants to send any type of message like that.” Spain is African American.

 

If the 2028 primary ends up as some sort of litmus test on whether black voters “matter less” than brown voters (or white, overeducated, downscale DSA dweebs), another Kamala Harris nomination begins to look less far-fetched. Any scenario in which she consolidates African American Democrats makes her a formidable contender to lead her party, full stop.

 

Having said that, I still wouldn’t bet on her.

 

No confidence.

 

Buried within the new Fox News poll is this hair-raising nugget:

 

By 2-to-1, voters say it is more important to elect new people than keep those with experience.

 

Overall, 19% say they want revolutionary change in the nation’s government, while many others want substantial (38%) or dramatic (23%) change.

 

Almost twice as many Democrats (52%) as Republicans (28%) want dramatic or revolutionary change.

 

Does “Harris 2028” say “dramatic or revolutionary change” to you?

 

As things stand, the dynamic in the next election is shaping up to be 2008 on steroids. That year, driven by widespread exasperation at Republicans over the economy and a mismanaged war in the Middle East, the electorate sought a dramatic break with politics as usual in its choice for president. That’s also where the next cycle is pointing, except this time the exasperation will be leavened with a metric ton of resentment stemming from the GOP incumbent’s embarrassing corruption, illiberalism, and buffoonery.

 

“Revolutionary” might be too strong a word to describe the vibe, but 2028 is likely to be considerably more “hopey-changey”—maybe without the “hopey” part—than even 2008 was.

 

Apart from Joe Biden himself, it’s hard to think of anyone less suited to that zeitgeist than his vice president, an incarnation of the vacuous Democratic establishment that delivered the White House to Donald Trump not once but twice. She’s a consummate politics-as-usual candidate who’ll be competing to win the support of a party that’s desperate for a vision. As noted previously, Kamala Harris doesn’t do “vision.”

 

She’s ill-suited to 2028 in another way.

 

It’s been almost a decade since America had a leader who seemed fit for the job. With the Trump era over at last, the country is destined to be hungry in the next cycle for a president whom it can feel confident about. That’s not Harris. The trend-chasing, the halting answers in interviews, her undistinguished performance in the (admittedly thankless) role of VP: Nothing in her past indicates she has the political chops needed to dig this country out of the disgraceful hole it’s created for itself.

 

It’s trivially easy to imagine Harris’ job approval sinking below 50 percent—and never recovering—in her first few months in office as the public loses confidence in her, especially once progressives inevitably find some pretext to declare that she’s sold them out. In her defense, that type of early and inexorable disillusionment is common in modern presidencies. But not all modern presidencies begin with Americans screaming: Please, for the love of God, just put someone in charge who I don’t need to worry about every day.

 

We urgently, urgently need a candidate next time whose case for the office rests on something grander than “lesser of two evils” logic.

 

Democrats might be wise to all of this already. It’s true, as I said, that Harris leads in most early primary polling, but that lead is soft. She’s averaging under 30 percent in the RealClearPolitics tracker, no great shakes for the most famous nonretired politician in the party. And some surveys even see her trailing: A new Emerson poll has her in fifth place at 8 percent whereas recent data from New Hampshire puts her at 5 percent there, far behind Ocasio-Cortez. I’m skeptical that the party would roll the dice on a figure as far left as AOC in a national election, but there’s no question that her politics meet the Democratic moment better than Harris’ do.

 

Another problem for the former VP is that, even with demand for “dramatic or revolutionary change” peaking, electability will still matter to primary voters in 2028. Who seems like a better bet in that regard: someone who lost to a twice-impeached, quadruple-indicted coup plotter in 2024 or someone who won a swing state—in a landslide—in 2026? Because Democrats are likely to have multiple candidates who fit that bill by year’s end.

 

It feels like a cosmic joke given the left’s hostility to Israel that the two most prominent examples are both Jewish. Everyone knows about Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who’s on his way to another rout this fall, but the hot new thing in Democratic politics is Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff. Ossoff is very young (i.e., not yet 40), has raised an obscene amount of money, has shrewdly turned committee hearings into a crowd-pleasing showcase of his ability to make Republicans squirm, and, unusually, seems well-liked by both progressives and liberals.

 

He stands a decent chance of winning reelection comfortably in a battleground state where comfortable wins, especially for Democrats, are rare.

 

If Ossoff and Shapiro close the deal this fall, they’ll become instant top-tier contenders for the presidency in 2028—to the point where I’d put good money on one of them ending up on either the top or bottom of the Democratic ticket. And before you say “A Jew on the ticket in this Hamas-loving party?”, don’t underestimate how leftists might value having an easy rebuttal to Republican charges of bigotry. How can you say we’re antisemitic for loving Hamas when our choice for president/vice president is Jewish?

 

And so, while I can’t tell you that Kamala Harris won’t be the nominee, I can say with almost metaphysical certainty that Democrats will have options who are both more likely to win a national election than she is and more likely to inspire confidence in the presidency than she would. Whether that still matters in a decadent America, where each party is constantly radicalizing the other into making moronic choices, is a separate question.

Kamala Harris’s Advisers Are Delusional

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

New York magazine’s David Freedlander assembled a variety of juicy quotes from Democratic insiders for his piece on Kamala Harris’s insatiable hunger for power. Most of those insiders seem only to want Harris to go away.

 

Some took the diplomatic track. They’d profess their undying affection for the former vice president but also wonder if she can raise the requisite funds or stay focused on the future given her inextricable association with Joe Biden’s administration. Others were less tactful. “I hope she runs,” said one Democratic strategist. “Because then she will lose and we will never have to hear from her again.”

 

As Freedlander observed, Democratic  political professionals are inclined to respond either with that fury or with a “heavy sigh followed by a long pause” when the subject of Harris’s ambitions arises. Democrats haven’t recovered from the trauma they experienced in 2024. And as long as Harris’s advisers continue to torment them with the delusions that they’re deploying to draw Biden’s veep back into the limelight, they won’t.

 

To the claim that nominating Harris would only force Americans to relitigate the Biden years, for example, her brain trust offers this compelling rejoinder: Nuh-uh.

 

“Look how quickly voters forgot about Trump’s first term,” said one Democrat in Harris’s orbit. “People have short attention spans and short memories, and for all the criticisms that could be directed at Biden today, who knows what they [will] think 12 or 16 months from now.”

 

That’s just nonsense. Americans hadn’t forgotten about Trump’s first term by 2024. Not only did they remember it, they remembered it fondly. Trump’s “nostalgia bump” was revealed in surveys of American voters and widely reported in mainstream outlets. Harris’s allies are asking Democrats to internalize a revisionist history of the 2024 campaign. That’s a lot to ask of anyone, much less those who owe you nothing.

 

Just as Americans still remembered Trump’s first term by 2024, they remember the Biden administration today. And their outlook has not improved. For instance, Donald Trump’s approval rating when it comes to immigration is, today, underwater. His heavy-handed approach to deportations and the sometimes-deadly confrontations between ICE agents and protesters in the streets have left a sour taste in voters’ mouths. But Trump’s troubles have not redounded to the Democratic Party’s benefit.

 

In May, with ICE-related scandals dominating the  news for months, CBS News’s pollsters found that only 34 percent of voters believed the Democratic Party had “the better approach to immigration right now.” Trump and the Republicans? Thirty-eight percent. Voters remember not just Biden’s lax approach to border enforcement (with which Harris is intimately affiliated) but also the financial hardships they struggled with during the Biden years. While just under one-third of respondents said Democratic policies would “help” reduce their costs of living, 41 percent said they expected those policies to “hurt” their prospects.

 

The former vice president’s aides know they have an uphill battle ahead of them if they’re to recapture the party from Harris skeptics. Oddly, their response to that adversity has been to attempt to muscle the party’s establishment into submission.

 

Presumably, it was Harris’s boosters who were quick to remind Freedlander that women and minority voters “are the backbone of the Democratic Party,” and Harris is both. Democratic institutionalists should know, therefore, that “any attempts to knock her down a peg will risk getting into thorny issues of race and gender.” Oppose her ascension too strenuously, they seem to warn, and Democrats risk “bogging down the party with questions about identity.”

 

That’s not even a thinly veiled threat. But is it credible? Harris staffers think so. “A number of staffers for potential 2028 candidates pointed to the recent Texas Senate primary,” Freedlander wrote, “in which James Talarico ultimately prevailed over Jasmine Crockett but did so at the risk of alienating key Democratic constituencies in the process.”

 

What are they talking about? Talarico’s victory over Crockett has not riven the Texas Democratic Party with racial strife. To survey the latest New York Times/Siena College poll of that race, Texas Democrats are perfectly happy with their party’s Senate nominee. Talarico enjoys the support of nearly two-thirds of young voters, 56 percent of women, 60 percent of Hispanics, 80 percent of black voters, and 94 percent of the Democratic Party. Indeed, one of the demographics with whom Talarico performs best is Harris 2024 voters, 95 percent of whom are backing the Democratic candidate.

 

Maybe the Democratic Party can be cajoled and coerced into giving Harris another shot, but Freedlander’s piece won’t persuade her critics to keep their qualms to themselves. Harris’s aides seem to have utterly misread the landscape, and they vastly overrate the leverage their candidate has over the party she seeks to commandeer.

Tim Walz Departs on a Deluge of Fraud

National Review Online

Tuesday, January 06, 2026

 

Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and erstwhile congressman and vice-presidential hopeful, announced Monday that he is abandoning his campaign for reelection. The about-face by Walz, who launched his bid for a third term in mid-September, was triggered almost entirely by the deluge of bad news about the state’s multibillion-dollar problem with welfare-programs fraud.

 

Good riddance. Walz was sold to American voters in 2024 not only as a virtuous political leader but as an alternative and better model of manhood. Almost nothing we were told about him in that process was true. His selection by Kamala Harris confirmed all of our worst suspicions about her judgment. The nation will be better off if neither of them holds public office again.

 

Minnesota’s fraud problem is, as we have written before, far from the only problem with Walz, from his extreme left-wing agenda and ideas to his issues with honesty. But neither is the fraud story simply a run-of-the-mine government scandal of the sort that could happen under even the most diligent chief executive.

 

Minnesota has opened itself up to abuse in three ways. First, the state provides an unusually extensive array of generous benefits with fairly lax criteria for qualification. The more rivers of money you unsluice, the more opportunities you create to divert the flow. This dynamic has been exacerbated by the deluge of new federal funds to and through the states during and after Covid and the Biden administration, incentivizing them to spend as much as possible as fast as possible. Second, the Walz administration had lax financial controls and such minimal system oversight that a state audit in November found that the governor failed basic internal controls even for his own office. Third, Walz and others in his deep-blue cohort, especially after the George Floyd riots on his watch, presided over a culture in which the fear of being called racist deterred them from looking into fraud rings operating in the state’s Somali community, which brandished such charges against anyone inclined to investigate.

 

The scale of the frauds involved is vast and as yet has defied a full public accounting. The first major scandal to break came to light in 2022 with federal charges involving the Feeding Our Future nonprofit, which stole most of the money it took in for the ostensible purposes of providing free lunches to schoolchildren. We already knew there was no such thing as a free lunch, but in this case, there was no lunch at all. Then–Attorney General Merrick Garland called it “the largest pandemic relief fraud scheme charged to date.” Walz reacted by expanding the state’s school lunch program. Since then, the revelations have kept coming, with dozens of federal indictments under both the Biden and Trump Justice Departments for thefts of staggering size and pervasiveness. More fraud turned up in housing subsidies, Medicaid, autism services, and childcare, among others, while fraudulently obtained funds were allegedly remitted back to Somalia. As a report at City Journal observed, “An estimated 40 percent of households in Somalia get remittances from abroad. In 2023 alone, the Somali diaspora sent back $1.7 billion—more than the Somali government’s budget for that year.”

 

Then–Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson estimated in July that the “vast majority” of the federal Housing Stabilization Services program in the state was fraudulent, with a price tag exceeding $1 billion. By December, Thompson’s revised estimate was that “half or more” of the $18 billion paid through easily exploited Medicaid programs since 2018 was received through fraudulent means.

 

The immensity of this dereliction of duty to the taxpayer is such that even the national political press occasionally took notice, albeit while downplaying the Somali angle. CNN examined the problem in mid-2024, and so did the New York Times in November 2025. But it was a viral YouTube video by amateur commentator Nick Shirley exposing blatant frauds in the form of nonexistent daycare centers without any children that raised Minnesota’s fraud pandemic to a national issue.

 

There are lessons in all of this. One is that people will abuse a welfare state that promotes an entitlement mentality in its recipients and a mindset of clientelism in its personnel. A second is that electing politicians who encourage both dynamics, and who depend upon both the welfare recipients and the welfare bureaucrats as their constituency, will result in leaders who act as their incentives would predict. A third is that programs that rely on the culture and goodwill of the American people to avoid fraud are more vulnerable when extended to immigrants who do not share that culture.

 

But maybe the simplest lesson of all is that nobody should ever have trusted Tim Walz.

Josh Shapiro Finally Unloads on Kamala Harris

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, December 03, 2025

 

There is a lot to pore over in Tim Alberta’s typically meaty profile of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, in The Atlantic. It is worth a read in its entirety. There was, however, one particularly salacious passage that requires some unpacking.

 

Shapiro succumbed to an unguarded moment when Alberta reflected on Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign and the prospect of her choosing the governor as her running mate. When the nod went to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Harris campaign floated a variety of self-serving rationales for the move that cast Shapiro in an unflattering light. In Alberta’s formulation, the campaign characterized Shapiro as “selfish, petty, and monomaniacally ambitious.” The whole experience has duly embittered Shapiro.

 

One of the many competing claims the Harris campaign made to explain its otherwise inexplicable decision to take a pass on the talented and popular swing-state governor in favor of a lummox from a state that hasn’t voted for a GOP presidential candidate in over 50 years was that Shapiro wanted to decorate the Naval Observatory with works by Pennsylvania artists. The cad!

 

The banality of the alleged offense notwithstanding, Shapiro seemed genuinely stunned. “She wrote that in her book?” he asked incredulously. “That’s complete and utter bulls***.”

 

“I can tell you that her accounts are just blatant lies,” he continued:

 

“I mean, she’s trying to sell books and cover her ass,” Shapiro snapped. The governor stared past me now, shaking his head. As I began to ask a different question, he held up a hand. He looked disgusted. With me? With Harris? No, I began to realize: He was disgusted with himself.

 

“I shouldn’t say ‘cover her ass.’ I think that’s not appropriate,” Shapiro said. His tone was suddenly collected. “She’s trying to sell books. Period.”

 

She is, and Shapiro knows why — although he caught himself before the indiscretion escaped his mouth.

 

Shapiro’s bid was tanked by the vaguely antisemitic whisper campaign his Democratic opponents mounted in the effort to prevent anyone other than a progressive from joining the already progressive Harris ticket. The Harris camp made no secret of its efforts to ingratiate itself with the violent and menacing anti-Israel rabble in the streets, and Shapiro’s elevation would have undermined that lunatic project.

 

One bizarre effort by the Harris campaign to obscure its true motives apparently rang true to NBC News reporter Yamiche Alcindor. “Josh Shapiro was seen as not someone who could deliver the state of Pennsylvania based on internal polling,” she wrote in August 2024 of a governor who had won a statewide race by 15 points two years earlier. “The source also said Harris’ team was unconvinced that any one person could guaranteed [sic] any of the battleground states for the ticket.”

 

If no one could guarantee their own state as a part of the Harris ticket, that says a lot more about the campaign’s principal than about her prospective running mates.

 

Another theory posited by Harris’s allies undermines that explanation entirely. Harris was “looking for ‘more of a governing partner’ than an electoral boost,” NOTUS reported. The Wall Street Journal’s sources in Harris’s orbit confirmed the degree to which Shapiro intimidated their candidate: “Some Democrats also privately questioned whether Shapiro would be well-suited to serve in a supporting role.” The fact that much of the remainder of that article is dedicated to the Democratic activist class’s discomfort with Shapiro’s Jewish identity tells the tale.

 

The Keystone State governor has earned his consternation with the Harris campaign. He was cravenly defamed by an operation that could not admit that it was bending over backward to accommodate bigots. In the end, however, Shapiro dodged a bullet. The governor stands a good chance of running on a national Democratic ballot one day. Kamala Harris never will again.

Kamala Harris’s Grand Delusions

By Guy Denton

Monday, October 13, 2025

 

‘Some people have said I was the most qualified candidate ever to run for president.”

 

This is a real quote from Kamala Harris, though it could easily be mistaken for a line from a Saturday Night Live parody. She delivered it with total earnestness at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., last Thursday night. The crowd replied with boisterous cheers rather than howls of laughter.

 

Harris was back in the district to discuss her new memoir about the 2024 presidential race, 107 Days. (Intended subtitle, perhaps: How All of You Idiots Failed to Grasp My Political Genius.) She has been promoting the book — a glorified diary of grievances, sanctimony, and self-pity — with a tour of cities across the United States. Appearances are also scheduled for the progressive safe havens of London and Toronto.

 

When I arrived at the venue, I was met with two lines that circled around the block. Attendees were young and old, elegant and casual. Some of those already inside had spent hundreds of dollars on meet and greet tickets. Street vendors hawked leftover T-shirts and buttons from Harris’s 2024 campaign, emblazoned with slogans — “I’m speaking”; “She can do it!” — that had failed to resonate last year and now resemble fragments of a shattered dream. One woman marched back and forth, carrying a whiteboard with the phrase “LOTUS for POTUS” scrawled on it in black ink. Those in line nodded and yelled approvingly.

 

Interviewer Kara Swisher took the stage first. When she introduced Harris, the crowd exploded into a thunderous roar. Everywhere, audience members held their cellphones aloft, desperate to record a few precious moments of Harris in the flesh. As the cheers grew louder, people pounded their fists in excitement and applauded frantically. Such eruptions were so frequent throughout the night that it would be an understatement to simply label the crowd partisan. For those in attendance, this was a religious experience akin to witnessing a sacred figure descend from the heavens. The hope that their savior could still one day become president was palpable.

 

But why does Harris — a twice-failed candidate whose greatest accomplishment in 2024 was to appear more unlikeable than Donald Trump — still inspire such devotion among a certain faction of Democratic voters? I wondered if the evening could provide an answer. Perhaps I could come to feel the same excitement as those around me by seeing Harris face-to-face. Maybe she would seem more charming and compelling in an intimate setting than she did on the campaign trail. Unfortunately, no such magnetism revealed itself.

 

In person, Harris is as artificial, awkward, and strikingly uncharismatic as she appeared in televised debates, rallies, and interviews throughout both of her presidential bids. She spoke in a labored drone, offering answers to Swisher’s questions that seemed at once intensely rehearsed and messily articulated. Most of her points were little more than slapdash assemblages of clichés and platitudes; an alarm should sound every time she refers to the power of “the people” or the importance of “the fight.” When she attempted to seem more organic — at one point describing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s apparent suggestion of a link between autism and circumcision as “f***ed up” — the result was painfully unnatural. Yet the audience greeted her every syllable with reverent shouts of affirmation. “Say the words!” someone screamed during one of her many disquisitions about Trump’s supposedly fascist inclinations.

 

As the talk lumbered on, Swisher turned more directly to 2024. “You faced unique challenges simply because of who you are,” she said, asking Harris whether her race or gender felt like the greatest obstacle to mounting a successful campaign. Surprisingly, Harris placed greater blame on the abridged length of her campaign than on institutionalized oppression: “There just wasn’t enough time.”

 

But Harris had the Biden administration’s record and resources to build on, and 107 days still afforded her ample opportunity to engage with the media and rigorously tour the country. Yet the more she appeared in the spotlight, the less palatable she became to voters. When she did give interviews, the results were largely disastrous, and her vague message of unity and good vibes failed to convince voters that things weren’t heading in the wrong direction. Joe Biden was elected in 2020 to restore stability in American life, but after four years of somnambulant leadership and his disastrous bid for reelection, the nation seemed even less stable than before. Ultimately, Harris failed to disentangle herself from the governmental chaos she helped create.

 

Swisher asked if a primary could have helped Harris establish a clearer image and agenda before the campaign began. “When were you gonna do a primary?” she bristled in response, as though Biden couldn’t have ended his reelection campaign months earlier and allowed an actual contest to take place. Ironically, mere moments before, Harris had denounced members of the Trump administration for their unwillingness to challenge the president because “they want power. . . . [They are] not going to compromise in service of the Constitution or democracy. . . . [They] don’t want to lose the house and yacht in the Hamptons.” If only she had been so concerned about holding those in power accountable when her own administration was desperately trying to conceal Biden’s obvious physical and cognitive decline to secure another four years in office.

 

When it came time for audience questions, the first was asked in a prerecorded video message by Hillary Clinton. “I debated Trump three times,” she said. “You debated him once. We beat him four times.” Clearly, he was defeated so convincingly that the American people had to elect him twice out of sympathy. After further self-congratulation, Clinton chose not to burden Harris with an interesting question. Instead, she asked if Trump is “unhinged.” “No doubt he’s unhinged,” Harris responded, branding Trump “the most callous, corrupt, and incompetent individual” in modern American politics.

 

How, then, does Harris explain Trump’s appeal to so many Americans? Her answer is simple — his supporters have fallen victim to an elaborate con. “I don’t know the man,” Harris said. “I debated him; I shook his hand. During the brief conversation we had he sounded very normal. That’s what con men do.” Trump, you see, never truly intended to fulfill any of his promises. “He lied, but people believed him.” Of course: Harris could only have lost the election because half of all Americans are suckers, not because of her own egregious weaknesses as a candidate. The rabid audience had clearly bought into this fantasy, but cults are never conducive to critical thinking. In the real world, continuing to portray Trump voters as stupid won’t help the Democrats build a new coalition. If the party still can’t grasp that serious concerns about the economy, immigration, and the decay of American values drew voters to Trump in 2024, it should brace for many more defeats.

 

Swisher fielded a few additional audience questions. Most provoked unremarkable answers by Harris about the power of joy and the evils of “titans of industry.” Eventually, Swisher raised the inescapable question: Will Harris run for president in 2028? “Maybe, maybe not,” Harris coyly replied. Seeking greater insight, Swisher asked what the Democrats should do to win back the White House. Harris then served up the final word salad of the evening, concluding that they should “deal with the immediate needs of the American people.” For its own sake, the party has an immediate need to ensure Harris never again becomes its leading figure.

Karma Comes for Jimmy Kimmel

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, September 19, 2025

 

ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, Monday night: “We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

 

Our Rich Lowry theorizes, plausibly, that Kimmel “was presumably misled by the legacy media’s unwillingness to be forthright about alleged killer Tyler Robinson’s motive and by the obfuscations of Democratic officeholders and progressive commentators.” A bunch of people on the left desperately wanted to believe that Kirk’s assassination was right-on-right violence — so desperately that they started to assert it in the absence of any significant supporting evidence — i.e., Heather Cox Richardson insisting that the shooter was “a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.”

 

Whatever the reason, Kimmel’s monologue featured the assertion, not a joke, that Kirk was murdered by “one of them” in “the MAGA gang.” Unsurprisingly, many folks on the right were livid. Some ABC affiliates were understandably upset, but Federal Communications Chairman Brendan Carr also felt compelled to weigh in, publicly:

 

When you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action. Frankly. on Kimmel, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. Obviously, look, there’s calls for Kimmel will be fired. I think you could certainly see a path forward for a suspension over this and again, the FCC is going to have remedies that we could look at. Again, you know, we may ultimately be called to be a judge on that.

 

“Nice network you have there, shame if something happened to it.”

 

If you don’t like the way the Federal Communications Commission chairman handled the matter of Jimmy Kimmel’s false remarks, the editors of NR have a simple solution: Get rid of the FCC entirely.

 

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said after Kimmel’s comments, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Broadcasters got the hint and announced they would be dropping Kimmel’s show from their stations. Defenders of the administration have since claimed that the broadcasters did so entirely on their own with no pressure from the government. But if you don’t want to be accused of practicing bullying government, it would help for government officials to not talk like bullies.

 

The FCC shouldn’t have this power because it shouldn’t exist. The government’s role in broadcast frequencies need not extend further than defining and protecting property rights, which can be done through ordinary courts and law enforcement. If one station owns a frequency, others shouldn’t be able to broadcast on it, for the same reason that the station’s headquarters building shouldn’t be able to be overrun by trespassers. The country doesn’t need a Federal Headquarters Buildings Commission, with political commissioners looking to flex their partisan muscles, to make sure that doesn’t happen.

 

A point about Kimmel himself . . .

 

One of the “jokes” in Kimmel’s last monologue Tuesday: “Two years ago, these meatheads wouldn’t shut up about the First Amendment. Now they want to skip straight to the Second.” It’s not that funny, and it’s a particularly incongruent assertion less than a week after a prominent conservative just got killed by a bullet through the neck.

 

Whatever Kimmel is like offscreen, his onscreen persona is about as big a jerk as you will find. His bristling contempt for anyone right-of-center practically bursts through the screen in every show. As a host, when the topic comes to politics, Kimmel is snide, mean, and spiteful. He brings a real dyspeptic bile to any discussion of Republicans or right-of-center Americans, who are almost always a prominent target in his show’s opening monologue. That’s one of the reasons quite a few people — not just diehard conservatives — think that as a late-night host, Kimmel is just not funny, charming, or pleasant to watch.

 

(I know that when it comes to being snarky, my glass house is in about as rough shape as my actual house, still being reconstructed because of the fallen tree. But I hope my humor never, or at least rarely, comes across as caustic or scornful.)

 

If Kimmel wanted to get back on the air soon, his effort would be helped by a big, broad, bipartisan consensus that his false statement about Kirk’s shooter was a forgivable mistake, and that the network suspending his show indefinitely against his will in the face of government pressure represents a threat to his First Amendment rights.

 

Kimmel is not going to get that big, broad, bipartisan consensus, in part because of our intense national political divisions, but also in part because he’s been such a jerk for all these years.

 

I know, I know; everyone has the same First Amendment rights, even jerks. But if you spend decades — Kimmel’s been hosting the show named after himself since January 2003 — ripping into a particular demographic of people on national television almost every weeknight, you can’t exactly be shocked when that particular demographic of people isn’t terribly motivated to come riding to your rescue.

 

And you really can’t be shocked that few on the right are interested in arguing that suspending Kimmel’s show represents a threat to his First Amendment rights when a bit more than a week ago, a left-wing extremist decided to end Charlie Kirk’s First Amendment rights forever with a bullet, and far too many Americans jumped onto social media to tell the rest of us how happy they were about the assassination.

 

This is an awfully bad time for a snide progressive comedian to ask right-of-center folks to put aside all their past differences and stand up for his right to keep lying about them without significant consequence, and along the way, make sure that he doesn’t lose his $16 million per year gig.

 

Be nice to people. You never know when you might need them as an ally.

 

Pull Up a Chair, Kamala Harris Is Ready to Spill the Tea

 

Katie Rogers of the New York Times has the scoop on the rest of Kamala Harris’s forthcoming campaign memoir, 107 Days. The first released excerpt indicated that Harris saw no sign that Joe Biden couldn’t serve another four years, and also contended that Biden’s inner circle resented her and undermined her at every turn.

 

Readers, in one of the more surprising developments of a year that’s already been full of surprises in the political world, Kamala Harris may well have written a book that’s going to be fun to read.

 

The flip side of Harris’s “it’s everyone’s fault but me” argument is . . . even after you account for her copious flaws and mistakes and bad decisions, there is indeed still plenty of blame to go around.

 

Whether or not Harris intends it, this anecdote about the president suggests to me that Biden was losing his marbles:

 

Minutes before she was to step onstage at a presidential debate in September 2024, she received a call from Mr. Biden. He relayed that his brother told him that she was bad-mouthing him, and that several “power brokers” in Philadelphia were threatening not to support her because of it.

 

Mr. Biden went on to insist that his own disastrous debate performance had not hurt him with voters, and that he had beaten Mr. Trump.

 

“I just couldn’t understand why he would call me, right now, and make it all about himself,” Ms. Harris wrote. “Distracting me with worry about hostile power brokers in the biggest city of the most important swing state.”

 

If you were underwhelmed by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, you’re not alone, because apparently so was Harris as the campaign continued:

 

Throughout the book, she struggled to reconcile her personal affection for him with disappointment in moments she felt he stumbled. During a vice-presidential debate against JD Vance, whom she called a “shape-shifter,” Mr. Walz began nodding along. Ms. Harris was aghast.

 

“You’re not here to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate,” she said to the television screen as she watched.

 

I can’t wait for the campaign ads next year: “Walz for Governor 2026: Even Kamala Harris Thinks He’s a Disappointment.”

 

Harris writes in the book that her first choice as her running mate was Pete Buttigieg, but she decided he would be too controversial to get elected:

 

Ms. Harris wrote that she would have chosen Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary under Mr. Biden, as a running mate. But she did not feel that the country was ready for a Black woman and a gay man to carry a ticket.

 

“He would have been an ideal partner,” she wrote, “if I were a straight white man. But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”

 

Another future slogan: “Pete Buttigieg 2028: Too Gay for Kamala Harris.”

 

Noah already noted:

 

We must assume that, at every step of the way along the path to you reading those words, not one person intervened to suggest that this represents an insult to the American people. Neither the author, nor her editors, nor her publisher, nor her publicists, nor even the Atlantic’s reviewer encountered a pang of conscience while disseminating this slight. The apparently unquestioned assumption underlying it is that you are either sexist, racist, or homophobic. Maybe all three!

 

Hey, man, let’s not forget antisemitic, too! Harris didn’t seem all that impressed with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, either:

 

Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania seemed more interested in defining the role for himself than helping her win, and she recounted Mr. Shapiro questioning an aide about the pieces of art he could use to decorate the vice president’s residence.

 

You could interpret Harris whacking Walz and Shapiro as a sign that she’s attempting to knock potential 2028 rivals down a peg. The Times writes, “She left open the idea that she would return to politics in the near future.”

 

But this also feels like some bridge-burning. Harris feels like she did her job, and large swaths of the Democratic Party let her down in her effort last year. A subtext of, “All of you failed me, so you owe me another shot at the big chair” sounds like a really subpar theme for a 2028 bid.

 

I’ve heard some people arguing that Harris shouldn’t have written this book. But you know what? This is her biggest, best, most high-profile chance to give her side of the story — to her fans, to her critics, and to future historians. Of course, her version of events paints herself in the best possible light and finds ways to shift as much blame to everyone else; that’s just human nature in the face of failure.

 

Democrats may dread another round of finger-pointing over Harris’s defeat. But it’s difficult to win if you’re not willing to take a hard look at why you lost.

Kamala Harris Thinks You’re a Bigot

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 18, 2025

 

The big news here is that somebody read Kamala Harris’s book. Secondary to that earthshattering revelation is that, in the book, Harris apparently exudes the condescension that shone through during her run for the White House and contributed to her failure to connect with a critical mass of American voters.

 

The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire reports that, in Harris’s campaign memoir, she admits that her “first choice” for vice president was “her close friend Pete Buttigieg.” But she didn’t go with her instincts because “it would be ‘too big of a risk’ for a Black woman to run with a gay man.”

 

Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man,” Harris writes in a passage of her soon-to-be-released book, 107 Days, that I saw. “But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”

 

We must assume that, at every step of the way along the path to you reading those words, not one person intervened to suggest that this represents an insult to the American people. Neither the author, nor her editors, nor her publisher, nor her publicists, nor even the Atlantic’s reviewer encountered a pang of conscience while disseminating this slight. The apparently unquestioned assumption underlying it is that you are either sexist, racist, or homophobic. Maybe all three!

 

Even more galling is the degree to which this supposition has not encountered any dissent from the commentary class, who, for elusive reasons, appear to think they’re exempt from the ugly verdict Harris rendered on the American people. “Harris may have been right about this,” former CNN host Chris Cillizza wrote of Harris’s assumption that you’re a hopeless chauvinist incapable of rational thought. “But it also reflects a broader risk-averseness that plagued her campaign.” Sure, that too. And yet, among the factors contributing to her loss was her barely concealed contempt for the voters to whom she was trying to appeal.

 

She didn’t see it that way. Nor, apparently, do her advisors and the press. For the rest of us, however, it’s kind of hard to miss.

Kamala Harris Is Done

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 08, 2025

 

When former Vice President Kamala Harris announced her intention to forgo a run for California governor (following some rather aggressive nudging from Democrats who thought her candidacy would sap the party of enthusiasm and cost them congressional seats), many speculated that Harris could be gearing up for another presidential bid.

 

As Harris and her allies contemplate a second quest for the White House, the question that polling raises is: “Why?”

 

CALIFORNIA POLL

 

2028 Presidential Primaries

 

Democratic Primary

Newsom 23%

Buttigieg 17%

Harris 11%

AOC 9%

Beshear 5%

Shapiro 4%

Sanders 4%

 

GOP Primary

Vance 40%

RFK Jr. 10%

DeSantis 9%

Haley 5%

Rubio 4%

Ramaswamy 4%

https://t.co/KYT3ebHQUk

— Emerson College Polling (@EmersonPolling) August 8, 2025

 

These are brutal numbers for a California native, let alone a figure who served as the party’s de facto leader just ten months ago. They are illustrative of what a shoddy contrivance all that “joy” always was, of course. They also highlight the degree to which Harris’s ascent up the ladder of California politics was a function of her ability to navigate intra-Democratic power centers. Harris’s star rose not because she had a special relationship with her voters. Rather, her relationship was with the party’s powerbrokers.

 

For months, Harris stood at the top of some very preliminary 2028 primary polling, and we can safely attribute that now to name recognition. Recently, national primary polling found her slipping behind former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and that trend is now reflected in the Golden State. That has to bring up some painful memories for Harris — memories she can’t be eager to relive.

 

If this trend continues, why would Harris subject herself to the embarrassment she experienced in 2019? If the onetime Democratic presidential nominee wants to be president that badly, there have to be some universities out there that would be willing to lend her the title. The White House, it seems, is going to remain out of reach.

Voters Don’t Like Losers

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, August 06, 2025

 

William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, was the last commander in chief born a British subject and the first member of the Whig Party to win the White House. He delivered the longest inaugural address in history, nearly two hours, and had the shortest presidency, being the first sitting president to die in office, just 31 days into his term.

 

Oh, there is one more bit of trivia about the man who gave us the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Harrison was the last politician to lose his first presidential election and then win the next one (Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson managed that before him). Richard Nixon lost only to win way down the road. (Grover Cleveland and Trump are the only two to win, lose and then win again.)

 

Everyone else since Harrison’s era who lost on the first try and ran again in the next election lost again. Democrat Adlai Stevenson and Republican Thomas Dewey ran twice and lost twice. Henry Clay and William Jennings Bryan each ran three times in a row and lost (Clay ran on three different party tickets). Voters, it seems, don’t like losers.

 

These are not encouraging results for Kamala Harris, who announced last week she will not be running for governor in California, sparking speculation that she wants another go at the White House.

 

But history isn’t what she should worry about. It’s the here and now. The Democratic Party is wildly unpopular. Its net favorability (minus 30 points) is nearly triple the GOP’s (minus 11 points). The Democratic Party is more unpopular than at any time in the last 35 years. When Donald Trump’s unpopularity with Democrats should have the opposite effect, 63 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of the party.

 

Why? Because Democrats are mad at their own party—both for losing to Trump and for failing to provide much of an obstacle to him now that he’s in office. As my Dispatch colleague Nick Cattogio puts it, “Even Democrats have learned to hate Democrats.”

 

It’s not all Harris’ fault. Indeed, the lion’s share of the blame goes to Joe Biden and the coterie of enablers who encouraged him to run again.

 

Harris’ dilemma is that she symbolizes Democratic discontent with the party. That discontent isn’t monolithic. For progressives, the objection is that Democrats aren’t fighting hard enough. For the more centrist wing of the party, the problem is the Democrats are fighting for the wrong things, having lurched too far left on culture war and identity politics. Uniting both factions is a visceral desire to win. That’s awkward for a politician best known for losing.

 

Almost the only reason Harris was positioned to be the nominee in 2024 was that she was a diversity pick. Biden was explicit that he would pick a woman and, later, an African American running mate. And the same dynamic made it impossible to sideline her when Biden withdrew.

 

Of course, most Democrats don’t see her race and gender as a problem, and in the abstract they shouldn’t. Indeed, every VP pick is a diversity pick, including the white guys. Running mates are chosen to appeal to some part of a coalition.

 

Harris’ real problem is her inability to appeal to voters in a way that expands the Democratic coalition. For Democrats to win, they need someone who can flip Trump voters. She didn’t lose because of low Democratic turnout, she lost because she’s uncompelling to a changing electorate.

 

Her gauzy, often gaseous, rhetoric made her sound like a dean of students at a small liberal arts college. With the exception of reproductive rights, her convictions sounded like they were crafted by focus groups, at a time when voters craved authenticity. Worse, Harris acquiesced to Joe Biden’s insistence she not distance herself from him.

 

Such clubby deference to the establishment, combined with boilerplate pandering to progressive constituencies—learned from years of San Francisco and California politics—makes her the perfect solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

 

Her choice to appear on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show for her first interview since leaving office was telling. CBS recently announced it was terminating both Colbert and the show, insisting it was purely a business decision. But the reason for the broadcast network’s decision stemmed in part from the fact that Colbert narrow-casts his expensive show to a very small, very anti-Trump slice of the electorate.

 

“I don’t want to go back into the system. I think it’s broken,” Harris lamented to Colbert, decrying the “naïve” and “feckless” lack of “leadership” and the “capitulation” of those who “consider themselves to be guardians of our system and our democracy.”

 

That’s all catnip to Colbert’s ideologically committed audience. But that’s not the audience Democrats need to win. And that’s why, if Democrats nominate her again, she’ll probably go down in history as an answer to a trivia question. And it won’t be “Who was the 48th president of the United States?”

This Is Why She Lost

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 01, 2025

 

At this point, Kamala Harris’s defeat in the 2024 presidential election is overdetermined. Indeed, even her loss’s overdetermination is overdetermined.

 

Before Election Day, I joined other observers in noting that the election’s outcome would be viewed retrospectively as the inevitable culmination of various contributing factors. Had Trump gone down to defeat, it would have been the unsurprising conclusion of a campaign waged by a one-term president dogged by allegations of corruption and saddled with a felony conviction. But Harris lost, and that, too, was the only possible outcome given the degree of voters’ dissatisfaction with the administration in which she served and her almost preternatural lack of political talent. Everything is predestined in hindsight.

 

And yet, while all the environmental and candidate quality issues certainly matter, there was also an intangibly off-putting element to Harris’s approach to that campaign that was hard to put into words. Fortunately, in one of her more ludic moments, Harris herself put her finger on it in last night’s interview with outgoing Late Show host Stephen Colbert:

“There are some people who are born or grew up believing, ‘I’m gonna be president, I want to be president.’ That wasn’t me,” she chuckled. “I knew I wanted to serve — I knew that.” At this point, Harris went off on a tangent about the opacity of public life that made little sense. But Colbert grokked her meaning. “I’m hearing you don’t want to be a part of the fight anymore,” he later pressed quizzically. “Oh, absolutely not,” Harris insisted. “I’m always going to be part of the fight.”

 

That should not reassure Harris’s fans. Perhaps she only intimated her disinterest in occupying the Oval Office to project false modesty, but the admission contained a grain of observable truth. After all, she ran for the office as if she didn’t want it.

 

By the late summer of last year, Harris’s conspicuous refusal to subject herself to probing interviews had become a liability for her campaign. Indeed, by mid-September, she had only just begun to expose herself to probing inquiries “if you look closely.” It wasn’t until mid-October that she sat down for a genuinely adversarial conversation with Fox News’s Bret Baier, which only revealed the degree to which she needed practice. Trump held 21 public campaign events in September. JD Vance hosted 14. By comparison, Harris headlined just 13 events. Tim Walz, a paltry seven. That pace continued into October, when “anxious” Democratic operatives began to fret over Trump’s ubiquity and the contrast it struck with the Harris-Walz ticket’s “risk-averse” approach, which ensured that the Democratic Party’s candidates were far less visible.

 

They say that it’s best practice for candidates to “run scared,” and Harris did just that. But she seemed more afraid of success than failure. Whether her campaign’s caution was due to insecurity or lethargy, it conveyed to voters that she just wanted it less than Trump. And the voting public tends to want their presidents to relish the role — or, at least, not actively resent it.

Kamala Harris’s Ambition Haunts California Democrats

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 28, 2025

 

There’s still time for former Vice President Kamala Harris to beg off a run to succeed Gavin Newsom in California’s governor’s mansion. As such, it’s hard to assess the degree to which Harris skeptics in the Golden State are genuinely terrified by her flirtations with a gubernatorial bid or whether they’re exaggerating their trepidation to convince her to recalibrate her ambitions. Either way, California Democrats are rubbing their temples today.

 

As CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reported, even her critics confess that Harris “would be a favorite to win the governor’s race” in “deep-blue” California — an observation that admits her victory would be attributable less to her political acumen than California voters’ bovine insouciance, upon which local Democratic office seekers have come to rely.

 

And yet, Harris will still “have to answer for former President Joe Biden” and her role in the failed but nevertheless attempted coverup of his deteriorating condition. In addition, “possible ambivalence about her candidacy could hurt Democratic chances in swing districts.” If her candidacy fails to “generate enthusiasm” among Democrats while irritating and, thus, activating Republican voters, Harris could get herself elected while still serving as a net negative for her party.

 

“She comes in with baggage,” one unnamed state-level Democratic lawmaker told Dovere. “I think it would only fire up Republicans and hurt our ability to win the four to five seats that we need to win to win the House and hold on to three seats that we just flipped in 2024.” Indeed, Harris’s political star has faded to such an extent that Dovere didn’t have to rely on anonymous quotes from cowed California Democrats. Some even bashed her on the record.

 

“Once you’re the vice president of the United States, there’s only one place to go. It’s president,” said Representative Jimmy Gomez. “For me, if I was vice president and, all of a sudden, I lose, it would be a fallback to me. I hate to put it so bluntly.”

 

Even if these brushback pitches are part of a campaign of elementary psychological manipulation, which is insulting enough, the rebukes Harris has received from her fellow Democrats for being a drag on Democratic prospects generally are especially ruthless. After all, much the same could have been said of Barack Obama.

 

When the 44th president took office in 2009, his party controlled 257 House seats, 57 seats in the Senate, 28 governorships, and 62 of the country’s 99 state legislative chambers. By January 2017, the GOP had reduced the party’s footprint to just 194 House members, 46 senators, 17 governors, and 29 state-level legislatures. Over his tenure, Obama presided over the loss of nearly 1,000 Democratic lawmakers. The president himself acknowledged the scale of this down-ballot disaster and attempted to reverse it by making 150 endorsements at the state legislative level. Not that his intervention helped matters. Republicans picked up control of two more chambers on Election Night in 2016.

 

To this day, few Democrats are willing to acknowledge that the star power Obama commanded for himself did not translate into lasting political power for his party. That omertà persists along with Obama’s personal celebrity. He remains, after all, a strong Democratic fundraiser, and the party’s partisans still regard his tenure in the Oval Office warmly.

 

Harris has been denied these dispensations. Her tenure at the Naval Observatory under Biden is nowhere near as well-regarded, perhaps because Harris commands no celebrity, and the effort to fabricate a cult of personality around her was such an obvious contrivance that it exploded on the launch pad.

 

In the absence of any measurable charisma and given that her candidacy comes with notable risks to the party’s overall political position, California Democrats are liberated. They don’t feel obliged to pretend as though she’s the answer to their problems. Indeed, they tacitly concede, Harris may be indicative of the party’s problems.

 

This level of candor and rationality is rare in a party that so frequently buys its own manufactured hype. That says a lot about Democrats, but it says even more about Harris.

No Autopsy Can Restore the Democratic Party’s Viability

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

 

When one of our two major parties loses a presidential election — and particularly when the loss is a heartbreaking one, causing angst among both the donor and activist classes — we turn to a hallowed political tradition: the election autopsy. What went wrong? How could we have blown it so badly? Here’s an official 100-page report from the party, complete with charts and appendices, explaining exactly why we’re going to be sucking wind from an exhaust pipe for the next four years and how to prevent this from happening again.

 

Those of you with long memories may remember that the national GOP engaged in this very same exercise back in 2013, as it reeled from Mitt Romney’s firm rejection by the voters. The GOP, in its infinite wisdom, concluded that the Republican Party lost because Mitt Romney was too anti-immigration and that the GOP would need to support amnesty and/or a “path to citizenship” in the future to ever have a hope of assembling a winning national coalition. (Keep that thought in your back pocket.)

 

Now — with Donald Trump speedrunning through his second term in office like an amphetamined bull in a china shop — it’s the Democrats’ turn for official recriminations. And of course the writing of the “autopsy” itself has become a football for warring factions of Democrats to punt around. This weekend, the New York Times reported — with the sort of headline snark you would expect from me, not the Times — that the “Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Is Described as Avoiding the Likeliest Cause of Death.”

 

Party officials described the draft document as focusing on the 2024 election as a whole, but not on the presidential campaign — which is something like eating at a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad.

 

Oh, how catty of you, New York Times! In other words, the autopsy is not expected to focus on matters such as Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection in the first place or Kamala Harris’s inadequacies as a candidate. The Times is transparently miffed about this.

 

And I find myself in the curious position of taking the side of the Democratic Party in this case. Noah Rothman wrote about this story yesterday afternoon and covered many of its salient points, but I would add that “autopsy reports,” because they’re public, are inherently political documents intended not to soberly and honestly analyze what went wrong so much as to signal to interested parties a party’s proposed future course of action. What good in that case would come from an autopsy focused primarily on Biden and Harris? (“Well, I guess we learned not to do it again.”) You can’t undo the past. Furthermore, any such approach would do a disservice to Democrats by lulling them into a dangerous belief that the problem was their candidates rather than their underlying issues with the electorate.

 

Alas, according to the Times, it seems that the Democrats’ autopsy report is going to arrive at a laughable conclusion anyway, assigning the lion’s share of the blame to the super PACs and outsider groups that failed to get the job done for Democrats. Apparently, they failed to “change the conversation” and make the election about Trump, as it properly should have been. (Far be it from me to suggest that no national election of my lifetime, not even 1996, was more fiercely litigated on the specific ethical and political merits of one man than was 2024.)

 

Friends, better super PAC messaging wasn’t going to save Democrats in 2024. A Democratic Party that refuses to acknowledge that it lost because of the border, inflation, and its cultural alienation from the great mass of American voters is not a party properly reckoning with its failures. (An honest autopsy would report the cause of death as suicide.) But recall, this is not the true purpose of an “autopsy” report. The true purpose is to dictate the party’s prospective positioning. My real point is that it will probably fail there, as well.

 

Remember that thought I asked you to keep in your back pocket, about the GOP’s own post-2012 “autopsy” report? Well, when Trump ran for president in 2015, he basically ran against every plank of that autopsy, in deed if not by explicit word. Even more importantly, he won, and in so doing reshaped the GOP coalition. Let this be a lesson in how seriously to take autopsy reports.

 

The WNBA’s All-Stars Don’t Want to Get Paid What They’re Really Owed

The WNBA All-Star Game was held on Saturday, July 19 — but, then again, you didn’t need me to tell you that, did you? I’m sure you were all tuned in to the big game on ESPN. There, the ladies of the court caused a stir — primarily on social media — when they began their warm-ups wearing matching black T-shirts that said “Pay Us What You Owe Us,” a demand for higher salaries and profit-sharing among the players. Then they played a game that nobody watched. (Who won? I did — I was reading a book at the time.)

 

The reaction to this on social media was instantaneous and brutal, however, perhaps even to the point of overkill. Who exactly is owed what by whom? tens of thousands of online accounts asked simultaneously, as if with one voice. My first reaction was that if WNBA players want to be paid what they’re really owed, then my offer, like Michael Corleone’s, is this: nothing. (The Babylon Bee was even less forgiving in its calculus: “Uh-Oh — WNBA Players Demand To Be Paid What They’re Worth And Now They Owe The NBA $400 Million.”)

 

But I think many commenters are incorrectly attributing a “woke” social justice element to the (minor) protest. It is no such thing. It is instead little more than a prosaic labor dispute, coordinated bellyaching about the terms of the current collective bargaining agreement the players’ union signed with the WNBA back in 2020, which is set to expire after the 2025 season.

 

Back in 2020 — in other words, before Caitlin Clark brought a new level of attention, in 2024, to what had been, prior to her advent, a flagging niche league — the WNBA players’ union negotiated a revenue-sharing agreement guaranteeing them 9.9 percent of league revenues. Meanwhile, NBA players currently get a CBA-determined 50 percent of all basketball-related income distributed to them. That is up for grabs in October, and that is specifically what the WNBA players were making a statement about.

 

Which gets directly at why their complaints ring so hollow: The NBA essentially pays for the WNBA — which has lost money every single year of its existence — subsidizing it out of a progressive sense of “corporate social conscience.” The WNBA would not make a profit on its own and, in fact, would collapse (or at least contract) were the NBA not propping it up. During the 2023–24 season, the NBA generated $11.3 billion in revenue; the WNBA somewhere around $100–$200 million. Its television ratings are similarly minuscule compared with the NBA’s (which, as an aside, has become an incredibly boring product in recent years itself).

 

The players would argue that the zeitgeist has shifted and that the WNBA is suddenly in a cultural sweet spot for growth because of the buzz surrounding Indiana Fever phenomenon Caitlin Clark, hence they deserve to lock in a better deal for themselves prospectively. It’s a curious argument to hear coming from athletes who, by and large, have been brutalizing Clark on the court this year in a comically obvious league-wide case of Mean Girl syndrome. Clark is currently nursing an injury, and ratings and interest in the WNBA have dropped accordingly; she was the only person on that court on Saturday with any plausible right to complain, and if she wanted to sport a shirt saying “Pay Me What You Owe Me,” it could have been just as easily addressed to her fellow All-Stars.

 

Donald Trump: American-Indian Rights Activist

 

For those who don’t pay attention to Trump’s Truth Social account — for those who only hear about it when he’s gone and said something bonkers enough to earn coverage here or roil the waters of larger social media platforms — I really cannot emphasize enough how relentlessly unhinged it is. It’s the nonstop nature of it that surprises: He’s out there beavering away at all times of the day and night, pumping out ten times more “content” than you probably realize. (This is a man with a pretty important day job.)

 

I mention this because I figured out long ago that Truth Social is Donald Trump’s emotional weather report, and when the winds pick up and he begins to bluster online, it’s usually a sign of internal storminess. Want to know how the president’s feeling today? He’ll tell you himself, inadvertently! I noted just last week that most of Trump’s wildest ideas (such as stripping Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship) emerge on Truth Social when he’s feeling put upon by political circumstances — in that case, the continued fallout of the “Epstein files” debacle. Out comes a shiny new distraction to refocus the media on something harmlessly silly.

 

Keep that in mind, because on Sunday morning, Trump felt the need to share a new idea with the world: The “Commanders” is a horribly lame name for a football team.

 

The Washington “Whatever’s” should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!

 

This wasn’t quite enough to stir outrage and engagement, apparently — after all, what fan of the film Major League doesn’t want to see Chief Wahoo and the Indians return? — and so, several hours later, he came back to up the ante:

 

My statement on the Washington Redskins has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way. I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original “Washington Redskins,” and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, “Washington Commanders,” I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington. The Team would be much more valuable, and the Deal would be more exciting for everyone. Cleveland should do the same with the Cleveland Indians. The Owner of the Cleveland Baseball Team, Matt Dolan, who is very political, has lost three Elections in a row because of that ridiculous name change. What he doesn’t understand is that if he changed the name back to the Cleveland Indians, he might actually win an Election. Indians are being treated very unfairly. MAKE INDIANS GREAT AGAIN (MIGA)!

 

Whatever you say, Billy Jack. This is all transparent bloviation, of course, despite the casual threat to throw his presidential power around. First of all, threatening me, as a conservative, with the withholding of federal funding for a sports stadium is like threatening me with a three-week all-expenses-paid vacation. (“Please, Mister Trump, whatever you do, don’t interfere with this egregious taxpayer boondoggle, don’t toss me in that briar patch!”) But the real takeaway from this strange outburst is that Donald Trump is fishing for distractions, looking to see which one moves the needle with either his fans or the media and shifts the topic of discussion away from matters that prick his presidency directly.

 

And frankly, speaking as a childhood Redskins fan who grew to despairingly hate the franchise during its apocalyptic Dan Snyder era, I don’t even want Washington to restore the Redskins name. It’s not about purported racial offensiveness; it’s about my traumatic relationship with the team, what Snyder’s rancid exploitation and degradation of the Redskins brand did to my feelings about it. The old Redskins — beloved though they were in my youth — are truly dead and gone. If the new ownership wants a fresh start, then I suggest that it take pride in the new roots of this franchise. Yes, it’s time to reclaim a grand tradition; it’s time to bring back the Washington Football Team.