If She Loses, Part 1: Kamala Wrong on the Issues

The US presidential race is neck-and-neck, but the press is starting to feel jitters about Vice President Kamala Harris’s chances in the face of what appears to be a momentum shift toward former President Donald Trump. This raises the question: What happens if Harris loses the?
For starters, college counselors ought to have plenty of Kleenex on hand to blot the tears, and they’ll need a few more coloring books and therapy dogs for the safe spaces. Those college grads in suburbia and urban areas will stock up on Prozac and THC gummies to numb the despair as they book extra sessions with their psychologists. It will be a meltdown for Democrats of all stripes. 
The liberal press, with palm to forehead, will wonder how the electorate could not have taken their socially, morally and educationally superior advice. (There’s even a chance Trump may win the popular vote, which would add insult to injury.) Still, I doubt there would be much introspection. It would be beyond their comprehension that America is more like Trump than Harris, so stories of how good Americans were duped by a conman will proliferate, and the “The end is nigh!” countdown will begin. 
Yes, I could talk about Trump’s liabilities, but he’s a known quantity. His personality, behavior and governing style are not new to voters. If Kamala Harris loses, on the other hand, her political obituary will be written on the subjects of risk aversion and policies. Everyone knows the chief election issues are and have been immigration, the economy and inflation, which have left Americans sour on Democrats, but Kamala’s loss will stem from other factors as well. So, we’re going to tackle this in two bites: first off, the main issues everyone knows, and then the issues the party couldn’t overcome with Harris in particular as the candidate. I will deal with the second set of issues in a later installment.
One note: The US does not elect presidents based on the popular vote, but rather on an electoral college that awards votes to candidates that win in each state. All US states, excluding Maine and Nebraska, have a winner-take-all system in which electoral college votes are awarded to the candidate who wins a majority of individual votes in the state. Most of the other states lean decidedly toward one party or the other; we can be fairly certain that Harris will take California, with its 54 votes, and that Trump will take Texas, with its 40 votes. There are only seven states that are “swing” or “battleground” arenas. Thus, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin effectively control the outcome of the election. For our purposes, we’ll pay attention to a few of these, most notably Pennsylvania and Michigan, where Harris’s liabilities are the clearest.
Recent omens bode poorly for Democrats. The Wall Street Journal found that most people (54%) think Harris would continue incumbent President Joe Biden’s unpopular policies. That shifts to a three-to-one ratio for undecideds. Trump has also chipped away four points from Harris’s advantage on the issue of abortion, which is Harris’ strongest campaign plank.
The Journal’s Alyssa Finley points out that “three surveys in the past week show that voters rate [Trump] more favorably than Kamala Harris.” According to Gallup, Trump is now viewed favorably by 50% of US adults. This is remarkable. Even in 2016, the year Trump won the presidency, he only held a 36% approval rating.
In non-news of note, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times decided they wouldn’t issue endorsements that would have reliably gone to Harris. Cue the beltway cries of cowardice, though such endorsements may have little impact for a press that now plumbs historic lows in trust at 31%. 
The media pile-on of Trump and his supporters may have led Joe Rogan, Spotify’s number one podcast host, to say, “The rebels are Republicans now. They’re like, You want to be a rebel, you want to be punk rock? You want to, like, buck the system? You’re a conservative.” He continued, “The liberals are now pro-silencing criticism. They’re pro-censorship online. They’re talking about regulating free speech, and they’re regulating the First Amendment. It’s bananas to watch.” Rogan has tens of millions of listeners, principally young and male. These folks would largely go for Trump anyway, but Harris declined the invitation to make her pitch.
Moving on to the individual issues, inflation and wages may be the biggest of the election, and the Democrats are in difficult territory here. Wages have been flat or below inflation for most of Biden’s presidency, and voters feel it. It takes a while for growing wages to catch up to what was lost when your paycheck was inflated away, and inflation sticks in voter’s minds for a long time even if wages are rising. People flat-out don’t like paying $4.99 for berries when they were $3.99 a couple of years ago. If we look at the difference between inflation and wage growth, Americans are only now getting back to par.
Home prices are a problem. Analysts at Florida Atlantic University earlier this year showed that the top three areas with overpriced housing are, in order, Detroit, Michigan; Atlanta, Georgia; and Las Vegas, Nevada. All three of those are major cities in swing states. 
Interest rates have dented home sales, and people who have low, locked-in mortgage rates are loath to move, which has reduced housing supply. Even where a suitable house may be found, and even if people can take the interest rate hikes, house prices themselves have leapt up, leaving many unsure if they will achieve the American dream of home ownership.
Housing prices and rents have soared in Nevada, but it gets a double whammy with the highest unemployment rate of any state. In that state, Las Vegas has become an eviction capital along with Phoenix in the neighboring swing state of Arizona.
Auto worker jobs are an issue in Michigan. Interest rates have affected purchases of homes, but they also impact car sales. However, the bigger problem might be electric vehicles (EVs). EVs require fewer parts to assemble, and many of those parts are made outside the US. As EVs are more broadly adopted, fewer employees will be required for assembly. By some estimates, EVs require 30–40% less labor than gasoline cars, which is a problem for Harris since she has been a supporter of Environmental Protection Agency rules that carry an effective mandate for EVs. 
That effective mandate requires that nearly 70% of vehicles be EVs by 2035, as the rules forcibly phase out internal combustion engines. T A 2018 study by the United Auto Workers said the number of jobs lost to EVs may rise to 35,000 as these cars are adopted or forced down the throats of customers. This issue has made the US Senate race in Michigan a toss-up. Even the Socialists have been in a tizzy over this.
That’s probably why United Auto Workers union members increasingly vote against their leadership. In other cases, even the leadership is waffling in its historic support of Democrats. The Teamsters, who received tens of billions to shore up rickety pensions courtesy of Biden (and the taxpayers), did not endorse anyone.
Finally, Michigan has the largest Palestinian population in America, and those voters are unhappy with the Biden administration’s support of Israel. Over 100,000 votes in the Democrats’ primary featuring Biden were marked as “uncommitted.” Trump’s 2016 margin of victory in the state was less than 11,000 votes, so the holdouts really matter.
Immigration has surged to all-time highs during the Biden years, and the issue now stands as most people’s number one or two concern. Harris has previously been in favor of decriminalizing illegal migration into the US, and during the Biden administration, she was the point person for addressing border problems. Almost four years later, voters have tired of southern border lawlessness, and city budgets across the nation have strained to accommodate the migrant flows.
This issue has voters hoppin’ mad. The media have gone into overdrive to say she never held such a position. Even though Axios called Kamala the “border czar” early in the administration, they decided that never happened. But if she had been the border czar, there were also folks who wanted you to know she did a great job. It kinda makes you wonder what she was doing for the last three and a half years. I guess she’s veep exclusively for abortion?
Energy is a swing state issue, and the Biden administration has done its best to staunch domestic fossil fuel production. Yes, US production is at an all-time high, but that’s largely in spite of what the administration has done. There are a million ways to strangle energy production, including halting LNG exports, and I can show you at least 225 very specific ones under the Biden administration.
In probably the most crucial state of Pennsylvania, the extraction of fossil fuels by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is big business. As the New York Post reports, “In 2022, the industry employed 121,000 Pennsylvanians with an average salary of $97,000, according to FTI Consulting. Fracking also generated $3.2 billion in state and local tax revenue, and more than $6 billion in royalty payments to landowners that year.”
If you look at some helpful graphics from The New York Times, you’ll see that “Blue Wall states fared relatively poorly” when looking at “percentage change in jobs from 2019 to 2023, by county.” This is particularly true of Pennsylvania, where job losses hit the northwest of the state particularly hard. The hard-hit areas are precisely those areas where Pennsylvania maintains the most oil and gas wells.
Oil and gas workers remember that Harris was previously in favor of a fracking ban. Do you think they want to lose their jobs in a tough market? With oil and gas as a major employer in struggling western Pennsylvania, left-wing climate change crusading is a fool’s errand.
Harris now claims she’s against a ban, but during her ill-fated 2020 presidential run, she said, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Not a lot of nuance there. Even now, Harris’s climate director, Camila Thorndike, has been winking at the pro-ban crew.
Addressing her remarks to “voters who care about climate change” in an interview with Politico, Thorndike noted that Harris “is someone that not only movements can work with, but she has championed these causes, and that we know who she is.” The former Bernie Sanders staffer who is given to calling oil and gas folks “murders” and fossil fuel CEOs “dictators and oligarchs” backtracked, but her point was clear: Kamala never explains why she no longer favors a fracking ban because at heart she remains firmly against fossil fuel production.
Harris has also been trying to sell herself as “the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which opened new leases for fracking.” Bollocks. This provision was the price West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin exacted for his crucial 50th vote to pass the bill into law, and it prohibits the government from holding offshore wind sales without holding offshore oil and gas leases. Harris can take all the credit she wants, but to mix metaphors, voters should know the Biden-Harris administration fought Manchin’s line in the sand tooth and nail.
These are all messy policy issues for the Harris campaign, and endless talk of dreams, aspirations and “joy” is wearing thin. Voters say they don’t know where she stands on the issues, and they want to hear more than the 9,000th retelling of her mother at a yellow Formica table. Along those lines, I will delve into the more personal issues of what may have undone her bid for the presidency. If she loses.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.