Home » What went wrong in the Harris campaign? Maybe the dogs just didn’t like it

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What went wrong in the Harris campaign? <i>Maybe the dogs just didn’t like it</i> — 57 Comments

  1. The dogs for damned sure didn’t like it:

    My name is Boffer Bings. I was born of honest parents in one of the humbler walks of life, my father being a manufacturer of dog-oil and my mother having a small studio in the shadow of the village church, where she disposed of unwelcome babes.

    Oil of Dog, Ambrose Bierce

  2. whats that shakespeare line ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing told by an idiot,’ it takes skill to earn such a total repudiation, so the question was did the campaign exists, or was it a simulacrum of one,

    it had the appearance of a campaign, they had a convention, they had delegates, they had celebrity endorsements, they had appearance here and there, but the engagement wasn’t really there, not with the press, not even with real life human beings, her responses were akin to a derivative AI

  3. This is the mirror image of what I mentioned before the election. Since it was lost by a narrow margin, any small interest group can plausibly claim that if only their pet cause was paid more attention to, the election would have gone differently.

    The socialists are saying the Dems weren’t socialist enough, the race hustlers are saying the Dems didn’t offer enough to race hustlers, the feminists are saying the Dems weren’t feminist enough, the people who wanted a different candidate are saying a different candidate would have won, etc.

    Just as if the Republicans had lost, the Dems are in danger of learning the wrong lesson and doubling down on what already didn’t work.

  4. I have a friend, who I know only somewhat. He’s a nice guy, and far left, though he can think from time to time. He came up with the following on Facebook late yesterday.

    I’m trying to convey to liberal boomers that younger generations do NOT care as much about having a female president as they do about improving their economic conditions. People are spending upwards of half their income on RENT. Compare that to when you were their age. To what extent is a female president a vanity project? I know this isn’t popular to say and I know sexism is hard to overcome, but identity politics is *chic* politics. It’s avoiding the real issue that corporations have taken over our governance.

    So I don’t think corporations are our country’s primary problem, but they and the uber wealthy do exert a large influence. However, “a vanity project”? “identity politics is chic politics”? Ha!

    His post is a pretty good description of reality over imagology.

  5. Why did they lose? Biden didn’t do a good job in office. Kamala Qué Mala Harris was a dog of a candidate. Poorly run campaign, such as choosing Walz instead of Shapiro; demonizing Trump and his supporters may have preached to the Liberal Choir, but that shopworn tactic didn’t convince many fence-sitters. And so on.

    An anecdote from my polling place. I was third in line when I showed up to vote on Tuesday. By contrast, a friend who voted early stood in line for an hour. There were two wheelchairs in the line, one ahead of me and soon one behind me. The one ahead had a wheelchair with an Army Vet seal on it. His wife was there for assistance. No problem. He instructed his wife to “Vote all Democrat” for him, but that was his right. As it was my right to vote all Republican.

    The wheelchair behind me was occupied by a younger woman who was babbling. The odds of someone who is wheelchair-bound who cannot speak coherently also being able to make coherent voting decisions are rather small odds. (I worked nearly a year as an aide in an institution for the mentally retarded, so I have some experience in making such judgments.) It appeared to me that the person who had brought the wheelchair-bound woman to the voting center had decided to “assist” her with the goal of augmenting a party’s vote. To me, that is a travesty of the voting process.

    It is possible that the wheelchair-bound person wasn’t voting, but I doubt that. Perhaps I should have hung around to test that.

  6. So if creepy Joe thought he would win the election, why step aside? What are Obama and his lapdogs going to do if he says, “No”?

  7. Speaking about voting, exit polls used to have “high school dropout” in the education category. IIRC, it was there in 2008, but not after 2008.

    Which enables Democrats to hide the fact that the high school dropout contingent votes Democrat.

  8. What Obama and his lapdogs would do would be to 25th him. Which is illegitimate. The only legitimate threat of the 25th is to get an incompetent president to resign with grace. Otherwise, either he is fit, or using it is mandatory.

  9. My reading at Slate.com confirms what neo and the commenters above write.
    There are 12 articles “above the fold;” 11 of them are about the election and each blames a different factor for their loss. One article blames the Dems’ support of “genocide,” another claims that Harris ran an excellent campaign in a n impossible situation, still another states that Harris was unprepared and incompetent. One blames ‘Men,” another “White Women.” The opening line of the article pointing out that there are a few glimmers of hope for Dems is “Well, this sucks. The American people have decided to elect a convicted felon over a woman.”

    Nowhere does any author recognize that the Democratic Party is the product, and it’s a terrible one. Nothing produced in a factory that contains both Dearborn and has a quarter of its financing done by Jews is going to be coherent or effective. (In depressing news, Jewish support for Harris remained inexplicably strong- 3 exit pools I found showed that Jewish voting for her was 79, 71 and 66%. Jews are intelligent but not so smart.).

    May the Democratic Party remain as foolhardy as it is today.

  10. One of the Trump examples of genius is the garbage thing. No outrage. He played with it. It was funny. Absolutely meaningless. Not enough weight to get mad at. Garbage memes all over.
    The dems are so whacked-out that even their insults are funny.
    That’s how superior we–the Trump side–are.

  11. Nutz calling Vance “weird” is like Democrats calling Republicans “liars”.
    Or “Biden” calling Trump a “criminal”.

    And then there’s this rather entertaining bit of—Surprise!—Gangster Party crookedness:
    ‘Senior Harris Advisor Deletes X Account As “Massive Scandal” Brews Over $20 Million In Campaign Debt’—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/senior-harris-advisor-deletes-x-account-massive-scandal-brews-over-20-million-campaign-debt

  12. There’s so many factors pointed out above and their drip, drip, drip causing an etching on a rock is mystifying

  13. “Senior Harris Advisor Deletes X Account…”, continued:

    “PLOUFFE GOES POOF! Implosion: Kamala’s Top Campaign Operative Deletes X Account.“—
    https://instapundit.com/683015/

    He’s not the only one, apparently.

    The Bovine Ms. M seems to have had some second thoughts, as well:

    And the Aussie ambassador to the US—no less—has also been erasing hysterically (who does he think he is!!? Bette Midler??)
    https://instapundit.com/682994/

    If he had any sense of honor he’d resign immediately…but these days, who knows…

  14. Re: Maybe the dogs didn’t like it

    Back in the Neolithic (early 1990s) when Microsoft was developing the Windows NT operating system, they decided, as part of the development process, that all teams working on Windows NT would have to use the latest in-house Windows NT as their platform for their daily work.

    Thus these MS employees suffered all the bugs and problems in Windows NT. Which gave everyone a reason to get the damn bugs fixed ASAP.

    Microsoft called this process “Eating your own dog food.” It now has its own wiki entry:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

  15. re: “And yes, books will be written about it – although not by me.”

    There is a wealth of information about events in blogs and on-line commentary, most of which is ephemera and will be, at the very least, difficult for future historians to reference. Much like letters in the past, but, in a strange sense, both concentrated and diffuse.

  16. @neo, jvermeer:25th amendment

    The 25th, by design, is harder to execute than impeachment and it cannot be used against a living, compos mentis President.

    Biden would have simply declared himself competent and two thirds of Congress would then be needed to force him out. The mere attempt would have done far more damage to the Dems than anything Trump could do, even if it could possibly have succeeded (why would the Republicans go along)? If that was a threat, it was an empty one.

    I’m sure there was some leverage used, but it could not have been that lever.

    …when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

  17. DEMs didn’t have a deep bench after Bill Clinton to run against the REPs. Barack Obama had been groomed for decades by American communists—Frank Marshall Davis headed the list, with Bill Ayers arriving later.

    Communists got the unknown BO to the 2004 Democratic National Convention – enter The Speech – followed by the ‘oohs and aahs’ that had previously been reserved for Bill ‘Slick Willy’ Clinton.

    Hillary patiently waited on the bench until it was her turn. Once up, she to was welcomed by the ‘oohs and aahs’, but those were mainly coming from the MSM section – not the resounding oohs and aahs from the Voter sections that Bill & Barack had gotten.

    Hillary ended up losing to Trump, and her backup on the bench had been Biden. Not an ‘ooh and aah’ type of candidate the DEMs had grown used to. Biden was more of a hold up the dog biscuit and watch the dogs all leap around in excitement ‘n glee.

    Biden beat Trump, and the DEMs had resolved both the bench issue & the ‘ooh and aah’ issue – with a dog biscuit type of candidate.

    Well, issues were resolved until brain-dead Biden’s falling, freezing, and muttering issues could not longer be hidden and/or explained away by DEMs and their MSM.

    DEMs went into panic mode. Looked at bench—PANIC!

    After some serious panicking time – DEMs settle on Kamala Harris. No real ‘oohs and aahs’ happened. Not even a dog biscuit seemed to work, which was unusual for the MSM pack.

    Conclusion

    Give the DEMs some more time, and eventually they will realize that they had needed to tie a pork chop around Kamala’s neck to get the dogs to ‘Play’ with her…

  18. I wrote to my Congress person (she’s a Dem) in 2022 complaining about the open border. Her reply said that the poor immigrants coming in were all refugees, and that we should welcome them with open arms. I knew then that the open border wasn’t incompetence, it was intentional. For me that issue, illegal immigration, was akin to treason because the POTUS was not defending this country’s sovereignty – a duty that’s fundamental to his oath of office.

    Mayor Adams’ complaint about the illegals being sent to New York City finally forced the MSM to cover the issue – though they never gave it the depth it deserved. Even so, by election day, it was either number one or two on people’s list of problems that Biden/Harris had created.

    For Harris and Mayorkas to openly claim in many forums that the border was closed was as arrogant a lie as I’ve ever seen told by a politician.

    It amazes and enrages me that the election was even close. As long as the MSM, Hollywood, academia, multiple NGOs, and foundations continue their grip on information and money; the dumbing down of the citizenry will continue.

  19. I really don’t think that a large number of Dems and supporters will learn any lesson from 11/5 (Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November). Todays paper had article on Trump’s win. Second para had J6, criminal convictions, racism, etc of Trump and supporters. Oh, and Trump ran a vicious campaign also. To me that is a very big reason that Trump won. Harris, et al, were very savage in their comments about us. We are not Americans too.

    Oh, and the above comment about Boomers. I really really don’t like it when you are blaming Boomers for everything. Born in the USA, 1946

  20. West TX Intermediate:

    I don’t have time to find it at the moment, but I once linked to and discussed the fact that exit polls that purport to be about Jews are WILDLY inaccurate. Samples are tiny and proportions skew too much to secular Jews.

    I have read several reports that say that polls of Jews show they voted in the mid-40s for Trump. And the vast majority of Jews live in deep blue cities. Apparently Jews in Florida voted something like 53% for Trump.

  21. Barry, a great comment from “Peter Nelson” at your instapundit link:

    Sorry, I call BS. If you take the time to record your tantrum and post it on Tiktok or Instagram or wherever, you’re just looking for attention. A whole lot of the behavior of leftists is explained by the fact that they’re neurotic narcissists – if not outright clinically bonkers.

  22. Interesting that Whitmer seems to be the only donkey that can read the room. The rest vow resistance.

  23. Kamala was a terrible candidate with almost no discernable political skills. She picked a VP who managed to be more unlikable than she was and she ran one of the most comically inept campaigns in recent memory. Even the help of a compliant and complicit media was not enough to get her over the top.

    I actually think that she is relieved that she won’t have to attend any more boring national security briefings where she has to pretend to care about countries that she has never heard of. She can relax and have a few extra glasses of wine with lunch and not have to worry about having to face a public wondering why she can’t seem to stop her inappropriate cackles.

    The Democratic party remains clueless about the quiet revolution that has reshaped the Republican Party and the American political landscape. They don’t seem to understand that you can’t convince people who are struggling to keep their heads above water that the economy is just fine because the Bureau of Labor Statistics says so.

  24. David Foster said:

    To extend the analogy, the intent of the Democrats was to keep getting new dogs until they found some that liked their dog food.

    And to extend it yet further, they still came up empty on the dog front, so they swept up an iguana, dressed it up in a dog costume, and made believe that it was a dachshund.

    I’ve been checking on some results from NY and a couple of other states. I’ve been fairly content, though not fully, of course. There’s been a certain amount of bellyaching from coworkers, which is to be expected given the demographics in my office. Was surprised to see that Tompkins County broke only 72/25 for Harris.

  25. David Foster and Gringo,

    You’re both more literate than I, so I’m sure you know Brecht’s poem, “Die Lösung.” Many of our betters who get paid to appear on television and print to explain our flaws would fit right in with the East German government.

    After the uprising of the 17th of June
    The Secretary of the Writers’ Union
    Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
    Which stated that the people
    Had squandered the confidence of the government
    And could only win it back
    By redoubled work [quotas]. Would it not in that case
    Be simpler for the government
    To dissolve the people
    And elect another?

    If they won’t eat the dog food get new dogs.

  26. Thats arabic not hebrew another group that trump made inroads with

    Im reminded when the guardian wanted to flip hamilton cty ahia in 2004 that failed disastrously* also when charlie brooker who would later come up with black mirror suggested an untoward fate against w
    *this was a county they suggested harris might carry until she didnt

  27. huxley,

    I’ve used the phrase “we eat our own dog food” many times as a manager when explaining to my staff why we would use our company’s and department’s products. I’m pretty sure it predates the Windows NT days and the link you link’ed states the same.

  28. Rufus T. Firefly:

    Yes, Microsoft didn’t invent the dog food idea. As stated in the wiki link I provided. I’m not sure where neo’s story fits in.

    But I first encountered it in the Windows NT saga and it became an amusing trope in the software industry.

    Windows NT was an amazing advance. Microsoft had enticed some top OS talent from Digital Equipment Corp. and created the first truly robust modern operating system for personal computers.

    Apple’s Macintosh brought the graphical interface to their personal computers but Apple crashed and burned when trying to create a truly multi-threaded OS like Windows NT and had to fall back and base their new Mac OSes on BSD Unix.

  29. When they blame Biden, he merely retorts “I’m the only one who beat Trump!” If that’s not true and they cheated to win they dare not expose themselves, Biden is safe.

  30. om

    The dog ate all the Kamala mail in ballots (her homework).

    So THAT’S WHY Kamala 2024 had so many fewer votes than Biden
    2020! 🙂 (Though my take is less voter enthusiasm and less activist fraud…But it’s really strange, that 2020 Demo jump.)

    Rufus T. Firefly, this thread early on definitely reminded me of the Brecht poem. Thanks for bringing it up.

  31. “I don’t think the Democrats have learned the lesson illustrated in this classic story, which is that maybe the dogs didn’t like it:” neo

    “I really don’t think that a large number of Dems and supporters will learn any lesson from 11/5” SHIREHOME

    To learn that lesson, they’d have to acknowledge that reality trumps imagology. But their imagology is founded on a rejection of the very existence of objective reality, as it applies to human nature and perception. Positing as it does that there is only the individual’s subjective perception of reality.

    It’s not happenstance that the left is concentrated in urban and suburban areas. Milan Kundera in describing the day to day life of his Paris neighbor, eloquently points to the urban dweller’s divorcement from the origin and processes that make life in the urban environment possible. Where other than air, every necessity for life must be imported for nearly all the population.

    “To extend the analogy, the intent of the Democrats was to keep getting new dogs until they found some that liked their dog food.” David+Foster

    On the southern Texas border, Starr County is 97% Hispanic. It has voted democrat since 1896. Trump won with more than 57% of the vote. That’s a political tsunami. Fortunately, the democrat elite live far above the political flood waters and so are ideologically blind to the writing on the wall. Wild card events aside, it’s now likely that in 2028, J.D. Vance will become the next American President. Of course, the Deep State may arrange to usher him into the Oval Office sooner. Which could well be a fatal mistake.

  32. “Brady said money was an issue, and criticized the Harris campaign for paying only about ‘half’ of the money the city committee requested for its get-out-the-vote effort. Those funds, otherwise known as ‘street money,’ are used to pay committee members to get out the vote.”
    To say the quiet part out loud, “street”, or “walkin’ around” money is used to directly pay for votes. It’s not that anyone’s vote is changed by the $20 the ward heeler hands them, it’s that they wouldn’t bother voting at all, for either candidate.
    Reading Brady’s quote, I was struck with how much it sounded like dialog from _The Godfather_. The boys have always had a presence in big-city (read: Democratic machine) politics, so I guess the lingo rubs off. Besides complaining about not enough vote-buying funds, I translate his quote as, “The Harris campaign had lots of money floating around, but none of it wound up in my pocket.”

  33. @Phillip Sells … Nate Silver put a post up on his SubStack today (Silver Bulletin) talking about the shift to Trump in New York City. Not a majority obviously but likely better than any Republican since Reagan.

  34. Miguel cervantes

    Im reminded when the guardian wanted to flip hamilton cty ahia in 2004 that failed disastrously*…*this was a county they suggested harris might carry until she didnt

    Hamilton County is where Cincinnati is located. The 2004 Guardian letter-writing campaign was for Clark County, which Trump carried in 2024. Hamilton County/Cincinnati, like most big cities, went for Trump.

    https://www.theregister.com/2004/10/25/operation_clark_county/

  35. huxley,

    Are you sure about that? I first encountered Windows NT as a server O/S (around 1994?) that seemed (to my perception) to be a blatant rip off of Novell Netware. My assumption was, in typical Microsoft fashion, rather than innovate they stole from the best and used their market share to drive the competition out of business*. Which they did to Novell. And, eventually Windows NT and then Windows Server became decent operating systems in their own right.

    *Just as they had done with MS Word, Excel and Internet Explorer.

  36. @Rufus: I first encountered Windows NT as a server O/S (around 1994?) that seemed (to my perception) to be a blatant rip off of Novell Netware.

    NT was released in 1993. The *nixs and BSD of course were already out by then and were already “robust modern operating systems for personal computers”. Slackware came out about a month after NT, SoftLanding some months before.

    I still use Slackware.

  37. If you were leaning democrat, what single issue might chase you away? Seems they had a number of off-putters.
    Guys in girls’ locker rooms would get the attention of, I presume, the bluest of blue who happened to have one or two girl athletes as daughters or nieces. Would that be enough to get someone to move?
    Immigration is one thing…known criminals released to prey upon US citizens? Although I suppose the really blue don’t live where that might come to bite them.
    Was the disastrous bug-out from Afghanistan sufficient, or was it too far from what is perceived as dem policies?

  38. Hi, Christopher B. That was an interesting article that you mentioned.
    Yes, the Trump totals throughout the five boroughs are very impressive, particularly for me the Queens result.

    One thing that I notice about the NYC county returns is that the turnout there appears to have been strangely low compared to statewide. Most of the other counties in New York state seem to have vote rates around anywhere from 2/3 to 3/4 of the “active registered voters,” just taking in the arithmetic at a glance. (Sparsely-populated Hamilton County, in the Adirondacks, had a full 80% turnout without a single void vote, at least in the presidential column.)

    But look at the NYC rates:

    Brooklyn 53.2%
    Bronx 47.5% (!)
    Manhattan 60.3%
    Queens 54.0%
    Staten Island 62.0%

    Kind of pathetic in comparison.

  39. @ Rufus & Niketas > “a blatant rip off of Novell Netware.”

    I was one of the first programmers hired by Novell at the beginning, in the early 1980s. After floundering around for a while with their proprietary language that was not a useful addition to the market, they began selling microcomputers, printers, and some applications software (my job). They hired a brilliant programmer, Drew Major (who was incidentally in my church ward, not unusual in Utah; nice guy) and went into the development of Netware.
    The other groups were all let go in & around 1982, which was a smart move on their part, but kind of ruined my career trajectory.

    I didn’t make it into the Wikipedia write-up.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novell

  40. Barry, on the Poll thread, linked a post from The Ccroll because of its discussion of polls (well, duh!), but some of the small pieces under the main feature talk about What Went Wrong.

    https://thedailyscroll.substack.com/p/nov-7-did-obama-have-a-plan

    ?As Democrats enter the election postmortem phase, we’re seeing a lot of discussion of what one might refer to as the “Joe Rogan Question”—i.e., why the Trump campaign, but not the Harris campaign, was able to successfully utilize the world’s most popular podcaster. The Nation’s Elie Mystal, for instance, declared on X that rather than court Rogan, liberals needed to “BUILD THEIR OWN ROGAN,” as if one could simply order one from IKEA. Slightly more realistic was Ezra Klein, writing this morning in The New York Times:

    The Democratic Party had spent years kicking people out of its tent. … It wasn’t that many years ago that Rogan had Bernie Sanders on for a friendly interview. And then Rogan kinda sorta endorsed him. Rather than celebrate, online liberals were furious at Sanders for going on “Rogan” in the first place. I was still on Twitter then, and I wrote about how of course Sanders was right to be there and this was one of the best arguments for Sanders’s campaign. If you wanted to beat Trump, you wanted to win over people like Rogan.

    Liberals got so angry at me for that, I was briefly a trending topic. Rogan was a transphobe, an Islamophobe, a sexist, a racist, the kind of person you wanted to marginalize, not chat with. But if these last years have proved anything, it’s that liberals don’t get to choose who is marginalized. Democrats should have been going on “Rogan” regularly. They should have been prioritizing it—and other podcasts like it—this year.

    All fair points, in a sense … except that it wasn’t really “online liberals” (as annoying as they may be) who were the problem, but the party leadership and donor class.

    [AF: whose playbook was to try and cancel Rogan]

    ?Speaking of Psaki, the former White House press secretary and current MSNBC host helpfully gave us an idea on Monday of the bullet we dodged on Tuesday. In her monologue on the day before the election, Psaki said:

    Even if Trump is defeated tomorrow, he has exposed during his time out there some serious limitations within our system, and it may be time to ask ourselves things like, whether social media platforms should have the freedom to operate at a lower level of accountability than local television networks in terms of the lies they can spread.

    It seems we’re living in a different reality than Ms. Psaki, because from what we can tell, television networks can spread lies with very little accountability at all.

    ?And in other dodged-bullet news, Jonathan Last of “The Bulwark,” the never-Trump Republican webzine dedicated to “defending democracy” and bilking large checks out of gullible liberal donors, expressed regret, as the results came on Tuesday night, that the Biden administration hadn’t been more “radical” in rigging the system against Trump. Here’s Last, as transcribed by Tom Elliott on X:

    [The Biden Admin] should have been quite radical. They should have made D.C. a state, they should have actually expanded the Supreme Court, they should have done a whole bunch of stuff that would have been deeply unpopular, but … would have restructured the framework in such a way as to make it harder for the next authoritarian attempt.

    That’s certainly a perspective, though we’d argue that the administration was in fact quite radical in attempting to place the entirety of English-language social media under government censorship and then, when that failed, to launch four criminal investigations against its opponent and sue to get him taken off the ballot.

    ?But maybe the Democrats’ problem wasn’t Joe Rogan. Maybe it was … Gaza! That was the argument from Peter Beinart in a Thursday New York Times op-ed, in which he argues, without evidence, that Harris lost because she didn’t listen to Peter Beinart about opposing “what prominent scholars call a genocide.”

    ?So what really did Harris in? Our guess is that she was screwed no matter what, given inflation and three years of an open border, but both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have published excellent postmortems of the campaign, both of which we’ll link below. A few highlights:

    Trump ran a lean, efficient, startup-style campaign, according to the Times, which turned its fundraising deficit into an advantage in agility and creativity. It outsourced the “ground game” to allied PACs and focused instead on where the campaign could get the most value in return for its spending: e.g., low-propensity male voters and nontraditional media such as podcasts. The Harris campaign, by contrast, racked up massive fixed costs with its on-the-ground infrastructure and with expensive, highly produced celebrity events. After raising more than $1 billion, Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle reported on Wednesday, the Harris campaign finished more than $20 million in debt while suffering the worst defeat for Democrats in two decades.

    Related, the Trump campaign appears to have relied on Trump’s instincts as well as a small handful of capable operatives, including campaign co-managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles and political director Jason Blair, who were able to make risky bets even amid criticism from other veteran campaign operatives. (Most of these criticisms were aired in the liberal press, which continued to insist up until election night that the campaign was inept, demoralized, and chaotic.) Harris, on the other hand, assembled a bloated amalgamation of her own staffers, inherited Biden staffers, and Obama veterans who joined the campaign in its closing months, with no clear lines of authority. The result appears to have been a sort of suicide-by-committee in which the campaign regularly struggled to make difficult decisions (e.g., whether she should go on Rogan) or settle on a message.

    Finally, the Harris campaign made the mistake of all recent losing Democratic campaigns: not listening to Bill Clinton. When Trump began dropping ads highlighting Harris’ support for taxpayer-funded transition surgeries for illegal aliens—with the tagline “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you”—Clinton immediately recognized it as a problem, despite the received wisdom among liberals that “anti-trans” ads didn’t work. Clinton urged Harris to rush out and clarify that she would not support such a policy as president, but was told that the ads were “not necessarily having an impact.” But ad testing by Harris’ largest PAC, Future Forward, found that the trans ads were among Trump’s most effective, with one of them shifting viewers 2.7 points to the former president.

  41. That’s from The Scroll, of course, not The Ccroll.
    (I think the latter is probably Cthulhu’s blog.)

    Somehow, my comments look a lot shorter when I’m composing them than they end up when posted.
    Sign.

  42. Not the Bee has the right idea.
    https://notthebee.com/article/there-are-so-many-woke-freakouts-on-the-internet-right-now-that-we-had-to-create-a-second-article-to-fit-them-all

    If you watch these videos, you’ll see how terrified these people are of Donald Trump … the billionaire NYC celebrity famous for reality TV, cameos in “Home Alone 2,” and Pizza Hut ads.

    They got this way because the media has lied to them for a decade with increasingly ominous tales of doom that ratchet people’s anxiety to the max. If we’re going to point fingers, let’s start with the talking heads that drove these people crazy so the elites could keep political power.

    This is why we are trying to undo the brainwashing through humor ?

  43. Are you sure about that? I first encountered Windows NT as a server O/S (around 1994?) that seemed (to my perception) to be a blatant rip off of Novell Netware.

    Rufus T. Firefly:

    I recommend “Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft.” A cracking good read!

    https://theceolibrary.com/showstopper-breakneck-race-create-windows-nt-next-generation-microsoft-4983.html

    Novell started as a LAN manager on top of MS-DOS. Great for file and printer sharing across a network, great stuff in its time, but it was never a full-featured, stand-alone OS and certainly not for everyday personal computer users.

    Windows NT did the network stuff and multiprocessing and multithreading from the ground-up plus a graphical user-friendly interface like Windows 95.

    Windows NT was a huge breakthrough.

  44. Funny story from “Showstopper.”

    Dave Cutler was the wild man genius systems architect whom Microsoft hired away from DEC to do Window NT.

    Cutler was interviewing secretaries. Being a wild man he was prone to foul language. He asked his applicants how they felt about the F-word.

    One said, “It’s my favorite word.” Cutler hired her.

    Halcyon days.

  45. AesopFan,

    That’s amazing you actually worked for Novell! Thanks for sharing your experience.

    Huxley, I stand corrected.

  46. Someone attributed the following to Van Jones. It seems a little insightful for him to have said it though. But I think it is one of the reasons the Republicans (thankfully) won:

    “If progressives have a politics that says all white people are racist, all men are toxic, and all billionaires are evil it’s kinda hard to keep them on your side. If you’re chasing people out of the party, you can’t be mad when they leave.”

  47. To use another famous saying, this time one ascribed to Lincoln – you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, you cannot fool all the people all the time.

    I say the Democrats figured they could fool enough of the people enough of the time, but then they ran out of time.

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