What went wrong in the Harris campaign? Maybe the dogs just didn’t like it
This election has generated so much to think about that it could serve as subject matter for posts for years. And yes, books will be written about it – although not by me.
So I’ll just start tackling topic after topic, trying to pace myself, knowing that I’ll only be able scratch the surface of what has happened.
I’ve already read many articles on the post-election fights within the Democrat Party in which one group blames another. For example, there’s this one that describes the war of words between the head of the party in Philadelphia and the Harris campaign:
McPhillips added: “If there’s any immediate takeaway from Philadelphia’s turnout this cycle, it is that Chairman Brady’s decades-long practice of fleecing campaigns for money to make up for his own lack of fundraising ability or leadership is a worthless endeavor that no future campaign should ever be forced to entertain again.”
The criticism directed at Brady, the longtime head of the Democratic City Committee, came shortly after the former member of Congress told The Inquirer that he felt no responsibility for the red wave that descended on the state.
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.
Then there’s the Biden people versus Harris people versus Obama people issue. For a good example of a piece describing that brouhaha, please see this:
President Joe Biden is furious that he is being blamed for Kamala Harris’ failed campaign and is going to war against his detractors in a bid to reunite the Democratic Party behind his middle-class credentials.
Biden remains convinced that his longtime ties to the trade unions and working-class men would have swayed the 2024 presidential election vote in his favor. Right to the end of the campaign, he insisted he would have beaten Donald Trump. …
The president’s circle was enraged that the finger-pointing had already begun in the Harris campaign within hours of Trump’s resounding victory, with most of the barbs aimed directly at the Oval Office.
According to Politico’s ‘Playbook’, Biden loyalists were especially bitter over unnamed quotes in a Politico article claiming the president was the “singular reason” for the damning defeat and saying a Democratic primary race would have given Harris more time and opportunity to run a better campaign.
The Biden aides blamed Barack Obama’s advisers for the Harris missteps that ultimately cost her any hopes of the White House.
You get the idea. Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.
Most of these articles assume that politics is a game that’s all about tactics and strategy. And I have little doubt that tactics and strategy are huge. But they’re not everything. And they can’t overcome a lousy product. 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:
Once upon a time a pet food company created a new variety of dog food and rolled out a massive marketing campaign to introduce the product. Despite hiring a first-rate advertising agency, initial sales were very disappointing. The agency was fired and a new agency and a new campaign was launched. Sales continued to disappoint. If anything, they fell even further. In desperation, the CEO called in all of the top executives for a brainstorming session to analyze what had gone wrong with the two campaigns and how a new campaign might revive sales.
The meeting went on for hours. Sophisticated statistical analysis was brought to bear on the problem. One VP argued that the mix of TV and print ads had been messed up. Another argued that the previous campaigns had been too subtle and had failed to feature the product with sufficient prominence. Another argued that the TV ad campaign had focused too much on spots during sporting events and not enough on regular programming with a broader demographic. Another argued the opposite–not enough sports programming had been targeted. After the debate had raged for hours, the CEO felt they had accomplished very little. He asked if anyone else had any theories that might explain the failure of the new product. Finally, one newly hired employee raised his hand and was recognized. Maybe the dogs don’t like it, she said.
In recent years the Democrats have been serving the American people some dog food that tastes like – dare I use the word? – garbage. Of course, some dogs like garbage, but a lot of dogs want something tastier. 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. If the deception is too egregious, you will have trouble fooling enough people to win an election.
The truth is that they managed to accomplish it in 2020 (or was there a large cheating factor? More about that in another post coming soon). They didn’t manage in 2024, in part because I think the public recognized that Biden hadn’t been as advertised. People have experienced the Biden administration and suffered from many aspects of it. Then there was the obvious deception later on, as Biden’s cognitive powers declined further and the pretense was maintained that he was fine. More trust was broken when there was a sudden admission by the party that Biden needed replacement, and then instead of asking the people what they might want, Harris was installed as substitute. Then there was the further pretense that she was “joyful” instead of strangely inauthentic and tremendously inarticulate. Plus plenty of other obvious lies such as the idea that inflation was caused by widespread price gouging rather than the Biden/Harris policies. And that Harris was supposed to simultaneously be of the administration and yet not of the administration. That was too much of a bogus Zennish koan for the public to swallow.
And on and on and on. No amount of “messaging” and “narrative” will change those things. But the Democrats seem to think they can say anything and people will believe it. Vance is “weird” says Walz, one of the weirdest candidates ever. Kamala is the gracious uniter, as she spews mendacious venom about Trump and Republicans. And on and on and on some more.
You can summarize the whole thing by saying that this election represents the triumph – for the moment, anyway – of reality over imagology. “Imagology” is a word used by Czech author Milan Kundera in his book Immortality, in the following passage :
…[C]ommunists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.
…[S]ince for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.
:
I think it’s a brilliant description, but I think that often reality, if obvious enough, can break the power of the imagologues, and that we’ve just seen a demonstration of that. And now we’re seeing the imagologues blame each other for not using imagology effectively enough, when in fact (to mix the metaphors) maybe the dogs just didn’t like it.
The dogs for damned sure didn’t like it:
Oil of Dog, Ambrose Bierce
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
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.
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.
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.
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”?
To extend the analogy, the intent of the Democrats was to keep getting new dogs until they found some that liked their dog food.
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.
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.
jvermeer:
25th amendment.
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.
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.
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
“ To extend the analogy…”
…make the lives of those dogs ABSOLUTELY MISERABLE until they understand that they REALLY DO LOVE that dog food….
Really. Woof woof…
“Hispanic Voters Hit With Racist Attacks After Massive Shift To Trump”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hispanic-voters-hit-racist-attacks-after-massive-shift-trump
There’s so many factors pointed out above and their drip, drip, drip causing an etching on a rock is mystifying
“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…
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
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.
@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.
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…
Oops…
That Bette Midler link:
https://instapundit.com/682984/
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.
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
This guy a Jew, links himself to British Blue Cola he claims the English conservative Establishment behind Trump wining, he talking they threatened Kamala’s party donors do not miss with Trump wining.
Is his talk serous. I don’t know how much credit with his claimed
https://www.youtube.com/live/G7S07bbMEd8?si=SV9puTWly0jweQIQ
From my perspective things are happening very, very fast.
Trump’s realignment of the Republican Party to a rainbow coalition based on the working-class is shocking and historic.
And in 2024 we won the White House and Senate.
Only five seats more to win the House. The Dems need 18.
https://decisiondeskhq.com/results/2024/General/US-House/
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.
Barry, a great comment from “Peter Nelson” at your instapundit link:
Interesting that Whitmer seems to be the only donkey that can read the room. The rest vow resistance.
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.
David Foster said:
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.
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.
If they won’t eat the dog food get new dogs.
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
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.
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.
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.
The dog ate all the Kamala mail in ballots (her homework).