One of the worst political pratfalls by any recent presidential candidate was Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” speech in September of 2016. At the time, most Democrats and their legacy media partners openly agreed with her assessment of Donald Trump and his supporters. When the targets of that snide slander sent her back to Chappaqua, it dawned on some of these geniuses that insulting the customer is a losing strategy. Most failed to learn the lesson, however, including the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee for 2024. Vice President Kamala Harris has gleefully taken to calling her Republican opponents “weird.”
Presumably it would be rude to point out that … the fingerprints of our Vice President are all over the Biden administration’s record of fiscal incontinence.
One would think that Harris, whose bizarre word salads have made her something of a laughing stock, would avoid the term “weird.” Yet she uses it to describe Republicans at every opportunity. Predictably, as Dave Rubin documents, this puerile taunt has been parroted by a long list of Democrats and talking heads. And they don’t restrict the insults to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.
Democratic operative Max Burns writes in The Hill that Trump’s choice of Vance as his running mate reveals the following about his supporters: “It’s reminding millions of voters that the MAGA movement is a clown car packed with off-putting weirdos.” In 2020, this particular “clown car” contained about 74.3 million voters.
This is why New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman describes this schoolyard name-calling as “the dumbest message Democrats could seize on right now.” These “weirdos” are the working-class voters who have endured the most pain from the economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
They are the people struggling to pay for groceries, gasoline and rent. They are the young couples who can’t afford to buy a house because the median price of an existing home is at a record high and mortgage rates have skyrocketed. This is bad news for Harris and Democrats in general because they might decide who wins the upcoming election. As political scientist Ruy Teixeira writes at the Liberal Patriot:
Here is a simple truth: how working-class (noncollege) voters move will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 election. They will be the overwhelming majority of eligible voters (around two-thirds) and, even allowing for turnout patterns, only slightly less dominant among actual voters (around three-fifths). Moreover, in all six key swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the working-class share of the electorate, both as eligible voters and as projected 2024 voters, will be higher than the national average.
This clearly favors the GOP presidential ticket. According to exit polls conducted by Edison Research after the 2020 election, Trump won 67 percent of the white working class vote and 26 percent of the non-white working class vote. Considering that the top issues for these voters are inflation and immigration, on which they tend to trust Republicans more than Democrats, the Trump-Vance ticket is likely to receive an even larger share of the working class vote in 2024. Consequently, despite the polling bump Harris has received after Biden was forced out of the race, Democrat strategist David Axelrod warned against “irrational exuberance” during a CNN interview: “It’s absolutely Trump’s race to lose right now.”
But Harris may not be able to rise above schoolyard taunts. On inflation, for example, an AP article reported that she has never discussed the topic in the speeches she has made since she was installed at the top of Democratic presidential ticket: “Not once in speeches in Wisconsin, Indiana, or Texas did she mention the word ‘inflation’.”
Harris Wears Biden’s Failures
It’s probable that she and her campaign staff will insist that she had no control over the policies that caused the problem. Yet she cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate that ultimately allowed the inflationary $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to reach Biden’s desk for signature. Indeed, according to the New York Times, she has cast more tie-breaking votes than any other VP:
Vice President Kamala Harris broke the centuries-old record on Tuesday for the most tiebreaking votes cast by a vice president in the Senate, underscoring Democrats’ tenuous hold on the majority … The vice president serves as the president of the Senate, giving her the constitutional power to break ties in the 100-member body. Since 1789, 300 tiebreaking votes have been cast. Former Vice President Mike Pence provided 13 tiebreakers while in office, and President Biden cast none while serving as vice president.
Presumably it would be rude to point out that this dubious accomplishment renders it all too obvious that the fingerprints of our Vice President are all over the Biden administration’s record of fiscal incontinence. It will also make it very difficult to claim that she wasn’t an active partner in the other failures that define the regime.
This is particularly true where the border crisis is concerned, of course. Not that Harris and her friends in the Fourth Estate haven’t tried. Never mind that they themselves documented her high profile role. As AP reported at the time, “President Joe Biden has tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the White House effort to tackle the migration challenge at the U.S. southern border.” Strange.
It’s abundantly clear that these people truly believe they can convince the voters to ignore the evidence of their eyes by insulting them. It’s like being told by a used car salesman, “You’re a moron if you don’t buy this sweet ride.” Sometimes the voters can be fooled by this kind of strategy, but not by someone like Harris. She’s too … well … weird.
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