The 2024 election is not shaping up to be a campaign about issues. It appears to be more about which candidate can inspire more people to hold their noses and vote.
Both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have the support and devotion of all the people they’re going to get the support of. This now becomes a fight for the leftovers election — the remaining middle-of-the-roaders who simply don’t like either of them, though for vastly different reasons.
Few people are indifferent to Donald Trump. One-third of the country loves him, one-third loathes him, and the remaining third feel both emotions at the time time to some extent, if less passionately.
In “Good Trump,” like when he was on “Gutfeld!,” people saw a side of “The Donald” that rarely makes an appearance on the campaign trail. That is the Trump who opened his speech on the exact spot where he was nearly assassinated only weeks earlier with the line, “As I was saying…” This is the type of Trump who, were he to prevail over his worst instincts, would win this election in a walk.
The issues that move more voters almost all favor Trump’s positions. On the economy, inflation, immigration, the border, crime, almost everything but health care and abortion, voters favor Trump and the Republican position. The only conclusion that can be drawn as to why Trump isn’t running away with the election is that a significant group of voters just do not like Trump.
And this goes beyond those who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. This is the middle who aren’t that fond of Democrats either. They seem naturally inclined to side with Republicans, but they aren’t, and it’s about Trump.
He can either do something to reach out to them — even a little, so they reach back — or hope this becomes a pure turnout election where the undecideds stay home or leave the top of the ballot blank, unable to bring themselves to vote for either candidate. That is a possibility, but it’s not much of a strategy.
You’d think this would bode well for Democrats and Kamala Harris, but she just happens to be the worst candidate either party has put forward since Walter Mondale in 1984.
Mondale had been the unpopular vice president for an unpopular president, Jimmy Carter. While he ran against an incumbent Ronald Reagan, he represented a chance for people to turn away from Reagan, whose economic policies had only really just started to take hold in 1984 (they’d roll after that). As popular as that election showed Reagan to be, it showed Mondale to be wildly unpopular too.
That’s Kamala Harris this time.
Harris is the bubble-wrap candidate, playing it safer than perhaps anyone ever has. Fine antique China is handled less carefully than she is.
She avoided interviews for more than a month as if she owed them money. Now she’s only wrapping herself in security blanket appearances like “The View” and Stephen Colbert. If you only take interviews from people who have endorsed you already, perhaps we should question the sincerity of your claim that you want to be “president of all Americans.” You can’t be that if you refuse to talk to most of them.
Say what you will of Donald Trump, he’ll talk to almost any reporter, surely knowing that he will be criticized if there is any kind of clash. Kamala Harris will speak only to sycophantic Holocaust-deniers like Whoopi Goldberg, podcasts about orgies and anal sex, notorious blackface “comedians” like Howard Stern and other pre-approved Democratic Party supporters and donors.
That may win the hearts and minds of Democrats, but she already had them by not being Donald Trump. All the “Trump is Hitler” rhetoric in the world will not lower anyone’s grocery bill by a single penny or put one extra drop of gas in the car.
Harris seems to have resigned herself to the turnout election model as well.
None of this is unknown to either campaign. When one of them wins, it will be in spite of themselves. If either does anything to step outside themselves, to shock voters by doing something unexpected and give the 3-5 percent of voters who will likely swing this election, they might just pull ahead and win.
Otherwise, they seem like a couple of candidates hoping the other side just loses.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).