Why Kamala Harris will lose

When you look back on the 2024 presidential election and try to understand why it was that Kamala Harris lost, there are a few things to remember. The first is that the two most important issues for American voters were the border and the cost of living.

By “the border” I do not just mean the incomplete physical barrier along our southern frontier. That structure is merely the objective correlative of a policy that has its roots in such lofty ideas as sovereignty, the meaning of citizenship and national identity.

After her coronation as the Democratic candidate in late July, Harris began to squirm and prevaricate about her appointment by Joe Biden as the “border czar.” But we have the phrase in black and white in the record of the appointment. Indeed, looking after the border was one of her main responsibilities. She failed miserably.

Millions — literally millions — of illegal immigrants poured into the country during the Biden-Harris regime. Many thousands of those millions are dangerous criminals. As I write, in late September, data from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement has revealed that, of the nearly 7.5 million people who have been slated for removal but have not been detained by ICE, 425,431 are convicted criminals and 222,141 have pending criminal charges.

Of those, 62,231 have been convicted of assault, 14,301 have been convicted of burglary, 56,533 have drug convictions, 13,099 have been convicted of homicide, and 15,811 have sexual assault convictions.

Meanwhile, Senator Josh Hawley, in a 2022 confirmation hearing with the proposed director of the TSA, asked him about the fact that the TSA accepts an arrest warrant or a detention order as a valid form of identification for illegal immigrants seeking to travel by air. Think about that the next time you are palpated by an excited TSA agent.

Hawley cut to the chase: “People who have done absolutely nothing wrong, are law-abiding citizens in every respect, are subject to the most invasive screenings at these airports, yet you’re allowing illegal aliens to present warrants for arrest and waving them on to airplanes. How does that make sense?”

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Jake Tapper asked Harris: “Would you be willing to vote for some border security money, wall money, barrier money to give permanent protection to DACA children?” Her response? “Let me be very clear. I am not going to vote for a wall under any circumstances.” Voters agreed that, however vague Harris was about other matters, she was crystal clear about her position on the border.

It did not help that it took her until late September this year for her actually to visit the border nor that, when she did, it was for what Tulsi Gabbard and others described as a “shameless” twenty-minute “photo-op.”

A pattern emerged regarding Harris’s position on border security. Back when she was a senator, she grilled the director of ICE, asking whether he saw any “parallels” between the behavior of his agents and the behavior of the KKK. He hotly denied the insinuation, but Harris pressed it hard, suggesting that because there was a “perception” that ICE agents were meanies, he had somehow failed in his duty.

The border writ large was one large reason that Harris lost. Another was her role in the Biden economy. As president of the Senate, she cast the tie-breaking vote that saddled the American people with Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act,” but which ought to have been called the “Prosperity Reduction Act.” In the nearly four years that the Biden-Harris administration has been in office, the cost of living has risen by 20 percent. The rising cost of food, housing and energy has been especially painful for middle-class families.

There were — or to be utterly faithful to the chronology — there will be other reasons that Harris lost. Her irrefragable dopiness and inarticulateness are high on the roster, as was her choice of the surreal, China-loving sock-puppet “Tampon Tim” Walz as a running mate.

“But wait,” you object, “you said you were writing at the end of September. How can you know that Harris lost?” Because I have been paying attention to what is happening and, at the same time, because I pay no attention at all to the propaganda press or what one friend calls the “narrative polls” that media promulgates to maintain the illusion that the election is close.

It is not close. Donald Trump will crush Harris-Walz in November. The voter rolls are not pristine, but they are much cleaner now than they were in 2020.

I suppose that another sniper’s bullet might put an end to Trump’s part in the campaign before November 5. But even that would guarantee that Harris-Walz would lose by an even bigger margin than they would have otherwise. As I have observed elsewhere, in 2016 Trump was allowed to take office but never really allowed to take power. Nevertheless, he presided over an astonishingly successful term, marred only by the advent of Covid.

There will be no Covid to save Democrats this time. Nor will there be an “October surprise” damaging enough to neutralize Donald Trump. The public knows him too well to be shocked by another Stormy Daniels or Russia collusion fantasy. Surrounded by serious and talented people like J.D. Vance, his running mate, RFK Jr., who abandoned his own campaign to support Trump, former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk and other business leaders, Donald Trump’s campaign will be like Patton’s Third Army racing across France in 1944.

These are among the reasons I feel confident in talking about the future as if it were the past. As Robert Allen Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, observed, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 2024 World edition.