Four years ago, Joe Biden said only he could beat Donald Trump for president.
Maybe he was right.
Trump has been declared America’s president-elect, and nobody should be surprised.
Bud Kennedy
Biden handed Vice President Kamala Harris the steering wheel too late. The Democratic Party was already going off the cliff.
By running a hard campaign while she was still teaching voters how to pronounce her name, Harris saved Democrats from an even worse meltdown.
But two truisms won out: Celebrities are popular. And populists are popular.
The average Republicans I talked with this fall couldn’t think of anything bad to say about Trump’s campaign, other than he’s crude and uses bad language and does as much damage to the party as he helps.
So much for that. America has put its faith in him to lift the Republican Party back into power.
Now he has a chance to take a sledgehammer to government for two years before a midterm election that traditionally goes against the party in the White House.
If you’re a Texas Democrat looking for something to grab onto in rough waters, that means a Democrat might normally have a chance to win some statewide office in 2026. But that party has to hope that Trump cuts the government enough or angers enough voters to send them looking their way.
When Biden beat Trump in 2020, he was a far better candidate with the foreign policy background and Senate experience to be a convincing leader. Harris’ limited experience was unconvincing.
It wasn’t totally about gender, though that hurt Harris with some traditional Democratic voter blocs. If Nikki Haley had been the Republican nominee, she would have won.
When prices of food, housing and insurance are higher than anyone ever imagined, voters want change, no matter how well their 401(k) is doing.
And Harris didn’t play to her strengths. She’s a prosecutor. Yet she didn’t make law and order or cracking down on crime an issue.
Instead, she went all-in arguing abortion law. But that didn’t show up as a decisive issue to voters, and by Election Day voters were worried about the state of the country.
Biden was no help to her campaign at all, and failed to give her enough runway for takeoff.
Yes, she had the support of former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wy.
But Harris and Cheney’s father, Dick, were two of the least popular vice presidents in recent memory.
By the campaign’s end, Harris was much more popular than before. She argued her case with strength and spirit, hard enough to push Trump up to the very last day of a lightning-fast presidential campaign.
Make no mistake: Plenty of Republicans don’t like Donald Trump.
But they really don’t like Democrats.
