Republicans are having a real problem this cycle trying to make Kamala Harris and Tim Walz look bad. Perhaps that’s because their candidate is so much worse in every way.
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A month ago, everything seemed to be going Donald Trump’s way. Since then, Republicans have had some rough weeks. First, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and deprived Donald Trump of the opponent he wanted to run against. Then, Kamala Harris quickly sewed up the nomination and managed to infuse the Democrats with newfound optimism and enthusiasm. Finally, she picked Tim Walz as her running mate, and he gave the campaign another boost (that it didn’t even need).
Trump and his allies have not taken these developments well… and that’s an understatement.
They have gone through their entire playbook… from Trump’s not-so-subtle racism and Trump’s silly nicknames, to turning the attention to Italian boxers, causing internal strife, and rooting for the US’s enemies.
They tried the standard talking points (“socialism,” “border czar”), some world-class projection (“We’re not weird, you are!”), and some plain-old insanity.
So far, very little has worked, and Trump hasn’t gotten his mojo back.
All this, by the way, happened after an assassination attempt that provided him with an iconic image and the best moment of the entire campaign.
It’s absolutely nuts that nobody is even talking about that anymore! Instead, it’s all stories about a school teacher from Minnesota.
It is possible that Americans have become more immune to demagoguery… or that they are just tired of the GOP’s tactics.
However, there is another reason why the standard Republican strategies are less effective this time around: Whether it’s consciously or not, voters probably realize that some of these lines of attack are just silly considering where they are coming from.
Here is one example: In 2020, Harris tweeted her support for the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
Clearly, she wanted that money to be used for helping Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters get out of jail if they were being held for protesting (and not rioting or such).
The problem is that MFF was a poorly run organization that spent quite a bit of the millions of dollars it raised on bailing out other (alleged) criminals. So, it can be accurately said that Harris (perhaps foolishly) supported the group — but not what they did with the money.
Obviously, that’s not how Republicans are portraying it. They make it sound as though the vice president is the mastermind behind it all and sent a bunch of rapists cakes with files in them.
Here is the thing, though: The entire Republican National Committee has essentially become a “get-out-of-jail” fund for Trump.
The party has spent millions of dollars on lawyers for the former president as he is navigating various indictments (including those for personal problems).
Furthermore, the Trump campaign tried to make it an issue that Walz signed legislation allowing convicted felons to vote. First of all, this is generally something the public supports, as evidenced, for example, by the overwhelming passage of a constitutional amendment in Florida to restore the voting rights of most felons there.
More importantly, however, this is an issue Republicans should now get behind… otherwise, they will have to do without the obligatory “Donald Trump cast his ballot today” photo-op on Election Day.
Also, when it comes to the riots associated with some BLM protests, the GOP’s hand-wringing seems a bit phony since they call January 6 insurrectionists “patriots” and the former president is vowing to pardon them.
Speaking of, Republicans and their allies have tried to label Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race as a “coup.”
Sure, senior Democrats probably wanted the president to throw in the towel after it became clear that he would likely not win, and told him so, but that’s hardly a coup.
No, a coup is when a guy loses an election and then tries to use his presidential powers (and any number of cockamamie schemes) to stay in office.
You may see where this is going.
GOP attacks are falling flat because, in most cases, their candidate and their party have done the very thing alleged… only worse.
For a minute, Trump’s media allies wanted to make it a story that Harris’s husband admitted to having an affair when he was married to his first wife, i.e., not the vice president.
Well, shall he who has not cheated on his first wife with his second wife, on his second wife with various women, and on his third wife with a Playboy model and a porn star, cast the first stone.
Then there are silly “controversies” that Republicans and their media allies like to turn into big stories — like when a sleuth spotted that Harris is wearing a particular necklace in a fundraising appeal, that, if it’s the real thing, is priced at $62,000.
If true, that would not be the smartest move on her part.
However, she is running against a guy who claims to be a billionaire many times over but, instead of using his own money, collects hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, some of which he then funnels back into his own pocket.
Kinda tough to make that necklace thing stick, then.
Next, a common complaint we hear from Republicans is that the media is against them.
Well, maybe Americans are onto the fact that Fox News may as well be a subsidiary of the Trump campaign. More people watch Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda outlet than CNN and MSNBC. In any case, there is simply no equivalent to Fox on the left.
Yes, it’s true that most journalists skew left-of-center, but that’s hardly the same as Sean Hannity trying to get Trump to walk back some of the insane stuff he says or any number of hosts lying with impunity for him.
Oh, and no other news outlet had to pay $787 million to settle a lawsuit that was brought because Fox participated in the Big Lie for no other reason than that its executives were too afraid to tell the network’s viewers the truth for once.
The one thing that has worked a little is the tried-and-true strategy of swiftboating Democrats.
However, even that is more difficult with a man at the top of the ticket who dodged the draft and later intimated that his own personal Vietnam was avoiding sexually transmitted diseases.
In other words, Republicans may simply have to resort to a tactic they don’t like to use at all: trying to win an election on the issues.
