Top Democrats are engaged in an intensive blame game over Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump last week. Trump swept all seven major battleground states, gained ground in nearly every state, improved his performance across virtually every single voting demographic, and is on track to win the popular vote, in addition to his sizable Electoral College majority. The defeated party is caught up in finger-pointing at the highest levels, with the Harris campaign, Obama loyalists, and Bidenworld all trading accusations and recriminations. People within Biden’s inner circle are angry at Team Obama for stomping into the fray and messing everything up. In short, everyone is mad at everyone:
Nancy Pelosi, who was knee deep in the intra-party machinations to throw Biden out of the race, is upset with Biden for not bowing out much sooner:
Nancy Pelosi to the NYT: “had the president [Biden] gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race” … “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary” … “And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”
Here’s the howlingly obvious problem with her Monday morning quarterbacking — she was an active part of the massive cover-up of Biden’s deteriorating condition:
She helped lie about his decline for quite some time, abruptly and frantically abandoning the lie only after it blew up on the debate stage in late June. They all went from ‘cheap fakes‘ to ‘get out,’ basically overnight. Pelosi also doesn’t have a leg to stand on as she grouses about the coronation of Kamala Harris, given that she ludicrously claimed there had been a primary, and that Harris had won it. Remember this?
This is exactly right. She can’t suddenly play the frustrated bystander when she loves cultivating a reputation as the ultimate power broker, whose fingerprints were all over the events of the last six months:
Meanwhile, it is wild how Team Harris managed to blow through one billion dollars in the process of losing to Trump. They actually spent themselves into debt, despite their eye-popping fundraising:
They spent six figures on a fake set for a single podcast appearance. Unreal. Relatedly, this statement is some combination of magnanimity in victory and master-level trolling:
I’ll leave you with this, via CNN’s election stats guru:
A few interesting theories pre-election and how they turned out… 1. Turnout would drop from 2020… Ended up likely being true nationally. Raw number was probably true, though still votes to count. Among voter eligible population, it was def true. (Note this differs in the swing states, though I’m not sure someone suggested it would apply there too…)
2. The electoral vote/pop vote bias in GOP favor would close big time… Ended up being very very true. It will be probably be about a point or less… Possibility even eliminated all together.
3. The polls would be more accurate this time around… That was def true in the swing states… Miss was far less than the historical norm. Still, the error benefitted Trump again and that was the ball game. (So part true and part false…) Side note: there were individual polls that nailed it, which is key because it means you really couldn’t be taken by surprise.
4. Age/race polarization would decline and educational polarization would climb… I heard a lot from a lot of folks (particularly those with a vested interest) that Trump’s gains with voters of color and young voters showing up in an average of pre-election polls was a mirage… Seems like the pre-election polls were right on in this regard, though we’ll see what Pew, Catalist, etc. show…
5. Edited to add this one… Despite the close polls, one of the candidates would score a relative electoral college blowout of 300+ electoral votes… This was true. Idea behind this was simple: any poll miss would apply to pretty much all the swing states. That is, the errors would be correlated. Correct.
