With Kamala Harris, there was a general feeling that one never really knew what she stood for and that she was trying too hard to be everything to everyone. That was her biggest mistake and I think people saw through that and resented it. That's why you see all of her word salads. It also seemed as though a big part of her campaign was "Donald Trump bad, Me good .... so vote for me".
And, although Donald Trump does indeed ramble, people at least knew what he stood for. You kind of knew where he was on all of the critical topics and so I think people gravitated to that a lot more.
The idea that Trump was the clear candidate with a well-defined platform while Kamala was the vague candidate who offered "word salads" is
quite a take.
I've also noticed when it comes to these election post-mortems that there's usually a tendency to rationalize election results as being logical, and to assume that voters intuited a hidden truth that pundits and commentators just didn't get. I think the pundits who create these post-mortems are worried that they'll be seen as bitter if they attribute the results to illogical or stupid beliefs of voters. But I have no such concerns, so here are my thoughts - I think the main reason Trump won, both this year and in 2016, was his charisma and public image. An enormous amount of Americans don't bother doing any research or following up on political candidates and go entirely by what they see and hear from them on TV. Most of these people just like Trump on a very simple, intuitive level. He doesn't seem to be a typical politician. He's blunt, he's impulsive, he doesn't pause before speaking, he expresses frustration at the dysfunction of Washington. People think, yeah, this guy gets it. He doesn't lie or mince words. He's not like the other politicians. He'd be a real wrecking ball to the establishment. In reality, of course, Trump is an enormous liar and was an extremely corrupt president, and his seemingly blunt and impulsive manner of speech isn't at all indicative of any supposed honesty, but there's no use in explaining that to the people who intuitively feel that he's an honest guy who's fed up with Washington just like them.
Trump has also coasted for a very long time on the false impression created by the reality show
The Apprentice that he's a great businessman. The fact is that he's never been that. For one thing, he inherited his wealth and is not the self-made man he pretends to be; for another,
The Apprentice deliberately manufactured the idea that Trump was this universally-revered titan of business whom any professional would do anything to work for. Before that show, Trump was best known for his long string of bankruptcies, his scandalous personal life, and his general sleaziness. That was the cultural perception of Trump in the eighties and nineties, and it was so ingrained that he was repeatedly mocked by TV shows and movies ranging from SNL to
Sesame Street. But people don't really remember how he was seen in the eighties and nineties; instead, they remember the slickly-produced reality show where Trump was so busy and important that he'd make a dramatic exit in a limousine or helicopter at the start of every episode, the tense boardroom scenes where Trump always cut straight to the heart of the matter by focusing on the issues that we saw the candidates talk about earlier in the episode (almost as if they edited the previous scenes to match up with whatever Trump chose to talk about!), and the numerous young business professionals who were so eager to work for Trump that they'd spend weeks of their lives vying for his attention in a filmed corporate rat race.
There are a lot of things that hurt Kamala in this race, to be sure, and if she could have gotten them right, maybe the above wouldn't have mattered. But as it stands, I think that an intuitive belief in Trump's honesty and relatability based on how he talks and a false impression of Trump's business acumen based on a popular reality show are two major elements of Trump's political success that people - both pundits and the general public - don't really talk about.
Also, this is really minor, but I love this part of the dumb article Tom linked:
Greer took the ball and ran with it.
Well, Joy, I have quoted, you know, LBJ [President Lyndon Johnson] on the show several times, but to paraphrase his famous quote, if you give the poorest of the white man someone to look down on, you can pick his pockets all day long, and if you, you know, convince him long enough, he’ll open his pockets for you, and this is what Donald Trump and the Republican Party has consistently done for decades now.
Other than correctly paraphrasing Democrat President Johnson's comments
Did the author really think he had something here by pointing out and emphasizing that Johnson was a Democrat? Was it supposed to be some sort of clever comeback? My guess is that he assumed that Johnson was describing his own cynical strategy for winning over racist voters, when anyone who's even reasonably familiar with Johnson and his achievements in office knows perfectly well that Johnson was of course
criticizing what he saw, and while he didn't specifically mention Republicans in the quote, the obvious implication is that that's who he was suggesting was responsible for this. This was, after all, the time of the
Southern strategy, something that Johnson would obviously have been very familiar with. Like I said, it's a minor point, but it's interesting in how revealing it is of the author's ignorance.
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