It's a Zero Sum Game

 

    Anyone who's been reading this forum for an extended period of time knows I don't jump on bandwagons. I don't change my social media avatars to show the face of the flavor of the day, I don't (with one exception in 2020 when I made a small donation to Bernie's campaign) contribute to campaigns. I also take polls and surveys with a grain of salt, especially after 2016 when those polling savants assured us on Election Day that year that Hillary would win.

     However, there comes a time when even a hard-bitten cynic like me has to confront cold hard truths, reading the writing on the wall and the tea leaves. 

     Election day is in a little over three months, in fewer than 100 days, actually. The election got thrown into a blender last month and to find one more chaotic, you'd have to go back to 1968, which was the last time a sitting president had decided not to run for reelection.

     And, as with 1968, we have another vice president running for the big office. Hopefully, this time around, we'll have a better outcome.

     July taught us that everything can change on a dime, Everything about this race is still fluid, very much in a state of flux. 100 days or less is still an eon in political terms. However...

     Things are not looking good from the bunker.

     And literally from the day Biden dropped out of the race on July 21st, we saw a transformation.

     Three days after Kamala Harris entered the fray, this is what Dr. Mary Trump observed on her Substack:

     "We know that Harris has already raised an astronomical amount of money since Sunday, bringing in $126 million in only 48 hours. The really striking part, thought (sic), is that almost 900,000 of those donors were giving for the first time. 

     And the excitement goes well beyond the breathtaking, record-shattering fundraising numbers. According to USA Today, the campaign 'had 58,000 people sign up to volunteer, more than 100 times the average number of volunteers per day.'

     Vote.org has seen a 700 percent increase in daily voter registrations, according to MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin, who reported Wednesday that the increase of  'more than 38,500 new registrations' came in the 48 hours after Biden withdrew."

     That was a week and a half ago. Since then, Kamala Harris hasn't looked so much like a presidential candidate as an avalanche, a force of nature. Since Mary Trump wrote that Substack on the 24th, Kamala Harris has held three Zoom calls, breaking the domain virtually every time. The first one attracted 44,000 Black women, the next about 150,000 white women and the latest, White Dudes for Harris, raised four million more dollars for her (which got them a brief suspension from Elmo Musk for... something). 

     Even though Kamala Harris had jumped into the race on July 21st, by the end of the month, she's raised $310,000,000. Not in July. In the last week and a half of July. That's about $30,000,000 a day. Trump's so freaked out by the Harris haul that out of desperation, he filed a complaint with the FEC claiming her fundraising totals were illegitimate (he was pissing and moaning about Biden giving Harris $91,000,000 from his own campaign). I don't know what Trump's line of thinking is but that money went to the Biden-Harris campaign, meaning she certainly has a perfect right to spend it on her own presidential campaign. In fact, she's the only other person on earth who can.

     Since Harris threw her hat in the ring, she's suddenly grown coattails. I'm lining up an interview with a congressional candidate out of Florida who wasted zero time jumping on the Harris bandwagon when hundreds of golf carts filled with Harris supporters in the Villages suddenly appeared.

The X Factor

 

     Kamala Harris is, literally, the X Factor. Elon Musk doesn't have an answer for her on Twitter and has to content himself with throwing his pasty flab around and suspending pro-Harris accounts. Trump is the proverbial man about to fall off the edge of the cliff and grasping at straws hoping whatever he throws at Harris will stick to the wall.

      But right now, it seems as if Harris has no kryptonite weakness, no Achilles heel. Unlike Biden, she's quick, sharp and merciless with her retorts. And the hotter Harris gets, the colder Trump gets. It's classic textbook zero sum game. And it can't be said that Trump refusing to debate her on ABC on September 10 is making him look any manlier or more appealing.

     So Trump's dwindling supporters have to content themselves with dusting off the classics- Misogyny, racism, calling her a DEI hire, accusing her of racial appropriation (as if someone can't be half Indian and something else simultaneously? Maybe JD Vance has something to add to that since he has three kids who are half Indian). Border Czar! She's stupid! Her cackle! They're sputtering in their apoplexy.

     And it's not just Democrats and Independents who are getting behind Harris. The huge turnout for her in the Villages was just the first bellwether. Republicans are lining up to support Harris. The Lincoln Project. Former Tea Party Republican Joe Walsh. And, perhaps most notably, the Republican former Lt. Gov. of Georgia and CNN commentator, Geoff Duncan, who's no blushing liberal.

     Ladies and gentlemen, this is no mere sugar rush, no Snakes on a Plane hype that burns up like flash paper.

     This is a movement. And it's here to stay until Election Day. After that, after she wins, Harris is on her own.

     But for now, I think we can safely conclude that this is a movement, that this is her time. Perhaps it's her time only through the agencies of the Supreme Power of Serendipity, of being at the right place at the right time, being savvy enough to accept Joe Biden's invitation to be his running mate. But the fact remains, regardless of circumstances, she's generating the kind of excitement that the political arena hasn't seen since the 2008 Obama. Not even Biden generated this much excitement four years ago when he had at his back a growing horror at the prospect of a second Trump term. Biden got over 81,000,000 votes in 2020. It's very easy at this point to see Harris getting more.