OpinionLiberals are starting to panic. Donald Trump is going to win in a landslide

Roger Kimball Thu, October 17, 20241/2

Denial is not only a river in Egypt. It is also a seductive expedient for the Democratic Party in the waning days of the 2024 presidential election. You see it everywhere in the official activities of the Democratic campaign. WinBlue donations are soaring! The polls still have Harris ahead! Democracy is on the line!

Escaping from the bluster of denial are worrisome little puffs of pandering, always a sure sign that the denial is at best half-believed by the denier. This is not surprising.Denial is the reliable product of desperation: the realisation, however imperfectly acknowledged, that the jig is up.

Harris’s numbers among men of all races are in the tank. The only exception is among the brittle ephebes of the media and the academy. They are there with their Chardonnay, list of pronouns, and ageing Covid masks to plant Harris-Walz signs on their front lawns and warn against the dangerous tyrant-in-waiting, Donald Trump.

But this is a minuscule, psephologically insignificant cohort. Which is why the Harris-Walz campaign has been driven to desperate measures. In the last week or two, they have rolled out a pitiful litany of feints and diversionary tactics.

Some were unforced errors, as when the news programme 60 Minutes ran a preview of itsinterview with Harris that prominently included one of her signature no-calorie word salad emissions. CBS excised that response when they aired the full interview,substituting an innocuous reply to some other question. But the damage was done. The original response was widely mocked. The bowdlerised substitute sparkedfury and contempt for the hapless, in-the-can-for-Harris behaviour of CBS.

My favourite bit of pandering was the truly horrible“I’m-a-man-and-I’m-voting-for-Harris” ad. It was rightly derided as the “cringiest political ad ever.”

Like many people, I at first thought it was a spoof, an anti-Harris production designed to make fun of her and her running mate, Tim Walz. That certainly was the effect. But it turns out that the half dozen men in the ad were not random bearers of XY chromosomes who just happened to support Harris for president.No, they were apparently B-list actors, recruited to deliver their lines.

And what lines they were.One actor, who pretended to know something about cars, said “You think I’m afraid to rebuild a carburetor? I eat carburetors for breakfast.” I am thinking of offering a reward to anyone who can tell me what that means.

One enterprising commentator discovered who wrote the ad – Jacob Reed, who has written for the late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel – and the real-life biographies of the actors. Let’s just say that none appears to be a poster child for masculinity. The comments have been brutal. “Zero testosterone was used in the making of this ad”; “A Real Man instantly realises that there isn’t a single Real Man in this pathetic beta male cringe-fest of a propaganda video”; “From the party that can’t tell you what a woman is”; “As a man, I think I walked away from this ad with a yeast infection.”

https://news.yahoo.com/news/liberals-starting-panic-donald-trump-043000345.html

>>21790234

2/2

Then there was Tim Walz’s “pheasant hunting” wheeze. I deploy the scare quotes becauseno pheasants were harmed in the production of that farce. Walz and a handful of reporters, accoutered in identical, brand-new hunting gear, are shown traipsing around a field without guns. Were they intending to catch the pheasant by hand and strangle them?

Eventually Walz is given a shotgun,but it was the wrong sort of gun for a hunt – semi-automatic, not a break-action gun. Not that it mattered.

As one commentator noted, Walz’s “gun handling skills make Dick Cheney look like the safest shooter in the world. Perhaps that is why Cheney endorsed him.”

Walz was alternately compared to the cartoon character Elmer Fudd and Governor Mike Dukakis. Readers with long memories will remember how, during the 1988 presidential campaign, Dukakis tried to act tough by riding around in an army tank wearing a too-large helmet. It marked the end of his campaign.

I have been predicting that Donald Trump would win in a landslide since before Joe Biden was pushed outof the race in July and Kamala Harris was suddenly air-lifted into the vacant top spot. At first the Democrats put on a brave show. Harris got a minor bounce from the Democratic convention. Despite emitting a cavalcade of lies, she more or less held her own in her one debate with Trump.

But soon after Labor Day in early September, cracks began to appear. In 2020, just 44,000 votes in a handful of swing states won the presidency for Joe Biden. That was in the midst of the national panic over Covid.The Dems don’t have a Chinese virus to help them this time. They know all this. Hence their panic. It is entirely justified.

https://news.yahoo.com/news/liberals-starting-panic-donald-trump-043000345.html

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books

InteractivePolls

@IAPolls2022

🇺🇲 2024 GE: @ActiVoteUS

(with leans)

🟥 Trump: 51.1% (+2.2)

🟦 Harris: 48.9%

—

Trends

Sept. 17 - 🔵 Harris +5.4

Sept. 24 - 🔵 Harris +2.8

October 2 - 🔵 Harris +1.4

October 8 - 🔴 Trump +1.2

October 17 - 🔴 Trump +2.2

—

1,000 LV | October 9-17 | ±3.1%

https://activote.net/trump-extends-lead/

https://x.com/IAPolls2022/status/1847267355690258544

Georgia–Raffensberger better not be interfering, but he is

https://www.activote.net/trump-narrowly-ahead-in-georgia-2/

Trump has large lead in South Carolina

Victor Allis Company news October 18, 2024 |

https://www.activote.net/trump-has-large-lead-in-south-carolina/

Election 2024 – Those who lecture versus those tired of being lectured

By Victor Davis Hanson - RCP Contributor October 18, 20241/2

The election is finally shaping up to be not only liberal Democrat Kamala Harris versus conservative Republican Donald Trump.Instead, it has become a larger contest between those who talk down to their fellow Americans and those who are increasingly sick and tired of being lectured. How smart is it, for example, for Harris supporters to claim nonstop that ex-president Trump is a fascist dictator – and thus, by extension, those also who vote for him?

Women voters poll about 53-5 percent for Harris. Trump enjoys a similar, although likely somewhat smaller, majority margin of male voters.Yet Harris along with campaign surrogates Barack Obama and Bill Clintonhas been lecturing both black and white male voters nonstop that they are misled.

Orthey supposedly suffer from false consciousness– as if they have no clue that Harris and her progressive agenda are really in their own self-interest.Such haughtiness reached a zenithwhen Harris ran ads of actors costumed as supposedly working-class men. They voiced scripted talking points to prove that "real" men are progressive Harris supporters.

But the actors were so patently ridiculous, their canned lines so unreal, that most viewers likely thought the ads were run by Trump himself – to show how arrogant, out-of-touch elites must imagine how the so-called "clingers" and "deplorables" think and talk.

The Trump campaign also tries all sorts of strategies to win over women voters, from promising to rectify the Biden-Harris hyperinflation to reducing spiraling crime in towns and cities.But one method they avoid is claiming women are ignorant of their real self-interest and deluded by Harris– accurately assuming that a candidate does not win voters by belittling their intelligence.

Harris and Obama both dressed down black men, claiming they are especially culpable for not voting en masse for Harris – even though a far higher percentage of black males will vote for Harris than for Trump.This hectoring the electorate on its supposed ignorance or moral shortcomings has become a Harris campaign trademark.

To Harris, objecting to 10-12 million foreign nationals entering the country illegally without background checks during the Biden-Harris administration is supposedly a sign of a lack of compassion. And claiming that a current declining rate of illegal immigration should allay voters' supposed paranoias utterly ignores the millions of illegal aliens who were all but welcomed in by Biden-Harris before the 2024 election cycle.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/10/18/election_2024_–_those_who_lecture_versus_those_tired_of_being_lectured_151798.html

>>21790637

2/2

Voters are also talked down to ad nauseam that they do not appreciate the Biden-Harris economy given the rate of inflation is falling.True. But most voters go shopping in a manner politicians do not.

So, they resent such top-down sermons. They know best that prices for staple foods, fuel, insurance, and housing have spiked by some 20-30% since 2021 – and stayed astronomically high.

Currently, the auto industry is in crisis. Its huge inventory of electric vehicles sits unwanted and unsold. Harris and the left, remember, mandated all sorts of EV standards in their war against the internal combustion engine. Then the proverbial people revolted against the comparatively limited range of EVs and the difficulty in finding accessible and quick-charging stations.

So, the free market and consumer demand ignored the increasingly strident lectures.

Likewise, Harris pontificated that crime that had spiked in 2021-2023 is now not all that bad.

But voters know all too well that their major cities are now unsafe. They sense one reason this year that crime is not soaring as it was two years ago is because it had gotten so bad that any further commensurate increases would have made life utterly unlivable.

The Harris campaign was further hurt by past videos that keep popping up of Harris lecturing voters about how they either must think correctly or remain cluelessly selfish or ignorant.So, a recent clip surfaced on Columbus Day 2021 of a Vice President Harris lecturing America about Western civilization's "shameful" sins in discovering the new world. Another video reveals Harris warning the country in 2020 on national television that the massive post-George Floyd demonstrations that had turned violent and deadly were not and should not stop, as if the country had to pay collective penance for its sins.

This 2024 race may be becoming analogous to an October 1980 teachable moment.

Then a preachy and sanctimonious incumbent Jimmy Carter ahead in the final October polls over challenger Ronald Reagan finally turned off voters for good. The previous underdogReagan won in a landslide for a variety of reasons.

But certainly, one explanation was thatthe electorate had finally collectively shrugged off their weariness. They were sick and tired of Carter's downer lectures about how they were wrong and culpable.

Reagan, however, reminded voters that America was better than all the alternatives, needed not be perfect to be good, and had nothing to apologize for.

The same contrast will likely determine the election of 2024.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/10/18/election_2024_–_those_who_lecture_versus_those_tired_of_being_lectured_151798.html

VDH IS ALWAYS SPOT ON

>>21790649

Is she possessed by something evil? It looks like it.