The 2024 elections are much in the news, and as always, people are making predictions and offering advice. Larry Elder is one such, and while words cannot adequately express my admiration for Larry Elder, this time, I think he’s missing the mark.
“If Joe Biden can’t fog up a mirror, the nominee is going to be Kamala Harris,” Elder said Sunday. After alleging Harris was chosen as a consequence of the Democratic Party’s “obsession” with identity politics, he honed in on her overwhelming support from Blacks.
“The Black media loves Kamala Harris,” he told “Sunday Morning Futures” fill-in host Jason Chaffetz.
“Her polls are at least 70% among Blacks and I suspect even higher among Black females. And don’t forget, the first primary for the Democrats is South Carolina, where 60% of the voters are Black and most of those are Black females, and they love Kamala Harris and will very much resent it if she is perceived as having been kicked to the curb for a White person like Mayor Pete or Gavin Newsom…”
“So they are stuck with Kamala Harris,” he continued.
Larry, I think you’re great, but I think you’re missing the mark here. Forget VP Harris’s polling among black voters; that alone is not going to win her either nomination, renewed VP slot, or anything else. Among the general public, Kamala Harris’s approval ratings are hovering somewhere between crabgrass and toenail fungus. Her boss, with whom her political fortunes are inextricably linked, isn’t doing much better. That’s not a recipe for electoral success. In the big picture, Kamala Harris is a drag on the Democrats’ entire 2024 chances, and everyone knows it. She is, to be perfectly candid, utterly unfit for the job. I won’t go into the circumstances which saw her rise to political prominence in California (this is a family-friendly site), but since then, she has been the ideal portrait of the Peter Principle gone mad: She has not only risen to the level of her incompetence but several levels past that. Democrat-aligned media outlets have been sounding the warnings for some time now.
Tulsi Gabbard, who remains something of a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, has also weighed in.
Former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (I) alleged Democrats are looking to “install” Harris as president by throwing their support behind Biden.
“The DNC’s strategy to ensure the Democrat establishment remains in power is to re-elect Joe Biden, no matter how old or capable he is, and then get him to resign or step aside and install Kamala Harris as president,” Gabbard said. “She will be untested and unelected, and ready to act as the Democrat Establishment’s puppet president. She will then have the advantage and power of incumbency to run in 2028.”
That seems more likely, at least among those Dems who are (seemingly impossibly) blind to the weaknesses of a continuation of the Biden/Harris ticket.
And weakness is the defining characteristic of the Biden presidency. Joe Biden has been an utter failure and now is nothing more than a sad victim of elder abuse. Kamala Harris was chosen as his running mate, not because of any particular skill set, like foreign affairs or economics, nor because she brought a vital swing state into the Democratic fold, but simply because she was a “woman of color,” one who, by the way, failed out of the 2020 Democrat primary before a single vote was cast.
Hesitant as I am to offer helpful advice to the Democrats — being a firm believer in the old maxim that when your opponent is making a fatal mistake, you let him — here it is: Find a completely different ticket for the 2024 Presidential election. Not Gavin Newsom, either; not Pete Buttigieg, not anyone else currently running a once-prosperous state into the ground or proving his incompetence at managing a federal agency. The one person who might restore the Democrat Party to the center-left role it held in the Sixties and Seventies might be Joe Manchin, but he’s showing no indication he wants the job, and he’s currently also fighting for his political life in West Virginia.
The best tack the Democrats could take right now is to encourage more candidates to primary the existing ticket. It’s early. The field is wide open. A vigorous primary season generally does pretty well at winnowing out weak candidates, and incumbency or not, the Biden/Harris ticket is weak beyond words. Keeping Kamala Harris on because of her appeal to around six percent of the population won’t change that.