Trump is at the top – and is not making any progress | Mulshine
During her campaign in the New Hampshire primary earlier this year, Nikki Haley said in a speech that most Americans did not want a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
“The first party to withdraw its 80-year-old candidate will be the party that wins this election,” Haley told the crowd.
That sounded like good advice at the time.
But in the end, it was the Democrats who won. President Biden dropped out and let Vice President Kamala Harris run against 78-year-old Trump as his presidential candidate.
Does this mean that the Democrats will win the election?
That would be the logical conclusion. But now that Harris has replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, Haley says she is optimistic about The Donald’s chances against Harris.
“She’s much more progressive than Joe Biden ever was,” Haley said of Harris in an interview with CNN. “So the fact that they nominated Kamala Harris … the fact that they nominated one of the most liberal politicians that probably could have been nominated is going to be an issue.”
If that’s true, Harris is off to a bad start.
The Democrats are in the middle of a party convention that will focus on Democratic leaders such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
But in the middle of it all, Harris got caught up in a food fight.
It began when her campaign team decided to blame inflation on “price gouging by food and grocery companies.”
The reaction was swift and fierce. Even the editorial page of the Washington Post – certainly no bastion of conservatism – wrote: “Inflation rose so sharply in 2021 in large part because the pandemic disrupted supply chains.”
“Instead of telling voters the truth, the vice president chose a less direct route: He shifted the blame to big business,” the Post wrote.
Many economists responded by arguing that government price controls could lead to shortages – a phenomenon familiar to us baby boomers who sat in lines at gas stations in the 1970s.
In her statement on price gouging – which she incorrectly referred to as “price gouging” – Harris seemed to have little understanding of the role that money supply growth plays in inflation.
In addition, she seemed a little too eager to transfer new powers to the federal government.
Pollster Raghavan Mayur from the Bergen-based polling institute TechoMetrica had an explanation for this.
“She was the most left-leaning senator in the Senate,” Mayur said. “If you look at the policies, she’s to the left of Bernie Sanders.”
Mayur referred me to the website GovTrack, which indeed found that Harris is to the left of the Vermont senator, who describes himself as a democratic socialist.
This is an issue that Republicans will have to explore further, but if the Trump campaign continues to pursue it, it could pose a problem for Harris as she competes for the votes she needs to win.
Most crucial are the eight swing states that are likely to influence this election. Right now, Trump is ahead in six of the eight states, according to the RealClearPolitics compendium of poll results.
Trump also leads the website’s “no-tossups” map of electoral votes by a margin of 287 to 251. He only needs 270 votes to win, so Democrats better not start buying champagne for their victory celebration.
How things will play out now that Biden is no longer in the race, “we don’t know,” Mayur said. “There are so many things at stake now that Biden’s age is no longer an issue.”
The big issues that the Trump campaign could exploit are energy, immigration and the aforementioned inflation.
However, Haley is one of many Republicans who have criticized Trump’s handling of issues such as Harris’ race.
“You can’t win with these things,” Haley told Fox News.
Haley argues that Trump should campaign on issues such as foreign policy, energy independence and our out-of-control borders.
Virtually every Republican politician I know holds this view.
I learned from one of these sources in the know that Trump’s advisers are making this point clear to him at every opportunity.
Then he goes out and ignores her.
Maybe he knows something we don’t know.
From the beginning of his campaign for the presidential nomination in 2016, Trump said and did things that would have caused anyone else to resign in shame.
This time, many insiders told me that if The Donald were convicted of a crime, he would be finished as a candidate.
But then he was convicted of 34 crimes. That was hardly a blip in his poll numbers.
Some say that if he were sentenced to prison before the election, he would be finished for good.
But then he would finally have to shut up.
That could only help.
ADD – Here is the speech where she promises to fight against something she can’t even say.
More: Current columns by Paul Mulshine
Paul Mulshine can be reached at [email protected].
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