Visions of a Landslide Heave into View

Never in my 79 years have I seen such a seismic shift in party prospects so late in a presidential campaign. Never have I seen a party so rapidly leave despair behind, find hope and begin to feel exultation.

It’s hard to believe that only five days have passed since President Biden stepped down from the upcoming contest. Yet every one of those days not only validates his decision; it gives us ever-greater reason to thank him for his wisdom and patriotism.

Experience matters. That was the primary reason for Biden’s reluctance to go, and it had a lot of merit. But once he left the field, and once Kamala Harris claimed the Democratic nomination, the balance of experience became again perhaps the most lopsided in my 79 years, save for the 2020 campaign itself.

On the Democratic side, Harris has had seven years as San Francisco’s District Attorney, six years as California’s Attorney General, four years as California’s junior Senator, and now 3.5 years as Vice-President. All those are elective offices. That’s a total of 20.5 years experience in electoral politics, a whole generation.

In contrast, former president Trump’s sole experience was four years as president, the only political office he’s ever both run for and held. And GOP Vice-Presidential candidate JP Vance has had a grand total of less than seventeen months in public office, as Ohio’s junior senator.

That vast difference in political experience is beginning to show.

One of the things that pols learn from experience is not to offend whole classes of voters gratuitously. Remember Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables”? That single remark may have cost her the presidency. When coupled with her “tin ear” about most people having two email accounts, and her refusal to discuss her closed-door speeches to Wall Street, it almost certainly did.

Well, not yet two weeks into the most consequential campaign in US history, JD Vance did something arguably worse. Not only had he gratuitously insulted Democratic leaders in 2021 as “a bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives.” This week he doubled down. With all the certainty of a sophomore proclaiming a self-discovered universal truth, Vance declared that parents of children should have “a bigger say in how our democracy actually functions” than other voters. (I know, it’s hard to believe any sentient pol would actually make that claim; but here it is: link. (Set the timer at 21:44 and prepare to be amazed.)

This is what you get when you appoint a hillbilly who went to Yale to run for the second highest office in the land after putting less than eighteen months of political experience under his belt. You get sophomoric and voter-disdaining hubris.

What will happen next is anyone’s guess. Will Trump see the gaffe and try to rein Vance in? Good luck with that! Vance undoubtedly sees Trump as little more than a deranged stepping stone to the presidency without having to earn his spurs. So the Trump-Vance campaign may crash and burn while not yet a month old.

Even if it doesn’t yet, there’s always Trump himself. He appears never to read his briefing papers. As president, he reversed himself frequently, often appearing to hear only the last person to whisper in his ear. He lied incessantly. He had trouble reaching simple logical conclusions. This is undoubtedly what caused Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon-Mobil who became Trump’s Secretary of State and whom Trump later fired, to call Trump “a f*cking moron.”

Experienced pols do none of these things. They read their briefing papers. They discuss important decisions with all their advisers, at length and in detail. And they try to make sure they won’t have to go back on them, or even qualify them, at least not right away. Millions of voters—at least those who are not already members the Cult of Trump—are beginning to understand these fundamental truths.

At the same time, millions of occasional, reluctant, female, minority and young voters, tired of two old men who can’t seem to express themselves coherently (in Trump’s case) or forcefully (in Biden’s) are beginning to see the light. They are coming to understand that a Black and South Asian woman, who looks like many of them and knows how prejudice feels, has the experience and the heft to win and to represent them as no one else (except perhaps Obama) ever has before. And so Harris polled 46% higher than Biden among Hispanic “double-haters” (those who dislike both Biden and Trump), even before Biden stepped down.

If you don’t think all this has the makings of a Democratic landslide in about one hundred days, then I question your imagination. So let’s work like hell for every one of those days, but with hope at our backs and wind in our sails.

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