Did you know? The Patriot Post is funded 100% by its readers. Help us stay front and center in the fight for Liberty and support the 2024 Year-End Campaign.

September 23, 2024

Who’s the Candidate of Change?

Thanks to the Leftmedia, many voters have been fooled into thinking Harris, the incumbent, will bring change.

“We can’t afford four more years of this!” thundered Tim Walz the other day.

He was slamming Donald Trump by way of creating a contrast with his running mate, Democrat presidential appointee Kamala Harris. But if you take just that line out of context, it might as well have been approved by the Trump campaign. It certainly goes to the overarching question of this entire election: Who’s the candidate of change?

Harris and Walz want you to think that they will bring change. Walz, of course, has been Minnesota governor since 2019, where he steered the state through the COVID pandemic with a strong dose of woke tyranny. More importantly, Harris has been Joe Biden’s vice president since January 20, 2021. She is effectively the incumbent.

Sidebar: Speaking of incumbents, who’s running the country? Maybe it’s Jill Biden

Back to Harris, a new CBS News/YouGov poll shows that she’s closing the gap on Trump on a critical issue: the economy. A few weeks ago, she was trailing 43% to 56% but is now behind by a much closer 47% to 53%. If she continues that trend, it’ll spell big trouble.

In addition to Leftmedia messaging on behalf of Democrats, the primary reason for this shift is that the economy is incredibly resilient. Despite Harris casting the tiebreaking votes for major inflationary bills in the Senate, and despite inflation hitting a crushing 9.1% in 2022 and standing at a cumulative 20% since 2021, the rate of increase has slowed a lot this year. The Federal Reserve finally cut interest rates last week (timing that Trump questioned), and other economic indicators like gas prices seem to be at least tolerable. It’s not fantastic by any stretch, but we’re no longer in crisis.

So, when Harris begins non-answers with “I was raised a middle-class kid” and prepares a set of economic proposals supposedly aimed at helping the middle class, she gets a media pass. When she claims to represent working people by targeting her ire at “the wealthy,” no media outlet dares bring up her true record.

Hence, voters start to waffle.

The other factor here is that Trump kind of is an incumbent. He certainly ran the GOP primary that way, and he did serve as president for four years. Voters will have to set aside or reduce in importance Trump’s personality chaos and the feeling that, ugh, we’ve been there before. Instead, they’ll have to remember just how good the economy was running during the first three years of his administration. Change means bringing that back.

But never underestimate the power of Leftmedia pollaganda. NBC News has a great example in a story about another poll showing that Harris leads by nine points on which candidate better represents “change.” The story contains a couple of lines that reveal the entire agenda if you know what to look for: “Harris’ favorability has jumped 16 points since July. … No major-party presidential candidate in the 35-year history of the NBC News poll has seen this kind of jump in popularity in an election.”

Why has her favorability skyrocketed? Two corollary reasons: Media negativity on Trump has always been astronomical and is even more so when compared to the fawning favorability shown to Harris. Second, she’s been hiding from the media, doing only three softball interviews and zero press conferences since seizing the nomination from Biden in July.

That illustrates pollaganda: Media outlets uniformly report only bad things about Trump and only good things about Harris. Next, they ask voters if they can repeat what the media told them. And then they report the poll as a story showing momentum in the desired direction.

Voila! Kamala Harris, the incumbent of the last four years, is suddenly the “candidate of change.”

In fact, as Mark Alexander plans to build out later this week in “The Audacity of Deception,” Harris has something in common with Barack Obama in 2008. “I serve as a blank screen,” Obama wrote in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, “on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” Harris has benefited from a similar dynamic simply because she is not technically Joe Biden.

Never mind that Harris will do all the same things as Biden did to create crisis (economy) after crisis (immigration) after crisis (world events). Never mind her own personal role in creating those crises.

The Leftmedia will tell us she represents “change,” and voters informed only by the Leftmedia will believe it.

Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.