The Patriot Post® · Who's the Candidate of 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.