Know thy enemy and know yourself, and you will never lose a battle … or something like that.
However the adage from famed Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu actually goes, it generally rings true in both battle and real-life — so it’s actually worth observing all of the ways that failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris came up short against President-elect Donald Trump.
And, if this writer is going to be brutally honest, even if there are no lessons to be gleaned from Harris’ boneheaded campaign strategies, it’s certainly worth a laugh — not hers — or two.
So without further ado, here’s a breakdown of just some of the ways Harris and her team fumbled away a golden opportunity to upend Trump, in no particular order.
(Partisan politics aside, an incumbent vice president with a truncated election cycle was going against a deeply polarizing politician — conventional wisdom would suggest the momentum should’ve firmly been Harris’.)
The whole Cheney debacle: If you needed any shred of evidence that Harris is totally and utterly disconnected from her own base, look no further than the way she paraded around Liz Cheney, while also crowing about an endorsement from Dick Cheney.
It takes all of a quick perusal through a recent history book to see why the warmongering Cheney’s are as deeply unpopular on both sides of the political aisle as they are.
If Harris truly thought embracing the Cheney’s was a way to reach across the aisle and unite, she was kind of right.
Young men: To her minimal credit, at least Harris realized just how poorly she was polling with young American men.
She just went about addressing that deficiency with nearly every bad idea in the book.
Turns out that the brilliant political minds on Harris’ campaign thought that berating and shaming young men was a winning strategy, which goes a long way to explain the final difference in electoral college votes.
(And no, Kamala Harris wasn’t doing especially good with women, either.)
The Adolf Hitler conundrum: In their fervor to label Trump and his supporters the worst of the worst, Harris and her campaign kept finding themselves comparing conservatives to the Third Reich.
And while that might’ve been an effective tool in, say, the 1944 presidential election, in 2024, the Democrats have officially sapped “Nazi” of any actual heft, significance or meaning, due to rampant overuse.
It’s a losing strategy that is clearly providing diminishing returns for the left, yet they keep leaning on it like a crutch because they truly have nothing else.
The racism conundrum: Similar to the above issue, Harris and her team probably thought they got a special gift when Trump hired a roast comedian for a New York rally just a week before the election. That comedian promptly compared Puerto Rico to a floating isle of garbage, sparking all sorts of allegations about racism.
And had Democrats and the left not completely and totally sapped “racism” of all meaning, they may very well have been able to turn that incident into some genuine momentum.
Instead, Election Tuesday happened.
Being two-faced: If your candidate (in this case Harris) already has an issue with coming across as inauthentic and forced, maybe don’t put out wildly two-faced messaging, like her campaign had been doing while trying to appease both Jewish and Arab American voters who may have some strong feelings about the ongoing battle between Israel and Hamas.
Much to the chagrin of Democrats, there doesn’t appear to be anything close to an easy answer for this — both Kamala’s inauthentic attitude and the party’s messaging regarding Israel.
Last, but certainly not least: It simply cannot be stressed enough that a major U.S. political party nominated a presidential candidate who did not garner a single primary vote.
How can anyone take Democrats seriously after the way they flagrantly disregarded, you know, democracy in the lead-up to this election. It puts an asterisk by everything Harris did, which isn’t something on-the-fence voters are likely to forget.
Kamala Harris was an installed puppet. Period.
She’s a failed, installed puppet, but an installed puppet nonetheless, and that’s something Democrats needed to own — not sweep under the rug.
Harris undoubtedly made a number of other blunders on her truncated campaign trail (side note, please do not let the establishment media gaslight you into thinking her shortened campaign was a disadvantage. There’s a big reason Harris has fizzled on the big stage anytime potential voters get to know her), but those are just a few that stood out now that the dust has settled.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
