If you know me pretty well, you’ll know that I love talking about politics. Specifically, the statistics around politics and how campaigns are run. The goal of this post is to take my thoughts around the campaigns of this election and analyze how they were ran in order to get a better sense of how this election is going to turn out. This post is specifically focused on the campaigns and explicitly their strategies to win an election. I am not going into the flaws of U.S. democracy, how I personally feel about the issues they’re advocating for, or why I supported this candidate for that reason. This is exclusively about this election and what each candidate did to try and win this election.

HUGE Disclaimer: Most of this post is about my critiques of both the Trump and Harris campaigns. That does not mean I am critiquing people who voted for Trump or Harris. If there is one thing I know about politics in our divided time, is that few people are absolutely thrilled about one candidate or the other, and also have a lot of critiques about both. It also does not mean their reasons for voting for one or the other are not valid or understandable. I am writing this post in the context of the campaign and each campaign’s efforts to try win an election in our flawed democracy.

Trump’s Argument, and The Mistakes His Campaign Made:

The main premise to Trump’s argument that he should be elected again is that he was president before and when he was president, things were better than they are now. Ever since he left office, it’s gotten worse and if he’s elected again, he’ll bring the country back to the greatness it had under him, and it’ll get even better than it was during his first presidency.

There’s a lot to this argument, so let’s unpack this.

Even if you don’t agree or like the guy, there’s a lot of merit to his argument at least. For starters, the economy is not exactly fantastic right now. Prices are, on average, 20-something% higher than they were on January 20, 2021. Sure, unemployment is on the lower end. But inflation has been real and it has been painful, and the stimulus passed under the Biden Presidency is definitively a factor that has contributed to that, even if it wasn’t the sole cause.

The current administration has tried to argue that annual inflation is back down to just above 2% and that it has been beaten. Therefore, problem has been solved. The issue, of course, is that prices are still going up. It is never a good idea to try to convince people that things are getting better when their economic situation, on average, has gone from bad to “so-so” in the last couple of years. You can’t convince people against their feelings. People have price nostalgia and they miss when things constantly costed the same. That’s completely understandable and there’s a very salient argument to re-elect the guy who was president when it was most recently that way.

Secondly, illegal immigration has undoubtedly gotten worse since 2020. And unlike the economy, which isn’t fundamentally under the president’s control, immigration policy 100% is. There’s no way to slice it, border crossings at the southern border hit record highs consecutively in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Now, Biden did sign an executive order in June that has severely curtailed border crossings in the last few months. On average, the number of border crossings has been in line with the Trump years in the last few months. But that doesn’t change the fact the Biden Administration was super lax and a lot of migrants felt compelled to come to the U.S. because the weaker policies gave them a better shot at getting in and staying in (on top of a LOT of other reasons too, I know).

Trump undeniably has said and done some pretty crazy things over the last decade. He doesn’t act appropriately at all times. He can be incredibly disrespectful and say some really shocking things, and he constantly lies. But, despite his character flaws, a lot of people support him because he fights for what he believes in and is unapologetic about it. Even though he acts disrespectfully, he argues that he is going to fight for U.S. interests and fix what is broken about this country, specifically the economy & our immigration system. And he says he will work to implement those same policies that decreased immigration levels and kept inflation low during his first presidency again.

Despite my own personal disagreements to that argument, I understand the logic of that. A lot of people supporting him believe that Trump isn’t the best guy, but (according to them) he’s certainly better than what any Democrat would do. And even though they don’t like the specific candidate, they support (most of) the policies. I’m not going to disagree with that or disrespect that premise, but I’m going to use that argument to judge Trump’s campaign. Here are my main critiques with him using his first presidency as his main argument to be elected again:

One thing that I have noticed is that when remembering Trump’s first presidency, people tend to have nostalgia about 2017-2019. The tax cuts, the Supreme Court Justices he appointed, the various foreign policy achievements. Most of that happened in those years. But there seems to be a collective amnesia about 2020.

Now, I have done everything in my power to try to forget everything about 2020. Every part that year was miserable and I certainly hated it, and so did everyone else. There’s no doubt that it has fundamentally changed our society in many ways, but most people that I’ve talked to tend to associate the pandemic as a whole with Biden’s presidency, not Trump’s. I’m not sure why that seems to be the case, but the pandemic was an absolute mess and everyone was at each other’s throats, arguably more so than now. And that happened while Trump was president. The chaos was incessant and non-stop. And all of that was undeniably at Trump’s doing, whether you agree with that or not.

If your main argument is to bring your presidency back to these better times, then exclusively focus on those better times and only on the positive parts of your presidency. If voters are actively trying to forget the period of time that everything sucked and you were president when that was happening, why make so many unnecessary statements that remind people of it, especially when that was the biggest reason your campaign lost in the first place, back in 2020? Re-litigating your previous election loss all the time is not something that voters care about, especially when it’s factually not true (if the election was stolen from you, then why did you go literally 0/50 on your lawsuits that allege it, decided by judges that you nominated?). Having people close to you actively support that and also say insane things and then not apologize for is it also isn’t the way to win over a voter that was contemplating voting for you again. All that does is make them remember all the reasons why they wanted you gone in the first place.

I will give his top campaign managers (Chris LaCivita & Susie Wiles) credit. This campaign in 2024 has been the most “organized” out of the three times Trump has ran for president. I put quotations around that because of the cards they are dealt. You absolutely cannot control what Trump says, so don’t even try to tell him to not do something, because that won’t work. But there’s a lot of mistakes they’ve made that just don’t make a lot of sense to me, if I was running his campaign:

1. Why greenlight speakers at your rallies that will just make your campaign look bad? Any news cycle that’s about Trump specifically, we know from the last nine years, doesn’t hurt him electorally. But a news story about someone making Trump look bad? That’s a different story. Manage your speakers better, because any bad headline just reminds people of the exact reasons they don’t want to support Trump in the first place. This is the same reason as having people like Laura Loomer who are nothing but dead weight to your campaign. Voters who are lukewarm to you are turned off by that rhetoric, and a vote not for you is a vote against you.
2. Why would you accept the June debate, or any debate at all for that reason? While a lot of people in his base (someone in your “base” is very different than someone just voting for you) will say he won whatever debate he participates in no matter what, which isn’t true anyway, a majority of voters tend to disagree. By accepting the June debate and winning it, everyone was exposed to Biden’s blatant cognitive decline, in a way that it was no longer deniable, even for major news networks who implicitly support him. There was no logical reason to do that. If your opponent is in an incredibly weak position, do not give any excuse for his party or detractors to find an off-ramp and try to get rid of him. You were already winning. Democrats were not enthusiastic to vote for Biden again. Why would you give them a reason to get rid of Biden so they can energize their base again?
3. Trump has spent an unusual amount of time campaigning in New York and California, which are states that he is not going to win. I’m not sure exactly why this has been happening. While campaign events in themselves do not have a lot of real benefits (winning an election takes a lot more than that), you can certainly lose votes in states by not going there. What has been confusing to me is why the Trump campaign is spending a lot of time in areas where he will not win (like Coachella, of all places), when his time could be spent, say, with the Senate candidates in Montana & Ohio, two places where he is a lot more popular. You can’t govern as effectively if you don’t have a majority in the House/Senate, so why not do everything you can to support them too? Having a majority will be the reason you get an agenda passed.
4. Why not do everything in your power to remind voters that Trump was nearly assassinated, twice? In what will be remembered as one of the most historic pictures in American history of a bloody Trump with his fist raised, the first assassination attempt has been the only event since January 6th that has moved the needle in terms of public opinion on him. We’ve collectively gotten to the point where we haven’t necessarily forgotten about it, but people are not remembering how significant that was. There was a lot of sympathy for Trump after that point in July, and that sympathy was squandered almost immediately to now there is no way to capitalize off the situation to garner more support for him, as horrifying as it was. I’m not saying at all that the assassination attempt was good in any way or should’ve happened. Violence in an election is never acceptable. But in a campaign when your only goal is winning, you need to capitalize on any positive or sympathetic coverage possible.

All of the reasons stated above are why this election is as close as it is. In a time where people globally are very unhappy with the people in charge of their government (even more so than usual), the “fundamentals” of this election should give Trump a major advantage to where he should be winning by a lot. And maybe that will be the case. The polls could be very wrong again and he could win by a lot. But if it is going to be like the way I think it will be, it’s going to come down to the wire, simply because the campaign made a ton of unforced errors that turned off a critical slice of the voters, and would support you if your & your allies’ rhetoric weren’t so ridiculous.

The Harris Campaign of 2019 & 2024:

There are a lot of critiques that I have of how Kamala Harris ran her campaign this year, but to start this, I think going back in time to 2019 can provide a lot of context to how we got here.

In 2019, at least in politics, Kamala Harris had a lot of buzz around her. She was a first-term U.S. Senator with a prosecutor past from an ultra-progressive state and that profile was very attractive to a lot of Democrats. It logically made sense for her to make a run to be president in 2020. In another universe, she could’ve potentially been a better alternative to Trump than Biden in 2020 if, and only if, the circumstances were different.

The main issue with 2019 is that Democrats, on average, moved farther to the left. A lot of that reasoning was basically, “Do the exact opposite of Trump says, no matter what.” Remember, if you weren’t a Republican, Trump was not popular when he was president the first time. And that strategy was quite effective to win back the House in 2018. The issue with that strategy is that Democrats adopted some policy stances that, quite frankly, didn’t benefit them. The main rationale was that it was the opposite of what Trump wants; therefore, voters will approve. When Trump tried to repeal Obamacare, Democrats’ solution was Medicare For All. When there was uproar over the Trump Administration’s immigration policies, specifically when there was a lot of focus on the family separation policy, Democrats’ main solution was to abolish Immigration & Custom Enforcement (ICE). Regardless of how you feel about those policies, and others that Democrats focused on in that time, none of them were ever popular. They might have been talking points, but opinion polling never showed that they had support outside of mainstream and progressive Democrats. Taking an affirmative stance on those was never a good idea long-term if you wanted to win.

Where Harris really went wrong in 2019 that is she tried to win the Democratic Primary by trying to get the best of both worlds. Remember, a lot of politicians (love them or hate them), build their profile by sticking to their core-held beliefs and advocating issues that closely align to their ideology. But Kamala Harris fundamentally is not an “ideologue” in that sense. She’s always been strategic and tries to do what is best for the voters and will change her mind if she needs to. That’s not, in itself, such a bad thing. And that is what every politician does in some sense, but there’s a balancing act you have to do when it’s comes to the positions you take. An effective politician is clear on their beliefs but can change it upon learning new information or when you need to compromise to make deals. You can’t be too uncompromising and rigid, even as a Republican, or you can get caught being perceived as being too far behind the times. Because no matter what, society progresses. But you also can’t change your mind every time public opinion shifts. There are times when you need to hold your ground and guide the people back to your position. Sometimes you lead the voters, other times the voters lead you. And that is a balance you have to keep, especially as a Democrat. The problem is, in my opinion, Harris straddled the line a bit too far on the strategic end that the flip side to that argument is that she looks like a sellout. I personally don’t buy that argument, but I understand the merits of it. And with the previous positions she’s taken, in comparison to the ones taken now, she can be fairly perceived as inauthentic, even if that might not actually be the case. (This argument, again, is also applicable to Trump. But Democrats tend to hold their nominees to a different standard. So that’s why I’m only focusing on Harris, as it’s negatively affecting her more.) This strategy backfired on her then and it’s not working well now. In the primary, she tried adopting a lot of previously stated issues that were popular amongst progressive voters and adopted others that tried to win over more moderate voters, hoping to get the best of both worlds to win the nomination. And it didn’t work. Progressives thought she was being inauthentic and moderates were turned off, and both groups had better options that suited them (there were 24 candidates running for the nomination that year). Her campaign collapsed and she withdrew in December. Now, all of those stances she took are being turned against her. And some of them can convincingly be argued as being “far-left” policies that are even more unpopular today than they were in 2019, a time when progressivism was at its most popular.

Secondly, whatever you think about her, Harris has gotten the absolute raw end of the deal as Vice President. Think about the role of the Vice Presidency for a second. You may be #2 in command, but the President has final say in all matters. They are surrounded by close friends and family who serve as advisors who have decades of trust built, whereas you do not. You have no formal authority besides being a tiebreaker in the Senate. And, most importantly, there is no requirement for the president to listen to you at all or have you do anything. But yet, you cannot critique their policies and are to constantly defend them, no matter what. That’s the job. And the Biden Administration did her so dirty. Contrary to popular opinion, Biden and Harris are not close. They didn’t collaborate one on one very often until she was the nominee. She did not have as large of an influence as say, Dick Cheney. Harris was given immigration as her policy to try and fix. Immigration is fundamentally an awful issue to try and create policy on. So, she really was set up to fail. When Biden inevitably fell apart trying to get re-elected, she was the consensus pick because there wasn’t a realistic backup option that wouldn’t upset at least part of the party. To put this into perspective, if you’re a Democrat trying to win an election, and your current candidate is in obvious cognitive decline, and you have 100 days left before November 5, what do you do? And who replaces him? If you stick with Biden, you’re screwed. Voters can be misled, but they’re not stupid. If you drop Biden, open it up and let everyone run, you’d have every ambitious Democrat try to win at the convention. There goes 1/3 of your remaining time to try to get your voters together because the party is fighting amongst itself. And someone’s feelings are definitely going to get hurt, so expect to lose some voters over a candidate they won’t like. When you’re already losing to Trump, that isn’t an option. So rally around Harris, whatever flaws she might have, and hope for the best. I hear a lot of complaints, especially from conservatives, that the process of swapping Biden for Harris was not democratic and was therefore illegal. My counterargument to that point is that our democracy is incredibly flawed and the two party system has no legal requirement to make let people decide who their party nominee is. Heck, before 1972, every nominee was picked by delegates at a convention. Voters had no say if the party bosses did not want it. Our democracy is very flawed (and I certainly have a lot of complaints with it), but that doesn’t make it inherently illegal to swap out a candidate, even if the way it was went about wasn’t the cleanest and the alternative was even messier for your party. So, to be inherited a massively struggling campaign that wasn’t raising enough money, when you have been a Vice President taking the brunt of every single unpopular decision of the administration, you don’t have a lot of room to work with the time you have left. The fundamentals are simply not on your side.

My main theory of Harris losing (if she does), in percentage terms, is that she was 65% screwed over and 35% screwed herself. Adopting the unpopular positions in 2019 was incredibly shortsighted. That was never a good idea in the first place. Starting off her campaign in August with a “positivity and fun” vibe, I think, was a good strategy initially. Every person who disliked Trump was happy and, more importantly, relieved that he wasn’t going to sail to victory because Biden couldn’t string two sentences together. The initial momentum was capitalized on well and it showed. There are two errors that she’s committed since then, though, and it’ll potentially cost her the election: 1) she can never get to the point and 2) she’s played it too safe.

BY FAR my, and pretty much everyone I’ve talked to, biggest critique is that she talks in circles. I mean, it’s obvious. And so does every politician ever. But you know the best way to draw a contrast with Donald Trump, the biggest rambler on Earth is? 1. Keep answers short 2. Get to the point. 3. Be honest. and 4. Be yourself. It’s hard to know what she stands for when she takes two minutes to answer a question. My generation’s attention span, on average, is like 8 seconds. We don’t want to listen to a whole story when the question was ‘Do you support an asylum ban?’ If SNL can pick up on that, there clearly needs to be a change in how you approach answering questions. Now, I fully understand that this argument is even more applicable to Trump, but this is where each voter base is different. Trump’s charisma and rambling is entertaining to a lot of people, but voters tune him out 90% of the time, and many do not care about the rhetoric he and his allies spew, no matter how appalling it is. We’ve had nine years of dealing with the guy, every person knows that’s what he does and what he’s about. But in this election, Harris is the lesser known candidate. We all may know her as the Vice President, but that doesn’t mean we really know her, especially how she would run the country. Republicans have tried to argue that it’d be a continuation of right now, but it would not be the same as Joe Biden. Because they are different people with different leadership styles. Being from the same party does not equal everything being the same. Biden did things differently from Obama. Trump did things differently than Bush. Harris would be different. So, articulate your own positions more. Throw Biden under the bus. He is incredibly unpopular, and his top advisors understand the game of winning an election. They might get upset, but they screwed you over for four years, so try returning the favor. Talk about what you would specifically do differently when people are desperate for any change. And, leading into my final critique, stop playing everything so safe. A campaign should take risks. Sometimes, risks lead to setbacks, but other times proposing an unconventional policy or reaching out to a certain demographic pays dividends. Go on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Do challenges and put yourself in front of different audiences so voters get to know the real you. A presidential campaign is also about getting to know the candidate, and in the age where screens are everywhere, you need to go where the people are listening, which increasingly is not cable television. She did this more in the last couple of weeks, but it would have been more effective to have done a media blitz in the first two weeks after she took the role as the nominee.

Fundamentally, I see the 2024 election as Trump’s to lose, not Harris’s. While I predict that Trump will end up winning, there are valid reasons it could go the other way and I could easily be wrong. But it won’t be because Harris ran a great campaign, but because Trump’s ego is his own worst enemy, and that enough voters are convinced that the best way to solve the real issues that we face as a country is not re-electing a gasoline can to put out the world’s fires, even if our other real alternative isn’t the extinguisher we desperately need.

-Colby