Vibes Are Good, But Sometimes It Also Takes Doing The Hard Grunt Work To Win Elections

And Vibes Won't Win Florida For Kamala

"Undecided Voters" by Nancy Ohanian

In 2008, Florida was a key in the Obama victory strategy. His people had made up their minds to win the state that had given Bush a 5 point win 4 years earlier. And Obama did win:

• Obama- 4,282,074 (50.91%)

• McCain- 4,045,624 (48.10%)

Yep, Obama won by 236,450 votes, especially because of massive win numbers in Broward, Palm Beach and Leon counties. The vibes were with him! But that’s not why he won; not when it came to counting the votes. Obama’s campaign had registered nearly 700,000 voters across Florida, especially in Broward, Palm Beach, Leon, Miami-Dade, Orange, Alachua, Hillsborough, Osceola, Pinellas, Volusia and St. Lucie…

Yeah they registered almost 700,000 voters and won by 236,450. This cycle, the vibes campaign isn’t registering any voters in Florida and the Florida Democratic Party has turned itself into a grifting operation that wouldn’t know how to register voters if their lives depended on it— which it has and which is why they are a dead and utterly worthless party and why, when they ask for money to defeat Trump or Rick Scott, they are lying to you. The GOP unregistered close to a million Democratic voters and they did nothing about it but whine. The Florida Democratic Party has now officially taken over the slot— Worst Democratic state party in America— from Ohio. (49th is still pretty bad.) In fact Obama won Ohio with an even stronger margin than his victory in Florida in 2008.

• Obama- 2,940,044 (51.50%)

• McCain- 2,677,820 (46.91%)

As for the media, this kind of silliness is nothing but empty clickbait. Trump is going to win Florida— comfortably— and the execrable Rick Scott, one of the worst senators in the country, is going to be reelected. [If you want to prevent a MAGA takeover of the Senate, forget the Democratic Party; rush— and I mean it— to contribute to Dan Osborn, the independent candidate running ahead of Republican Deb Fischer in Nebraska.] As for Florida… forget statewide races and start rebuilding the wreck of a party-filled-with-self-serving-grifters like, Nikki Fried, Oliver Gilbert, Daniela Cava Levine, Shevrin Jones, Phillip Jerez… and support down ballot progressives who can turn the party around from the ground up.

Ohio is another state that the Kamala campaign has written off and isn’t campaigning in, isn’t spending any money in, doesn’t exist in. And yet, Sherrod Brown— who in every imaginable way is far more progressive than Kamala Harris— is probably going to win the state. He has his own operation and basically ignores the ridiculous and utterly worthless Ohio Democratic Party.

Sunday USA Today headline: Battleground states see waves of new voters sign up who could sway 2024 race. But none of this— mostly a surge in young voters— has anything to do with the presidential race in Florida, Ohio, Texas or California. “Recent spikes in voter registrations,” wrote wrote Savannah Kuchar, “are shaking up the already contentious 2024 presidential race, with hundreds of thousands of new voters now signed up to cast ballots and help determine who resides in the White House for the next four years. In the majority of the seven key battleground states where Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris are particularly close in the polls, the current number of registered voters is up compared to the 2020 presidential contest that coincided with the COVID-19 global pandemic.”

Instead of investing— and it’s a big investment— in registering voters outside of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and a few other battleground states, Team Kamala is quietly courting big-name GOP endorsements hoping to influence rank-and-file conservatives. I doubt Liz and Dick Cheney— not to mention Adam Kinzinger, Alberto Gonzales, McCain’s family members, Nancy Kassebaum, Anthony Scaramucci, Geoff Duncan, John Negropone, Stephanie Grisham, Barbara Comstock, (nor Mitt Romney and Chris Christie if they ever make it official)— are going to bring in many Republican voters in the battleground states. But Kamala doesn’t need many— just a few— if the polls are correct about the races beings tight (which I don’t think they are). Besides, Kamala “hopes their approval could give make it more palatable for ordinary Republicans to break ranks,” creating a permission loop for conservatives who don’t follow politics on a day-by-day level.”

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Olivia Troye, a former national security aide for Trump, said “that when prominent conservatives endorse Harris, it creates a ‘permission structure’ for rank-and-file Republicans to join the effort. People take a pause and look and say, ‘What is happening here, with all these different leaders and former administration people across all Republican administrations coming forward, and their voices being added to the chorus of why we will not support Trump?’ she said. I think that’s helping at the ground level because what we’ve been trying to do is have these people lean on each other, because MAGA is a very hateful bullying movement, and so I think there is power in almost like safety in numbers.”

Kamala swore Flake in when Biden appointed him ambassador to Turkey

And yesterday, she got another former Republican office-holder, Trump-enemy Jeff Flake, a former Arizona Senator, who retired rather than run for reelection against a Trump-backed primary opponent and then went on to support Democrats and be rewarded with an ambassadorship. Yesterday. Stephanie Murray, writing in Arizona’s biggest newspaper, reported that Flake said he’s endorsing Kamala because of his conservative values, not in spite of them. “I'm a conservative. I believe in the rule of law. First and foremost, I want to support a presidential candidate that respects the rule of law, somebody who, if they lose an election, wouldn't try to use the presidential powers to overturn that election… If you are a conservative, then you believe in the rule of law and you believe in limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility, free trade. And I think that if you look at the two candidates, Kamala Harris represents more of those views than Donald Trump. I don't agree with everything that the Harris campaign has put out. That's not necessary. I've never agreed with the entire platform of any Republican I voted for… Her support for our allies abroad, that's important to me. Recognition that tariffs actually would increase inflation and increase costs on U.S. consumers, that's important. And her recognition that immigration reform is one, important and two, it needs to be bipartisan... I've never supported Donald Trump. I didn’t in 2016. I didn’t in 2020. And there's been no conduct over the past four years that would cause me to support him this time. Kamala Harris, I served with her in the Senate. I know of her character… This is a red state, and if you run as a traditional Republican, you can win in Arizona. The problem is if you run as a MAGA Republican who denies that President Trump lost, you know, the last election, take his just, kind of smash-mouth politics, then you can't win in Arizona— and that speaks well for the voters in Arizona.”

Flake’s a Mormon and Kamala feels she needs Mormon support to win— not in Utah, Wyoming, California and Idaho (which have tons of them)— but in Nevada and Arizona… where they make up around 6-7% of the voters. But what about evangelicals? Is her campaign making a dent there— in Trump’s most braindead base? Saturday, Eliza Griswold took a look. “Of the numerous efforts that have coalesced since August to support Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, Evangelicals for Harris—which claims two hundred and fifty thousand people who’ve signed up to volunteer or to receive information from the group—is one of the most ethnically and ideologically diverse. Participants are Black, white, Latino, and Asian American. They include disaffected conservatives, independents, and a smaller number of liberals who’ve banded together to stop the reëlection of Donald Trump and to challenge a troubling strain of American Christianity… Evangelicals for Harris has one principle aim: to persuade Christian voters to reject Donald Trump. ‘What MAGA missed is that evangelicals were key to immigration reform, prison reform, child tax credit, U.S. support for Ukraine,’ Jim Ball [an evangelical minister and founder of Evangelicals for Harris] told me in a text message. ‘Anyone who prioritizes these issues, and now abortion, has been Left Behind by the MAGA GOP’ The group’s spirit, however, reflects a larger push among white evangelicals to wrest their faith from Christian nationalism, and to restore a more welcoming and expansive vision of evangelicalism that transcends party politics.”

Some theological conservatives who’ve teamed up with Evangelicals for Harris have taken note of Trump’s efforts to distance himself from the pro-life movement, by calling for abortion to be left to the states. They hope this will make it easier for white evangelicals to turn away from him. “Evangelicals largely vote Republican behind the abortion issue,” Dwight McKissic, a conservative Black pastor, told me. With Trump, McKissic said, “We’ve been scammed.” Lee Scott, the cattle farmer and pastor who helps lead Evangelicals for Harris, opposes abortion. But, similarly to Duford, he says he’s voting “pro-family.” He told me, “I personally disagree with Harris on abortion, but life is bigger than that, and I agree with her on the childhood tax credit, care for the elderly.”

Scott and the others may have an opportunity to sway evangelicals who have mixed feelings about Trump, but there are obvious limits to what they can achieve in the evangelical community as a whole. “Donald Trump’s impact on white evangelicalism is akin to Moses parting the Red Sea,” Ryan P. Burge, a Baptist minister and a professor at Eastern Illinois University, told me. “It’s true that he’s managed to push out a lot of moderates who are theologically evangelical but can’t stomach maga’s policies or rhetoric.” And yet, Burge added, evangelical maga adherents remain firmly committed, if fewer in number. “Trump will still carry eighty per cent of white evangelicals, even as their numbers continue to dwindle.”

There are also meaningful divisions among evangelicals who oppose Trump. Evangelicals for Harris is largely made up of conservatives, but another segment of evangelicals swings much further to the left. They are committed to a radical vision of peace and disagree with Harris around other issues. First, they vehemently oppose U.S. military support for Israel, and are especially vocal on this issue to stand apart from fellow-evangelicals who believe that Israel’s survival is instrumental to Christ’s return. They are also critical of Harris and the Democrats’ recent decision to remove opposition to the death penalty from the Party platform. “I still can’t believe it,” Shane Claiborne, a leader of the progressive evangelical movement, tweeted recently, calling the surprise move “disappointing.” Still, Claiborne is supporting Harris, saying that it’s much less about choosing her as a candidate than it is about voting for the person more likely to uphold the rule of law. “We’re not electing a savior,” Claiborne told me. “We’re electing someone we can protest against for the next eight years.”