By Steve BermanDavid French dropped 1,591 words in the New York Times to make his Kamala Harris endorsement feel better, but he came up short. French has felt for a while–nine years–that the Republican Party is moving in the wrong direction, and now he’s decided that only a far-left radical can shake the party. Hey, everyone can vote for who they want (as long as illegal aliens and dead people don’t cast ballots), so hooray for him. But he’s wrong in the sense that the path for a better GOP doesn’t lay in handing the government to the most leftist ticket in American history.
But that’s not what I want to talk about. The Harris campaign is happy to accept French’s vibes, or any other moderate or conservative, and they’ll do it in bad faith all day long. It has helped them, for now.
So you know where things stand, here’s the numbers from RealClearPolling, with the (swing) in parentheses. Arizona, Trump +1 (-4); Nevada, Trump +3 (-7); Wisconsin, Harris +4 (+5); Michigan, Harris +4 (+6); Pennsylvania, toss-up (Trump -2); North Carolina, Trump +4 (no change); Georgia, toss-up (Trump -2).
But let me tell you something. Democrats really love to huff their own stink, and if they believe the polls, they begin to think they’ve got some kind of mandate. We know this isn’t true. Conservatives like David French aren’t truly voting for Kamala. They are voting against Donald Trump. The logic is fairly simple: those who believe Trump is a catastrophe for the nation, or a death knell for our democracy would vote for a dead cat over him, so Democrats will hide the ball and go for their whole wish list. They take advantage of the good faith of people who believe the leftist cabal would follow the Constitution.
The only reason President Biden could not be the dead cat is that the conventional wisdom decided he has proven, beyond a doubt, that he cannot perform the essentials of the job for another four years. We all knew that. Of course, the CW logic is flawed, because voting for even an unfit Biden would keep Trump out, which is the whole reason to run a dead cat campaign. Also, if Biden wins, Harris wins as vice president, so then the 25th Amendment, section 1, or section 3—take your pick—puts Harris in the presidency should Biden’s incapacity become too great. If Biden didn’t quit, people in David’s situation would vote for him no matter what, trusting the Constitution and rational minds to handle the future.
But Democrats aren’t operating in the cradle of rational minds trusting the system. It was Democrats who forced Biden out of the race. It was Democrats who withheld money from his campaign. It was Democrats who mounted a full-court press in the media to get Biden to quit. It was Democrats who said that Biden being in the race was a guarantee that Trump would win. It was Democrats who said that the Trump campaign wanted to run against Biden. It was Democrats who held up the polling as proof Biden was a sinking ship. It was Democrats who didn’t trust the Constitution to handle the situation in 2025.
It is Democrats who are just fine with the man they said was mentally incompetent to remain president in January, 2025, yet he is good to handle every world crisis, our economic policies, and generally running the executive branch of the government for the next 90-plus days, while the person who is supposed to take over if he can’t benefits from him quitting the race.
Call me cynical, but I believe it was done in bad faith. Joe Biden would have had the votes of conservatives and moderates who could not stomach Donald Trump. He would have had those votes no matter what, because of the dead cat rationale. Democrats were scared that Biden could not campaign, but then, why did they put him out there on stage to fail?
Democrats–meaning the elite bicoastal crew who pump money and influence into leftist causes–weren’t counting on Joe Biden to be publicly incompetent and quit in a second term—they were worried he might stay—and that would spoil their progressive orgy. See, Biden is a genuine moderate Democrat, and his presence is an irritant to the current crop of Marxist-adjacent radicals.
(Biden is a political hack and a master flip-flopper, but he is still a Cold War politician, a Tip O’Neill/Ted Kennedy/Sam Nunn/Max Cleland Democrat with tinges of Hubert Humphrey. Biden is barely on the outskirts of the Bill and Hillary Clinton camp, and squarely outside the cult of Barack Obama.)
If by some twisted logic, Kamala Harris can save conservatism, then Joe Biden can save liberalism, but liberals know the score. Biden is not liberal enough for the neo-Marxists seeking to run the Democratic Party.
So the progressives defenestrated Biden, but left him to deal with the problems of the world (such as he’s capable, between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, and no personal visits, please). All this while Harris galavants around the midwest with Gov. Abortion Tim “Let It Burn” Walz, a man like millions who honorably served the country, who supported Operation Enduring Freedom as an enlisted intelligence analyst, from Italy, and answered questions about his stretching of that service record with “I’m damn proud” to raucous cheers from the crowd ready to occupy the nearest college administration building and fly Hamas flags from the windows.
Biden gets the blame, while Harris reaps the adoration of the masses. Harris may very well win, on the backs of the voters and their ballots cast because they are afraid of what Donald Trump might do in office. But she doesn’t want to win those votes—she doesn’t even want those votes. She DEMANDS those votes.
The whole thing is in bad faith. Once in office, if Harris wins, she will take all the conservative and moderate votes cast not for her, but against Trump, and claim them as a mandate to do whatever damn thing she wants to do. If the reverse coattails of down ballot races, because of anti-Trump voters who want to punish the GOP for handing them subpar candidates, send races to Democrats, yielding them the House and the Senate, the left, high on its own flatulence, will move to consolidate power in ways only imagined in John Eastman’s notebook doodles.
First, they’ll completely eliminate the filibuster in the Senate, which is already hanging by a thread. Second, they’ll push through a sweeping, unconstitutional package of ethical oversight of Supreme Court Justices, including mandatory retirement, and possibly an inspector general or ombudsman to peer over the Justices’ shoulders and spy on their private deliberations. And if the Court tries to strike the law, they’ll pack the Court until it doesn’t.
Third, they’ll sculpt into law their ideology of intersectional “rights” and “power,” making Florida’s ill-fated attacks on the First Amendment seem like traffic tickets. Watch for Orwellian “ministry of truth” powers given to every federal agency such as not seen since the days of Woodrow Wilson. If you think the European Commission’s meddling in American politics and social media is egregious, watch what a Harris-led progressive three branch tsunami can do.
Fourth, forget about the borders. Citizenship will become not a privilege for immigrants, who now take pride in learning about American history, civic duty, and government. It will become a paper-stamping exercise in “clearing a backlog,” so tens of millions will have their ballots counted. And if that doesn’t happen fast enough, the next census will ensure blue states get their share of electoral votes, because even illegal aliens count in the census.
Fifth, economic policy will become outcome-based, meaning the government will pick winners and losers. Instead of congratulating companies like Tesla, the government will savage them, because they stand against unions. The green agenda will be wielded like a superweapon, but only to reward those who agree with all the right progressive priorities.
Sixth, education, to these radicals, will become the most regulated part of American life other than healthcare. You’ll hear about Title IX and all these other laws as if they floated down from heaven and were carved into tablets by the finger of God. College will be for everyone, and you won’t be able to find a plumber, or a decent HVAC technician, because everyone will believe that those jobs are beneath them (young HVAC techs can get free training, and start at $22-30 per hour, with benefits, if you’re willing to get dirt under your fingernails).
As a conservative who recognizes that both candidates are liars with corrupt character, why should I give Kamala Harris a vote she neither wants nor earned? Why should I bow to her demand to vote against a guy I already refuse to vote for, just because Democrats want to have their cake and eat mine too?
It’s bad faith to take the votes of moderates and conservatives who are scared of Trump and use those votes to proclaim some fundamental mandate to make the country the most leftist and radical in the republic’s history, and to cement that status with a flurry of legal and regulatory red tape that will take decades to unwind—if there remain any candidates capable of winning office who can unwind it.
It is bad faith to engineer the overturning of the Democratic Party by framing it as an existential issue for democracy itself, and in doing so, demanding people of good conscience throw their vote in the pot to lend their unearned endorsement to everything Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have on their to-do list.
Kamala Harris does not deserve the presidency. She doesn’t want conservative votes, like those of David French. She feels entitled to them. She demands them. And she’ll dance on the political corpse of Joe Biden to get them.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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