A Calm GOP Should Pivot to the Facts

Give the Democrats credit for political cleverness. The momentum gained from Donald Trump’s crushing of Biden in debate, his seemingly miraculous survival of an assassin’s bullet, and the raucous and joyfully-ended Republican Convention was deemed “a threat to democracy” (aka “a threat to rule by Democrats”), so they managed to turn America’s attention away quite nicely from this sequence of events and on to their (presumable) candidate, Kamala Harris. They’ve been claiming she’s the normal one, and Trump and (especially) Vance are the “weird” ones.

            Given the rapidity of all this, the Dems have managed to score a bump in some of the polling such that they are slightly closer. Predictably, some Republicans have panicked. They want to drop Vance or overhaul everything in the campaign. What a bunch of chickens. We still have three months till the election. The goal should be to keep calm and continue to hammer on the fundamental failures of Democratic policy in America, Kamala Harris’s feeble record, and what a second Trump Administration would accomplish.  

            For those with political memories, it is simply a fact that the last month has been perhaps the craziest in decades. Yet the insanity, up until last weekend, benefited the GOP and the Trump campaign. That’s why the Democrats’ magic act was so impressive. Joe Biden disappeared for days, supposedly having suffered a bout of Covid. If it was Covid, that only shows that endless Covid shots are pointless. Whatever it was, keeping him incommunicado was brilliant. Nothing is more fascinating to Americans than a mystery. Was Joe Biden dead? Did he have a stroke? Would he ever appear?

Biden only made “contact” with the American people via his social media, where a pdf of a letter announcing he would give up the nomination was released last Sunday. A few hours later, he announced he was supporting Kamala. The disappearing act and the purported change in Democratic nominees thus became the topic of conversation for everyone, left, right, and center. When the Democrats finally pulled old Joe out of their hat to appear for some brief and banal televised remarks, the subject was fully changed—and they could complain about anyone wondering about Joe’s fate being “conspiracy theorists.” Pretty bold when a third of Democrats believe Donald Trump staged his own assassination attempt.

A full throttle media drive to make out Biden as a kind of George Washington without the wooden teeth ensued. No, it wasn’t that his polls were terrible and he didn’t make sense or know what to do on stage—requiring Obama and party bigs to pressure him out. It’s that Joseph Robinette Biden had sacrificed his own desire to use his accumulated wisdom in favor of handing over the reins to a new generation. One left-wing religious outlet even depicted him as a kind of John the Baptist. I suppose we are supposed to think of Kamala Harris as the Messiah.  

            It’s a hard sell, but don’t underestimate the Democrats’ propensity to support anybody. After all, they managed to propel old Joe into office despite his own lackluster record of accomplishment, creepiness, and the fact that Obama himself famously observed that one should never underestimate Joe’s ability to (we’ll keep things clean) screw things up. And in Pennsylvania in 2022, they managed to elect a dead man.

            Indeed, they’re giving it everything they can to turn one of the least likable and most left-wing Democrats a political make-over. She is supposed to be a relatable and fun person, but anybody paying attention will doubt this. A government watchdog report revealed that Harris has had a 90% turnover rate in vice presidential staff since taking office. Anybody who was paying attention might have seen the reports in 2021 of former employees who told of her “soul-destroying criticism.” Many reported her penchant for not reading briefing materials they assembled and then blaming them for her own poor performance. Anyone who has listened to her explanation of the Ukraine-Russia war finds that criticism plausible.

            She is supposed to be a policy moderate and a hard worker, but the purported government transparency site GovTrack deleted their 2019 page indicating that her voting record in the Senate was to the left of Bernie Sanders. Not surprising given her advocacy of extreme measures such as banning fracking. In fact, she was the furthest left in that body when she bothered to vote. She missed 61.9% of the votes that year and had the fewest committee assignments. (Their current page for her whole career makes her only the fourth most left-wing Senator.) 

            Perhaps her greatest “success” as a Senator was her fundraising for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which posted bail for rioters in the 2020 protests—many of them violent criminals who either disappeared or were arrested again for yet more violent crimes. Minnesota’s CBS affiliate, WCCO, beclowned themselves by saying that Donald Trump was lying about her action even while her Tweets promoting the group are still active!

            So, too, as Vice President. Just as the pitch for Joe Biden four years ago depended on associating him with Obama’s purported triumphs, Harris is supposed to have been a powerful actor in the Biden White House. Yet Americans were treated this week to the spectacle of major media companies denying that she had ever been the “Border Czar” despite their own use of the term for three years. It’s no wonder they’re in a panic about this. Everyone knows the border has been and continues to be a disaster.

            It’s not likely to get better for her. On Friday, Harris tried to distance herself from what the left thinks of as Biden’s “pro-Israel” stance by calling for a ceasefire in the Middle East war. Yesterday, a Hezbollah rocket struck an Israeli playground, killing at least twelve—mostly children—in the bloodiest day since October 7 last year. Harris’s appeal to the Hamas wing of her party may garner her a few votes, but Americans are unlikely to see any evidence that she has persuasive power abroad.

            This is perhaps why the Harris campaign and their media adjuncts have taken to targeting Trump’s vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, a figure who was not widely known to Americans. The campaign is working at calling him “weird” and a “creep,” mostly for comments at a conference in 2021 in which he criticized a number of Democrats who didn’t have children who were not only advocating against child-friendly policies like the Child Tax Credit, but even advocating against having children. He later sarcastically complained to Tucker Carlson about “childless cat ladies” wielding too much power in American society. Full points to the Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein for tweeting out his full comments from the original conference, which show that he is not attacking individuals who don’t have children but “an entire political movement that is explicitly anti-child.”

            To his credit, Vance has not backed down on this broader criticism of Democrats pushing policies that are not friendly to children and encouraging young people to not have children at all. To have backed down would win few votes from those who refused to listen in the first place.

            But a number of Republicans have been panicking and demanding or suggesting that Vance be dumped after this week. I suppose that’s a possibility, but it seems to me that this kind of panic ought to be resisted. As political commentator Will Chamberlain rightly observed, the treatment Vance is getting could not be avoided: “They would have called Vivek weird. They would have called Burgum a software nerd. They would have called Rubio weird and labeled him Lil Marco. (Remember when they made fun of him for drinking water?)” He observes that the GOP people complaining about Vance were already opposed to him, so: “Ignore the noise.”

             This seems the right approach. There is no need to panic. Kamala Harris is still a terrible candidate. She may well have gotten a small bounce from this week’s DNC-media attempt to whitewash Harris’s record and smear Vance’s. But it won’t last.

Vance might benefit by avoiding sarcasm on the old campaign trail, but he should continue to be the voice pushing for a family-centered GOP. He should not back down at all when he is attacked on these questions. And he should remember to quickly turn these conversations around—and pivot to the ways in which a Trump-Vance administration will benefit all Americans, with children or not.

In Megyn Kelly’s full interview with Vance, she brought up the fact that Democrats are pushing radical measures such as Title IX regulations that would put men in women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and showers. Vance immediately jumped in with other policy problems and eventually turned to the manifest failures of the Biden Administration and Harris’s own record as a radical that contrasts with what Donald Trump and he are doing. He will do well to turn more quickly on the stump and with reporters. If he can manage to pivot quickly each time, the attacks will be blunted.  

The Democrats did a bit of public relations magic this week, but there’s plenty of time to show that they are presenting illusions. And people may be seeing it anyway. Yesterday, Byron York linked to a new Wall Street Journal poll showing that Donald Trump’s job approval is the highest it has ever been, in or out of office. Republicans need to avoid panic, focus on making sure their friends and family are registered to vote, and keep getting out the word about the danger of a Harris Administration and the promise of a Trump Administration.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.