Kamala Harris and the Democrats cannot win the 2024 election fairly. While mainstream networks focus on Trump’s alleged negatives, they pale in comparison to those of the Harris-Biden administration. The neocon faction of the Republican Party has claimed this election will be a referendum on Trump. However, the real referendum will be on the Harris-Biden administration and the Democrat party as a whole.
There have been a noteworthy number of “referendum” elections throughout history, where a nominee’s fate was determined by their, or their party’s, poor handling of a significant crisis. In fact, there has been one almost every decade since the 1960s.
The most important issue in the 1968 election was the highly unpopular Vietnam War, which coincided with a period of immense civil unrest following the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. As a result, President Lyndon B. Johnson, suspecting a voter backlash, became the first president to not seek reelection since 1928. Instead, his Vice President Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Democrat nominee. But he could not overcome the public’s dissatisfaction and was defeated largely due to Johnson’s handling of those issues.
Richard Nixon was the beneficiary of the Johnson referendum. But just a few years later, it was he who prompted another. Despite the country voting in a landslide for him in 1972, Nixon resigned following the Watergate scandal only two years later. Voters expressed their disgust by voting out Nixon’s VP and Republican nominee Gerald Ford in the 1976 election, with historians citing Ford’s pardon of Nixon as a key reason for his election loss.
President Carter kept with recent tradition by allowing crises to determine his electoral fate. Carter’s presidency was marred by two historically awful issues: Inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis that began exactly one year before the 1980 election. As a result, voters arrived at the ballot box with empty wallets and immense anger over Americans being trapped abroad, causing the electoral map in 1980 to revert almost identically to what it was just eight years prior during Nixon’s 1972 landslide.
President George H.W. Bush was able to ride the coattails of the popular Reagan years to a comfortable Electoral College victory in 1988. But he would go on to preside over a recession and a major unemployment problem. These issues even prompted the emergence of a third-party candidate businessman named Ross Perot to run for the presidency, which undoubtedly aided in Bush’s defeat to Bill Clinton, in addition to the already dissatisfied sentiment regarding the economy amongst voters.
By 2008, it was another Bush whose reign led to a blowout election. George W. Bush’s high approval rating following the September 11th attacks had vanished by 2008, as he, like his father, presided over a recession. This culminated in a stock market crash on September 29th, 2008, just weeks before the election. His decision-making regarding the Middle East had also grown increasingly unpopular. Unsurprisingly, his party’s nominee, John McCain, was defeated in an Electoral College landslide.
Each of these presidents and nominees bore the stain of one or two very important crises in the lead-up to the election. These elections, resulting in relatively noncompetitive defeats, prove that a single major crisis is often all it takes to lose power—spelling catastrophic news for the Harris-Biden administration, which has presided over five.
The seemingly biggest issue of concern right now is the border crisis. Immediately upon taking office, the Harris-Biden administration halted border wall construction. They then ended Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as “Remain in Mexico,” which required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their immigration cases were being processed. They have also severely handicapped Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) ability to curtail illegal migration. This has resulted in a massive influx of illegal aliens who have wreaked havoc on American society by flooding its cities and committing serious crimes, including murders. Further, Kamala Harris’s appointment as border czar has created a rare situation in which a Vice President is seen as more responsible for a crisis than the President, making this failure uniquely attributed to her.
If immigration is the number one issue, the economy is 1B. Jimmy Carter has always been known as the inflation president, but Harris-Biden has actually managed it worse. Carter took office with inflation at 5.2% and saw it eventually rise to a high of 14.8%, an 184% increase. Harris-Biden took office with inflation at just 1.4% and saw it increase to 9.1%, which is a 550% increase. Carter inherited an inflation problem and made it worse, while Harris-Biden created one. Further, the average monthly mortgage payment has nearly doubled from $1,746 to $3,322, while the median household income has fallen during that time, crushing the American dream of homeownership for countless Americans during the Harris-Biden reign.
Harris-Biden has further emptied Americans’ pockets by waging war on the American energy sector. Their obsession with electric energy replacing “climate change-causing” sources of energy has been devastating. The administration restricted oil and gas leasing which harmed domestic energy production, and signed executive orders aimed at ensuring half of all new vehicles sold by 2030 are electric. This attack has resulted in all 50 states setting record highs in gas prices during their tenure, as the average cost of gas has been over three dollars per gallon nationally for nearly 1,400 days now.
Foreign affairs are another factor causing Americans unease. Even partisans acknowledge the increasingly hostile state of global affairs under Harris-Biden compared to Trump. Cries that Trump would trigger a nuclear war with North Korea were unwarranted as he instead brokered world peace before handing the keys to Harris-Biden, who have added salt to this wound by throwing endless amounts of money at foreign problems while allowing anyone (including those from countries where terror is ensuing), to illegally to cross the border unvetted. This exponentially increases the potential for similar terror as we are seeing abroad to reach the United States.
The final crisis is the weaponization of government. Under Harris-Biden, Americans are seeing unprecedented weaponization. Jack Smith was appointed special counsel in the classified documents and January 6th indictments of President Trump, both widely viewed to be politically motivated as Smith was directly appointed by Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland. Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis met directly with the Harris-Biden administration shortly before prosecuting Trump for election interference. In the New York-based hush-money case, Matthew Colangelo, who previously targeted Trump during his time in the New York AG’s office, recently left the Harris-Biden/Garland DoJ and joined Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s team that is targeting Trump. Beyond targeting the preferred candidate of millions of Americans, which has resulted in numerous assassination attempts on Trump’s life, Biden’s FBI has also targeted traditional Catholics, labeling them as potential violent extremists, in addition to Biden’s White House encouraging major social media platforms to violate the First Amendment by removing posts they disagreed with.
When push comes to shove, voters vote for what is best for their health, safety, and finances over rhetoric or personality. This means only a high-level voter fraud operation will allow this agenda to continue. As flavor-of-the-month narratives about what will sway voters flood mainstream networks between now and November 5th, recognize that any time a president or party has been widely viewed as responsible for significant crises, they are voted out of power. There are numerous instances of this occurring without any exceptions. Since Americans overwhelmingly view the Harris-Biden administration as the culprit in all these major crises, they cannot win legitimately.
A slightly edited version of this was previously published through American Thinker here.
Matt Kane graduated from Stony Brook University with a bachelor’s degree in political science. His work has been posted by President Trump and published by Real Clear Politics, The Gateway Pundit, Human Events, American Thinker, and AMAC. Follow on X/Twitter: @MattKaneUSA, Truth Social: @MattKane