Victor Davis Hanson
Money
Harris and her PACs supposedly outraised their Trump counterparts by about $1 billion and spent that huge sum in little over 100 days. Would that not ensure Trump was crushed under a landslide of ads and commercials?
Not necessarily. What if the commercials for Harris were both more costly and worse? What if a campaign flush with someone else’s money spends it foolishly and quickly as did Harris? What if $300 million of finely tuned commercials can saturate a mere seven states as effectively as $600 million of “white dude” and “real men” absurd televised appeals? Does it hurt or help a candidate to buy over five hours some six airings of the same terrible commercials?
If you are remodeling a small 1,000-square-foot house, does a $5 million improvement look any different than a $200,000 one? So how many hundreds of millions can you cram into an election decided by a mere seven swing states?
If one candidate does ten more public town halls, press conferences, or interviews than another, does not that nonstop exposure save millions of dollars in paid publicity? Can the lesser funded candidate make up with sheer energy, mostly free rallies, and covering more ground what he lacks in paid commercials or huge staffs?
Are brags that Harris had raised a billion dollars more than Trump through her vast networks of PACs a sign of her competence, her momentum, her future success—or proof enough that a leftwing Democrat is the pawn of the unpopular billionaire California tech class?
Ground game?
Was it wiser to hire out sympathetic fellow travelers who rounded up voters in part for the “cause” and at cheaper costs than to simply pay out campaign workers to show up at people’s houses?
In general, a lower-paid zealot who has previously vote harvested or believes he can change an election by registering more voters is a superior investment to functionary campaign workers while even he is paid a lower wage.
Is it wiser to get people to vote by mail and early in toto, or to refine such nontraditional balloting by using the available weeks mostly to focus on and target low propensity voters while assuming high propensity voters would take care of themselves and turn up on their own?
So, was there one sort of targeted early voters and yet another sort as well, and conflating the two diluted the effort?
And was part of Harris’s problem that its supposedly smug, young, hip, tech-savvy supporters without evidence were assumed to be more up on gadgetry, electronics, and internet modeling while the deplorable Trumpsters were deemed Neanderthals in comparison—when in fact the Trump people were far more sophisticated in the way they identified persuadable, swing voters and ensured the entire base voted?
So how did Trump beat the overfunded Harris? He proved the more sophisticated in registering voters, getting out the mail-in and early vote, maximizing free publicity, covering more ground, using money more effectively, and garnering more high-exposure interviews—but all in an effort to advance a middle-class agenda far more attuned to the needs of a damaged and hurting middle class mostly ignored by Harris and the new elite and progressive Democratic party.
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