Musa al-Gharbi
Unherd, Aug. 6, 2024
“The biggest wildcard for Harris’s nascent campaign, though, is her leadership style. Over her time in California politics, Harris earned a reputation of being a cruel boss whose organisations operated in a dysfunctional way and with unusually high turnover.”
In 2016, mainstream analysts were virtually certain that Donald Trump would not win the GOP nomination. Then, when he did, they claimed that it was nearly impossible that he would win the presidency. They were convinced they were able to see the future: a destiny where Democrats would indefinitely enjoy decisive electoral majorities. We know how that turned out.
These days, people are much more alive to the possibility that conventional wisdom might not apply to highly unconventional cases. This is good because, in many respects, the 2024 cycle is far more unusual than 2016.
This was true even when the race was still Trump versus Biden. It had been over a century since a former president last squared off against a sitting president (in 1912), and nearly 70 years since the last time two presidential candidates had a rematch. Both Trump and Biden were unprecedentedly old for presidential contenders, and other candidates were deeply unpopular. Everything, it seemed, was to play for.
However, even with Biden out of the running, this is still an extraordinarily unusual contest. Most obviously, substituting one’s candidate — as the Democrats did last month — is largely unheard of in US presidential contests. Precedents from abroad suggest that, because this is a tactic usually deployed by parties heading for certain defeat, candidate substitution typically improves a party’s performance, but not enough to change the overall outcome of the race. But sometimes — as in the case of Jacinta Ardern replacing the previous Labor Party candidate in New Zealand — it does flip the election..… [To read the full article, click here]
