By Tiko Okoye
Several polls suggest that the economy and immigration are the major issues voters are concerned with – areas where Donald Trump seemingly has a competitive edge. Maybe, and maybe not. But even if they are, Trump hardly helps himself and GOP down-ballot candidates nationwide by his inability to stay on message, as he spends every waking hour whining about Kamala Harris’s ‘AI-induced’ larger crowd sizes and ancestry – just as he did in the birther controversy involving then-candidate Barack Obama.
Let’s take the economy. An informed analysis would readily reveal that – except arguably for the Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon administrations – the US economy tends to go into a deep recession whenever the GOP occupy the White House and control Congress. This is because they consistently grant massive tax rebates to their wealthy campaign donors, and not only does their trickle-down economic policy never pan out, but they end up ballooning the national debt – a paradox for a party that preaches frugality and ‘small government’ – leaving any incoming Dem administration with the onerous and unpleasant task of cleaning up their mess! On the other hand, Harris, a product of a working family, has been harping about rebuilding the middle class as the way to economically empower majority of Americans to live out the American dream. Majority of American voters prefer the Harris plan.
As for immigration, commentators tend to forget that the border situation worsened rather than improved during Trump’s four years in office, and that he couldn’t even build the wall he had bragged. Besides, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) painstakingly crystallised a bipartisan immigration bill reputed to be the first major overhaul of asylum and immigration law in more than 10 years. But it was rejected after Trump and GOP House leadership brought enormous pressure to bear on GOP senators to make a volte face, simply because Trump wanted to make immigration a major campaign issue. The character difference between Biden and Trump is so striking. Biden says, “I love this job, but I love my country more.” Trump clearly loves being president again far more than he loves his country, and American voters are now much wiser and won’t fall again for cheap stunts.
Truth is that the fault with the Biden administration is the messenger, not the message. Despite the booming economy, working-class Americans were feeling the pinch at the grocery stores. And while Biden was finding it near-impossible to connect with hard-pressed Americans on right messaging, GOP strategists successfully scripted a compelling narrative with their “too-old-and-too-senile-to-be-president” trolls. Which is very ironic considering that Biden is only three years older than Trump and the latter is notorious for his ranting and muddled-up identification of people, places and events, but his every misstep is conspiratorially attributed to “Trump is just being Trump”!
A new messenger is on the block, even though the message is practically the same. The Harris team has broken the traditional mould of Democrats always playing defence – a losing strategy exemplified by Michelle Obama’s campaign slogan of “When they go low, we go high.” This inability or incapacity to effectively return tit-for-tat has always allowed the well-oiled GOP propaganda machinery to ominously stereotype and label Democratic candidates. But not Harris and her folksy, do-me-I-do-you running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The result? A flummoxed and flabbergasted Team Trump is still searching for ways to effectively handle the Kamala-mania phenomenon!
With national polls revealing that Harris is leading by 4-6 points, and several pollsters now putting her ahead in as many as seven of eight swing states, there can be no doubting that the Trump campaign is in need of life support – and even this may be coming too late. With less than 10 weeks to go, Republicans and their foremost strategists are beginning to worry that Trump may already be out of runway. Two of Trump’s notable pollsters, Tony Fabrizio and Travis Tunis, who had earlier espoused that Harris’s “honeymoon with American voters” would be a short-lived affair have been forced to eat humble pie by reporting that “No one should be surprised to see Harris get an extended but still temporary 2 to 3-point bump post-DNC.” I make bold to declare that the bump will be more like 4 to 6 points, that there’s nothing ‘temporary’ with the Harris lead, and that it will extend all the way to November 5.
That the current scenario is eerily similar to that of 2016 is of little comfort to Team Trump. Yes, there’s a female contender who, like Hilary Clinton, is surging in the polls. But things are markedly different this time around. First, Trump now has a past record in office to be decomposed and can no longer claim to be the outsider coming to drain the Washington DC swamp. He is a convicted sex offender and fraudster while Harris is a former California attorney general who was tough on crime. Trump is fossilised in the past, spewing pessimism and hollering about vengeance and retribution and being a dictator as well as demarketing America as another shithole country. Meanwhile, Harris is preaching freedom, joy and optimism about a brighter future. The choice cannot be more striking.
Virtually all editions of the newspapers published nationwide the morning after the Democratic National Convention ended carried screaming headlines that chorused: “A New Way Forward!” Those still doubting the credentials of Harris should just think of the way and manner she seamlessly grooved into the position of a change agent; a candidate who is a senior partner in a much-maligned incumbent administration is successfully rebranding herself as “similar in many ways but equally dissimilar in several key ways.” This is a stroke of genius – a trait she also exhibited in her choice of running mate when everyone else – including Trump, Republicans, Democrats and this writer – was betting on her picking Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro because of the pricey 19 electoral votes at stake in the swing state.
Harris’s momentum has seen her outraising Trump in fresh donations. Last month alone, she raised $204 million, dwarfing Trump’s $48 million, bringing the total amount she has raised within such a short period of time to about $500 million! Many have described Harris as the leader of a political movement, not just a political party, as her big tent now houses Democrats, Independents and Republicans who are disenchanted with Trump.
If the race were strictly based on a one-man-one-vote format, Harris would be winning by a landslide. The only reason why several analysts and pundits are still calling it a very tight race is because POTUS is elected by an Electoral College that is heavily skewed in favour of GOP-leaning rural mid-western states at the expense of Democratic-leaning populous and wealthy states on the eastern and western coasts. Trump is hoping that his MAGA supporters would upset the applecart.
And ever since the GOP super-majority in the Supreme Court, created by Trump when was 45th POTUS, upended the over-50-year Roe v Wade decision, pro-choice has been a rallying cry in a nation where female voters outnumber their male counterparts. It has seen candidates running on Democratic pro-choice tickets defeat their GOP opponents in deep-red states such as Louisiana, Ohio and Tennessee – to mention a few; and every proposed legislation restricting reproductive rights has been defeated in various referendums. It must be worrisome to Trump and GOP down-ballot candidates that referendums are scheduled to hold on the same subject in several states on the same day presidential election is to be conducted, including swing states, when it is known that Americans are not split-voters.
It’s also pertinent to note that while Trump was in the White House, his mannerisms and utterances caused the GOP to lose the Presidency and Senate in 2020 and saw a much-touted red wave go up on smoke in the 2022 mid-term elections. Trump has never been a majority-candidate nor a winner, and history will keep repeating itself as long as he hos presence or shadow looms large in any election.
Trump and GOP aficionados must be ruing the missed opportunity to nip Harris’s gravitas in the bud. Harris contested a state-wide election for the very first time in 2010, and was struggling to shed the same San Francisco far-left liberal label that Trump has resuscitated to no effect. Back then, officials of the Republican National Committee (RNC) foresaw the threat a diamond-in-the-rough Democrat like Harris could pose in the future, and commenced a counter-strike against her.
The gambit was codenamed “Killing Hercules in the crib” in their dirty tricks playbook, a reference to an ancient Greek folklore in which Hera, the wife of Zeus, the mythical king of the gods, knew that Hercules (original Greek version is Herakles) was her husband’s illegitimate son with a mortal female and tried every way possible to kill him as soon as he was born. The plan centred around a brutal testimonial of the mother of a slain police officer who criticised Harris as a far-left liberal who refused to seek the death penalty for the gang member who killed her son.
The moral of the story is that there’s no killing the beetle. If Republicans couldn’t do it when she was cutting her teeth in politics, they won’t be able to stop her ‘Big Mo’ going forward or kill a Hercules who has since overgrown his crib. America has surely had enough of the chaos as well as the race-baiting, narcissistic, misogynistic attitudes as well as the mischief-making, misogynistic, disruptive and corrosive proclivities of Trump in their polity. It’s time to finally retire him from national politics and give the surviving rump of the GOP rebuild their party.
Most Americans are ready to witness another African-American – and a female to boot – break the invisible glass ceiling to become the 47th POTUS. As for Trump, it will finally be good riddance to bad rubbish and a nightmarish memory!
Ichie Okoye, a Boston University Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow, investment banker, microfinance expert, newspaper columnist and public affairs analyst, wrote in from Abuja