In 2017, Clinton’s supporters were traumatized. They couldn’t understand how she lost.

In 2021, Trump’s supporters were traumatized. They refused to believe he lost, and have been sulking ever since.

It’s 2025. You’d think by now people would have stopped living in denial, but no. The Odious Man is going back to the White House, God help us, because once again the Democrats nominated someone even their own party didn’t want. The only good news for us poor unrepresented citizens is, Trump will never run again.

Yes, I said the Democratic Party didn’t want Harris to run. If you’re a party insider living inside the Beltway, you’re probably unaware of this even now. After all, she ticks all the boxes, right? Black, Indian, biracial, female, career woman, monumentally successful, a reformer, charismatic: what’s not to like?

Oh, how easy it is to forget 2020, when she was the first to drop out of the Primary because she got slammed on national TV and couldn’t recover.

What’s not to like? Party spin control watched her get defeated and looked into it, and here’s what they came up with:

• She’s Black, and the country’s full of racist white people, especially the South.
• She’s biracial, not Black, and Black voters are racists.
• She’s a woman, and Latinos are notoriously anti-woman.
• She’s half-Indian, and other Indians disapprove of women in high-powered roles.

I’ve had all of these explained to me, and then I’ve been told that it’s not racist to say these things because it’s actually cultural, which somehow isn’t the same. But, leaving that whole mess aside, and presuming the four statements are, if not uniformly, then at least statistically, true (like “White men can’t jump”), didn’t everyone know all this going into the election?

Answer: Yes, yes we did.

Before we follow that up, though, let’s look at a couple of things the Party is neglecting:

• Harris wasn’t about to win in either Florida or Texas, so the Latino vote didn’t matter so much as one might think.
• The South has been pretty heavily pro-Trump for quite a while. She wasn’t about to win there either.
• Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are hardly bastions of Southerners. Those represent the 44 electoral votes she needed to win, and they went Trump.

So why did she lose those three states, the “Blue Wall”? Before you get carried away talking about the mobilization failures of the Black community, consider that 11% of the population of each state — the national average — is Black. What she lost in Wisconsin and Michigan was the Muslim vote, based on the Biden Administration’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza. And as for Pennsylvania…

Harris Is A Cop.

Okay, she’s not. You and I know this. She’s lawyer, which is in a lot of ways worse. She’s a former prosecutor who sent thousands away for doing pot. In her time she was pro-reform; she made her political career based on that — but the public perception of Kamala Harris is that she’s a cop. In what big cities are the police significantly unpopular? Most, but let’s be sure to count Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Atlanta. Ever heard of Breonna Taylor?

We just went through four years of anti-cop civil unrest under Trump. Wasn’t it kind of arrogant to ignore public perception on the issue? Or… was it just optimistic?

Harris Is A Biden/Obama Follower

She’s not. She’s actually a reformer, and one with some startlingly unconventional economic positions. But that’s reality, not perception, and in politics perception is reality. The perception is that Biden’s four years in power were horrible economically, next door to a recession, with massive uncontrolled inflation and massive disasters both domestically and overseas. Every bad thing that happened under Uncle Joe is linked to Harris in the minds of the voters — this in spite of the very evident lack of power of any Vice President in history.

Almost Half Of The Party Wants A Progressive

Bernie Sanders nearly upset the primary in 2020. Had it not been manipulated by massive staged contributions, he would have at the very least guaranteed a contested convention. He won the Iowa caucuses, yet the state party refused to release that announcement for months, strongly hinting that Mayor Pete had instead. Massive PAC money magically appeared to prop up Warren and Klobuchar long after responsible candidates would have dropped out. And then… along came Biden.

The Party rigged the primary in 2016, and did it badly — they didn’t need to, but they did. There were cheating scandals, rigged polling, debate nastiness… Wasserman Schulz flubbed it so terribly that Tulsi Gabbard walked out of the organization, ran as an outsider in 2020, and eventually flipped to Trump in part because he respected voters more. Speaking of 2020, The Party rigged that too. In 2024, they didn’t even bother with a primary.

And the radicals in the DNC noticed, and rebelled.

There was organized political action inside Party machinery -against- Harris all through the Rust Belt. They worked on voters in Georgia too. And she lost — by very small percentages.

The Ideal Candidate

If Republicans run a competent, conservative woman in 2028, they’ll win hands-down. Right now they have Nikki Haley as a possible, and Tulsi Gabbard in reserve. That can change in four years, and likely will.

Democrats have a lot of powerful figures, people who are well-known across the country. Without any doubt whatsoever, AOC is topping some insider lists. Just like Harris, she ticks all the boxes: charismatic, successful, attractive, young, female. She’s a known rebel, however, and she’ll scare money interests. But some will be tempted to crown her as the anti-Trump. Then too, Harris will be awfully tempting, and for the same reasons she got the crown this time around.

What the Democrats really need to do, however, is create, run honestly, and trust an open primary process, one that filters out the cranks and showcases talent. They keep hand-picking losers and ignoring their own voters, not recognizing that this strategy is precisely what costs them election after election. What they need to do is encourage the best and brightest among their number to run, to debate, to compete — and may the best candidate win. If they do that, they can’t possibly lose… except against a Republican woman.

But of course they won’t.

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