It is strange to argue that the election of Vice President Kamala Harris would be better for Republicans than that of former President Donald Trump. Yet the liberal side of the media has tried to push this message, omitting the real damage a Harris presidency could cause.
A cultural argument is an easy first appeal. To some, Trump represents all that has gone wrong with the Republican Party. They say he lacks character and has driven the GOP to a show of promiscuity and brutality: The only solution is to abandon one’s values to the Left and let it all crumble, so that Republicans can restart.
Others, with the Democratic Party as their starting point, sigh over the country’s state of “wokeness” and see Trump as the catalyst. (Quite different from the first argument, but curiously the same conclusion.) He consolidated the far-left into what it is by bemoaning the state of the nation, in their view, and so his fight is self-defeating. Voting for Harris is a much better bet for those who want to stamp out woke culture.
Still others make a strategy-based argument, given how the power of the Democratic Party is concentrated. Democrats are united, vigorously, against Trump — and that’s about it. To kick him off stage would prove ruinous for a party so otherwise disparate. On top of that, Republicans may easily slip into control of the Senate and prove effective at shutting out Harris’s unwanted proposals. A win for Harris at once scatters Democratic unity and locks in Republican majorities.
Except it does not. This third view is more compelling than the cultural despair of the first two, but it downplays just how damaging a Harris presidency would prove in itself.
At the very least, we should be able to take Harris at her word to predict immediate damage. When asked about what she would do on Day One of the presidency, Harris answered that she plans to implement her “opportunity economy.” Whatever that really means, it refers to such policies as an increase to the tax credits (without also promoting marriage), enormous housing credits, and, of course, price controls.
Those are the few plans she has revealed. Less economic, Harris has been noisiest about “reproductive rights,” mainly abortion access. It would be foolish to expect she would not try to deliver most on abortion, given how much the Harris-Walz campaign has centered on the concept. The Supreme Court will remain a conservative majority, thankfully, but Harris could still sign serious anti-life measures and galvanize state-level pro-abortion factions.
It is not too inconceivable that Harris does what she has done as vice president, just more loudly and further left. Long-term, this means the damage accumulated under President Joe Biden hardens into catastrophe as Harris doubles-down on Democratic methods. Things like immigration will continue to worsen (there is no way she builds a border wall), with all the effects to employment and safety that accompany it.
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Consider all the smaller policies on which Harris seems to have flipped, like the electric vehicle mandate. There is no reason she cannot flip again later in her presidency, at just the right time.
Worst, then, is the hiding Harris has done her whole campaign and shows no sign of stopping. It is dishonest — that is clear. More damaging might be the public acceptance of such pretensions for years to come. Once we elect someone who hides from the media and lies about policy positions, election standards shift even more than people feared they had under Trump.