How the Republican David Beat the Democrat Goliath

Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly can reach more voters than the droning anchors of ABC or the racialist rants from Joy Reid on MSNBC. Why did not Harris take Rogan up on his interview offer? Or, like Trump, venture into high-rated but not always assuredly friendly podcasts? What makes the podcast crowd more popular? They listen more to their audience, do not talk in politically correct parables, do not shut down to their listeners, and don’t reverberate the daily party lines issued by the DNC.

In sum, the Trump machine, for 10 cents on the Democrat dollar, got its message out to more voters and, more importantly, to more swing voters.

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Media

Yes, the Left controls the Media. But the times they are changing. The biased news network triad of ABC, NBC, and CBS, along with PBS and the cable MSNBC, CNN, and CNBC news channels, may garner over 20 million nightly network viewers. Their anchors may be higher paid and more prestigious than bloggers and podcasters. But the supposedly hip and cool connected Left never realized that it is a new age of podcasts and blogs for the majority of Americans, who are tired of the grim-faced, overpaid, blow-dried anchors who lie to them every night in promoting the progressive project.

So, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly can reach more voters than the droning anchors of ABC or the racialist rants from Joy Reid on MSNBC. Why did not Harris take Rogan up on his interview offer? Or, like Trump, venture into high-rated but not always assuredly friendly podcasts?

What makes the podcast crowd more popular? They listen more to their audience, do not talk in politically correct parables, do not shut down to their listeners, and don’t reverberate the daily party lines issued by the DNC.

In sum, the Trump machine, for 10 cents on the Democrat dollar, got its message out to more voters and, more importantly, to more swing voters.

Endorsements

Kamala Harris reportedly paid multi-billionaire Oprah Winfrey $1 million to stage a scripted interview with her, violating journalistic ethics and epitomizing grifter greed. Worse still, Harris reportedly spent nearly $20 million to hire grasping has-been celebrities and entertainers who required pay to perform and endorse her—and all for the supposedly morally superior cause.

Yet how would an endorsement of Kamala Harris from Bruce Springsteen or Cardi B persuade any of their audiences to switch over to Harris, given that most voters either don’t vote or were already committed Harris voters?

In other words, endorsements matter little—no matter the celebrity crush—if the endorsers only appeal to the already converted.

A Joe Rogan does not usually endorse candidates. However, when he endorsed Trump in the eleventh hour, he brought young men who might have otherwise stayed home or voted for Harris. Liz Cheney was a pathological Trump hater and only appealed to like kind. She tagged her along on the Harris campaign trail, won no new voters, and may have irked the Harris hate Haliburton crowd.

In contrast, a nod from RFK, JR., or Tulsi Gabbard made it socially acceptable for swing voters to support the verboten orange man. As a general rule, rich actors and elite celebrities cannot attract a single new voter to a ticket and are as likely to repel as attract voters.

Polls

We are stuck on the idea that the old familiar polls are still polls. They are not. They are partisan, leftist tools whose duty is to gin up momentum, help raise money for their candidates, and get out the vote. They reached a nadir in this election after disgracing themselves in 2016 and trumping that embarrassment in 2020.

So here are the accuracy rate percentages for the most “prestigious” polls’ predictions, compiled after the election:

Emerson 57%; Wall Street Journal 50%; Beacon (Fox) 50%; Marist 50%; Morning Consult 50%; Suffolk 50%; TIPP 43%; 538 43%; Quinnipiac 40%; Susquehanna 33%; CNN 33%; Bloomberg 33%; GSG 33%; Echelon 33%; Washington Post 33%; Data for Progress 25%; CBS 25%; Siena 14%; Cook 14%

At best, at around 50 percent accuracy, they are no more valuable than a coin toss. At worst, they are guides to believing the exact opposite of what they predict.

In contrast, the supposedly “conservative” polls, or the purportedly “new” polls, or the “outlier” polls were mostly right on the money:

Atlas Intel 100%; PollFair 86%; Rasmussen 86%; Trafalgar 71%; Insider Advantage 71%; Real Clear Politics 71%.

Someone asked me in the week before election day, “How do you know that Trump will win?” and I said I looked at the three or four polls that were most accurate in 2016 and 2020 and assumed they had no reason to lie in 2024, and they did not.

How could any poll claim that Trump would lose Pennsylvania when it was widely reported that in 2024, 600,000 more Republicans had newly registered than Democrats newly registered from the 2020 election—that saw Biden win the state only by about 80,000 votes? Did preelection reports of the Amish registering, of Hispanics breaking near even for Trump, of African American men, perhaps going 20 percent or more for Trump, of union members’ defections from Harris—all nonexistent in 2020 when the election was close—matter nothing?

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 different from 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 holds 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 compensate for what he lacks in paid commercials or huge staff with sheer energy, mostly free rallies, and covering more ground?

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 sympathetic fellow travelers who rounded up voters partly for the “cause” and at cheaper costs than to pay campaign workers to show up at people’s houses?

Generally, 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, even if 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 primarily 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?

Part of Harris’s problem was that its supposedly smug, young, hip, tech-savvy supporters, without evidence, were assumed to be more up on gadgetry, electronics, and internet modeling. At the same time, 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 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—all 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.

By: Victor Davis Hanson

November 13 & 15, 2024