David Plouffe, a top adviser to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, this week explained the failure to inspire independent voters: “This political environment sucked, okay?”
But political environments don’t just happen. They’re driven by governance, campaigns, culture, and the media. Including journalism.
According to a New York Times post-mortem of the Harris campaign, a Trump campaign ad and its followup had a devastating effect. The first ad described even liberal media as “shocked” by Harris’s 2019 support for “taxpayer funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.”
The ads were so devastating that the issue is now part of the conversation on the future of the Democratic Party. Adam Jentleson, a former Democratic Senate aide, wrote in the New York Times that candidates should stop offering up positions on “every issue under the sun.”
According to the Times’ post-mortem:
The ads were effective with Black and Latino men, according to the Trump team, but also with moderate suburban white women who might be concerned about transgender athletes in girls’ sports.
Those were the same suburban women Ms. Harris was trying to mobilize with ads about abortion.
Democrats struggled to respond.
