Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, warned on Fox Business on Friday that Republicans could lose to Vice President Kamala Harris this November.
Hanson appeared on “The Bottom Line” to discuss Harris’ policies and whether former President Donald Trump has a shot at beating her as the election draws near. He said Harris’ “radical” policy beliefs could work to Trump’s advantage, but warned that the team needs to stay focused on her and not get distracted by “ethnicity and cynicism.”
Fox Business co-host Dagen McDowell began by asking Hanson whether she thought the former president could “Dukakis” Harris, a reference to former President George W. Bush’s victory in the 1988 election despite his opponent, former Democratic presidential nominee Mike Dukakis, leading in the polls. (Related: “Firestorm”: Philadelphia Mayor May Have Accidentally Leaked Kamala Harris’ VP Pick)
“That’s going to be a central issue in the campaign, because on the one hand, they have 90 days, not a year or two, and she’s not going to be allowed anything other than a canned speech off a teleprompter in front of a receptive audience, just like Biden wasn’t allowed in 2022,” Hanson said. “They don’t have time to get bogged down in these cul-de-sacs about ethnic backgrounds and laughs and stuff. They need to get to the point and get everything they said out.”
“Good news that she’d never heard in her life resonated with an audience of opponents. She ran for state senator in California, she ran for office in the Bay Area, she dropped a short-lived primary bid in front of a left-leaning audience. In all these cases, her goal was to be the most left-wing onstage in a left-leaning milieu,” Hanson continued. “It’s not that she said all these things, she said them emphatically. She doubled down on them.” [and] She emphasized that she is an extremist. The records are all from the last 20 years.”
Speaking to reporters last night, Hanson highlighted Harris’ “wordplay” and continued to criticise what the Trump campaign needs to do in the race.
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“The Trump campaign will be obligated to find all of that, record it, air it and have journalists question her about it. The only time she had an unscripted moment was on the runway with Biden the other night, when in 60 seconds she did exactly what her entourage feared she would do: she descended into a litany of words: ‘wash, rinse, spin,'” Hanson said.
“So Trump needs to do that, and anything he can do helps. He needs to look back to the 1988 campaign, when Dukakis had a 17-point lead on August 1. Of course, they had Lee Atwater, who demonstrated the way it was done and destroyed the image, or the mystique, or whatever you want to call the illusion, of Mike Dukakis being competent and a technocrat,” Hanson said. “And he redefined Dukakis as a hard-core Massachusetts liberal who was a much more competent administrator and politician than Kamala Harris was. So they can do that, but they don’t have much time.”
After Biden announced he would not seek reelection, Harris received an outpouring of support from fellow lawmakers, donors and other politicians. Approval rating That doesn’t seem to be improving, but polls show the race between her and the former president is extremely close heading into November.
A recent Economist/YouGov poll found carried out According to the data, between July 27 and 30, 46% of 1,610 U.S. adults said they supported Harris, two points behind Trump at 44%, while the remaining 10% said they were still undecided, either voting for another candidate or abstaining from voting.
But the poll found that the margin of error within the poll is significant: +/- 3.3 percentage points for weighted data and +/- 3.1 percentage points for registered voters.
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