Retrospective on the 2024 US Presidential Election campaign.

There's finally a chance to see the election in some perspective. Each of Donald Trump's elections have been nail-biting.

For me, the trouble started with Joe Biden's nomination in 2020. He wasn't originally going to be nominated, but he was up against Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The moderates put their heads together, and decided to drop out and let him run. They wanted to avoid a repeat of 2016 where Hillary and Bernie Sanders fought each other so hard that it weakened Hillary just enough to lose her the election. So that's the first mistake, that there was a conspiracy against Sanders (again).

The second mistake wasn't his fault. Biden didn't have to be on the campaign trail because he could run against Trump from indoors, due to the COVID pandemic. Again, it seemed that circumstances were unnaturally aiding Biden, an impression that would come to haunt him.

The third mistake was that he agreed beforehand to name a woman as VP. This was an extremely significant choice, because it was likely that whoever he named would eventually be a presidential nominee in the future. (This turned out to be the case). This gave the impression that Kamala was parachuted into this position, instead of earning it on her own merit. And this impression was probably bolstered by the fact that Kamala had to fold her 2020 campaign before the primaries voting even started, and this seriously damaged her reputation to the extent that she never even recovered.

Now that I have the benefit of hindsight, I can look at the election and compare it to the 2016 election. Upon reflection, Hillary Clinton was a superior candidate to Kamala Harris in almost every aspect. She was one of the most qualified people to ever stand for presidential elections. The only thing about Hillary was that she was unlikeable. Otherwise, she had a good record as a Senator and a Secretary of State, and was a good enough politician that Bill Clinton wanted to marry her. She governed well and had a mastery of detail. Kamala Harris would struggle to explain to people why she ought to be president at all.

So when you compare Hillary to Kamala, you actually wouldn't expect Kamala to outperform Hillary. But Kamala actually underperformed Hillary by not very much. Hillary won the popular vote by a few percentage points. Kamala lost by 1 percent. Although Trump in 2024, remember, is also a weaker candidate than in 2016. Now, many more people know that he's a criminal, and know that he tried – rather desperately, one might add – to steal the 2020 election.

I think that's the reason why the criticism of Kamala was a bit more muted – people probably thought that she was so crap that they are surprised that she lost that narrowly to Trump.

There are a few things that will go against Kamala this time around. There are the things that were the holdovers from 2020 – that she made her hash of her first presidential run, that Biden had the nomination handed to him on a platter, that he then handed the VP nomination to her on a platter, and that they were never tested in a real presidential campaign because COVID made it impossible to have a conventional campaign.

On top of this, Biden also cheated by covering up his health issues from the public, not just as a candidate, but also as a president. It's bad enough to pretend that you're healthy and well to be a candidate, but it's probably even worse to pretend that you're well enough to be a president. Then who the hell was running the show?

And to top it all off, Kamala Harris was given an endorsement by Joe Biden right away, after Joe Biden said that he wasn't going to run. One of the more shocking revelations of this book is that it was Kamala who said to Joe Biden, “you have to endorse me immediately”, and he immediately complied. It's almost as though Joe Biden never prepared for the contingency that he was one day not going to run, until it was forced upon him, and didn't think through who was going to be the Democratic nominee. The only reason why I think he endorsed her was to keep the nomination “in the family”, and Biden considered Kamala Harris part of the family.

While Joe Biden is a solid president, there's no evidence that Kamala Harris would have been a good president, in hindsight. She mainly got her votes because there are more people this time around who know that Trump is incompetent, as opposed to in 2016, when it was easier to pretend that he was just acting crazy for show. Kamala Harris had a lot of endorsements early in the campaign, and there was a great initial wave of enthusiasm for her, as the person who didn't get as much hate as Trump got. But then later people got to know Kamala better and they started probing for who she really was, and they started to realise that she had done very little to deserve her nomination. That's when she started to lose those crucial votes that would have catapulted a Democrat into the White House.

It's also notable that Obama and Nancy Pelosi's preference was to have an open convention and redo the primary. But there were reasons why Kamala would have wanted to run. She might have thought that it was a fait accompli for her to be nominated and given that she was going to be nominated anyway, she had to have the endorsement from Biden right away. As opposed to that she was forcing him to make her the presidential nominee and actively shaping the course of events.

Another thing that counted against Kamala was that both Obama and Hillary recounted that they had to fight tough primary campaigns. Hillary had to fight two tough primary campaigns, whereas Biden and Kamala Harris had their nominations handed to them on a platter, that not ony was Biden's nomination essentially a coronation – he got the gay candidate (Buttegieg) and female candidates (Warren and Klobuchar) to step aside to led him run – the bye that he received extended to Kamala Harris too. They allowed him to run because the perception that Biden, as a white male was more electable than the rest. Then suddenly that opened the door for the black female to be shooed in. That looked a lot like Kamala Harris was the DEI hire. Fewer people considered Obama the DEI hire because he managed to prove himself by beating Hillary in 2008.

Presidential candidates are not annointed. They are given the opportunity to showcase their worth to on the world stage to millions of people watching in a primary. It's the primary which is the making of the candidate. It's through the primary process that great candidates like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are unearthed. The Democrats appeared to have an embarrassment of riches in 2008 when it seemed as though they had not one but two viable presidential candidates. But this bounty was squandered. It turns out that 2000 didn't unearth any great candidates – Al Gore was basically almost given the candidacy because he was picked as VP and didn't have to sell himself to the world, and this was disastrous for the Democrats to retain the White House. 2004 only unearthed John Kerry and John Edwards. John Edwards carried forth into 2008, and revelations about his infidelity basically disqualified him from running again. In 2012, there were no candidates unearthed because there was no primary – Obama was the presumptive nominee. In 2016, there were 2 presumptive nominees waiting, Hillary and Biden, and while Bernie Sanders was a very strong candidate, there are doubts about his suitability to be the president, due to his radicalism and his politics. In 2020, there was Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. But curiously enough, no great figure on the scale of an Obama.

2024 was supposed to be the year when there could have been candidates to put themselves forward. People talked about the amount of talent that was available, in people like Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz and Gavin Newsom. But none of them got the chance to showcase themselves on the world stage. And that was what was so damaging about what Biden had done. 2024 would have been a great time for younger people – the post Baby Boomers to put themselves forward for the president's job, to at least keep themselves in the public spotlight for 2028. And nobody picked up the mantle. Alexander Ocasio Cortez might be getting enough mileage to put herself forward in 2028, but we don't really know.

The silence around the Democratic Party has been deafening. There are people who openly doubt whether it's a good idea to be protesting Donald Trump since day 1. And Donald Trump has actually made it very hard for the protesters to be out in full force. The Democrats might take a chance that Donald Trump's own actions made Republicans even more toxic than before. But then they'll be accused of doing nothing during the nation's darkest hour.

It's very notable that this book has really been about more of Democrats than the Republicans. Most of the narrative in the clip has been about Democrats, and not very much actually has been about Republicans. Trump has nominated a firebrand as a VP, and I can't imagine JD Vance doing the same thing that Mike Pence did if another January 6 broke out. I don't know if the Harris campaign was actually thinking “we're not actually going to lose this, are we?” throughout the campaign.