I’m not so sure. I want to see the numbers first. W “won” the Hispanic vote with 40%. But he spoke Spanish, as does his wife and a good portion of his family. And he had a Mexican-American sister-in-law helping him stump and raise money.
If Trump outperforms him, I’ll listen to arguments on a shift.
If she loses, the story will be that she didn’t have time to develop her message.
The reality is that the fundamentals didn’t favor her with inflation, the retreat from Afghanistan and real weakness in opportunities for young men in our society.
Top that off with the fact that she just wasn’t a good candidate. She’s not good at it. Appears incapable of relaxing or delivering concise answers. Refused to discuss any plans. Not really inspiring. Not as bad as Clinton, but up there. They needed a retail politician to overcome inflation. They selected maybe the worst choice for that out of the dozen or so contenders.
I think they selected the candidate they were kinda saddled with by Biden. I have thought about "What if they held an open convention and Pete Buttigieg or Getchen Whitmer emerged?"
I dunno that it makes a difference, as that also fractures the party with a potentially divisive and back room decision. Might have been better, but it's all armchair quarterbacking at this point.
She wasn't perfect, but was the probably the best hope with a badly floundering Biden campaign. If he had dropped out a month later, she might have pulled it off. Or (ideally) a year earlier, and allowed an actual primary to happen. If anyone is to blame, it's Biden himself for not being self-aware enough to realize he was in a fatal position of weakness a lot earlier.
But no hard feelings toward Harris. She was the candidate we had, not the candidate anyone really wanted. And that wasn't her fault. But she gave it her best shot and I have many of the same criticisms as you do. I voted for her because no matter how flawed she was, I saw Trump as an order of magnitude more flawed.
But as drboobay pointed out, people aren't necessarily rational actors and the general public can't easily look at inflation and say "Yeah, that sucks and hurts all of us. But the US actually did better than most countries on that, and was largely out of the control of any president." When people miss rent or go hungry or defer medical tests/procedures, they'll blame whomever is in power. Hard to blame them. Not terribly surprising, just disappointing.
