Voters throughout the nation rejected the Harris campaign’s closing strategy of smearing President-elect Donald Trump as a “fascist, Hitlerian dictator bent on destroying democracy.”
The failure of the divisive rhetoric, pushed by establishment media allies for years, raises questions about whether or not Democrats will continue to use it.
Leading up to Election Day, data suggested the electorate was not believing the rhetoric.
A Washington Post/Schar School poll of key swing states found in October that a plurality of voters believed Trump would do a better job of defending democracy than Vice President Kamala Harris.
An NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll showed in May that a majority of independent voters believed President Joe Biden was a greater threat to democracy than Trump.
Some Democrats tried before Election Day to warn the party about the failure of the rhetoric.
“Attacking Trump’s Fascism Is Not That Persuasive,” read one memo from a pro-Harris group, Future Forward, the New York Times reported.
The warning came as members of Democrat resistance groups indicated party members might be violent if Trump won the election, undermining the Harris campaign’s smear and her original “campaign of joy,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday:
Others are channeling their nervousness into action: They are planning to attend Women’s Marches scheduled in Washington and beyond on the Saturday before the election. In Boston, they are joining pill-packing parties, where volunteers fill boxes with abortion kits to mail to women in red states with strict limits. “We feel like we’re doing something,” said Erin Gately, a 47-year-old physician assistant who last time took to the streets to protest after Trump’s election, but says this time she would focus on tangible actions like protecting reproductive rights.
“I think there’ll be some violence. I think there’ll be workplace fights. There’ll be fights at kids’ birthday parties. I think they’ll be protests and will turn violent,” Mark Halperin recently told Tucker Carlson about a potential Trump win.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.