Gary Willigis a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva News Staff.
Just as the New York Yankees defeated themselves with three separate defensive blunders in the fifth inning of the deciding game of the 2024 MLB World Series, US Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party defeated themselves in the 2024 presidential and senatorial races.
The first seeds of Donald Trump’s stunning political comeback today were planted in August 2021 with America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. From then on, America projected weakness to its enemies and rivals on the global stage while facing severe inflation, economic stagnation, a crisis at the southern border, and growing internal polarization at home.
Joe Biden has not been a good president, irrespective of his apparent mental decline. This made yesterday’s election an uphill battle from the start for the Democrats. Even so, Donald Trump’s unpopularity gave them a chance at holding onto the White House if they had run a smart campaign.
Much will be said about Biden’s refusal to drop out until the summer before the election, the choice to nominate an even more unpopular Vice President in his place and the absence of a party primary, and Harris’ refusal to discuss what her policies and positions are and to even say what she’d do differently from the current administration, all of which contributed to her loss.
But there is another factor that may have been more decisive than it has been given credit for.
Both the Biden campaign and the Harris campaign actively courted the antisemites constituency.
About a year ago, Biden’s people began to panic over polling data showing Arab voters in Michigan moving away from the Democrats over their perceived support for Israel following the October 7 massacre. Radical progressives were also up in arms against Israel and in support of Hamas as soon as word of the massacre began to reach America’s shores. US government rhetoric and policy began to turn against Israel at least partially as a result.
For all of 2024, US policy has been to project weakness in the Middle East by pressuring Israel into accepting a one-sided ceasefire that would have saved Hamas and Hezbollah and paved the way for more October 7s. The Administration has amplified false charges of war crimes against Israel, giving tailwind to attempts to convict Israelis for the crime of not dying at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.
The people Biden and Harris were trying to appease do not only hate Israel. They also hate America. In a ‘Quds Day’ rally in Dearborn, Michigan in April, speakers and the crowd chanted “Death to America” in addition to “Death to Israel.” On July 4, America’s Independence Day, anti-Israel protesters burned American flags in New York City.
This past year has seen a historic wave of antisemitism, with college campuses and city streets the sites of genocidal marches and rallies, explicit calls for the genocide of millions of Jews, and a culture of hate and violence. Synagogues have been protested, Jews assaulted, and Jewish students threatened.
How did Harris respond to this outpouring of Nazi-level hate? She claimed that the people calling for another Holocaust and the destruction of the country she was seeking to lead "are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.”
More recently, when an anti-Israel protester started shouting at her about the non-existent Gaza “genocide” at a campaign event, her response was to say, “It’s real and I respect his voice.”
This moral cowardice is beneath contempt for any public official, and should be disqualifying from serving in the most powerful leadership position in the world, an office that demands more than a modicum of courage.
It was also stupid, because the only way to deal with the hate they spread is to confront it. Treating it as anything other than the evil it is only feeds it, and those who spread it will never be satisfied unless the US started sending guns, tanks, missiles, and F-35s to Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis - and nuked Tel Aviv.
Harris was hardly alone in bowing to the worst people in America.
If last week’s Congressional report on the wave of antisemitism on college campuses is accurate, thenSenate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is guilty of the worst betrayal of the Jewish people in American history since the US under FDR refused to bomb the train tracks leading to Auschwitz.
Emails show that Schumer, the man who likes to claim that his name means ‘guardian,’ apparently decided that people who celebrate the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, people who call for the murder of Jewish students and for 10,000 more October 7s, are the people who he needs to guard. By telling Columbia administrators that only Republicans care about the issue of antisemitism and that they should not cooperate with the Congressional investigation, he abandoned and betrayed every Jew in the US.
Schumer proved that he never deserved his office and that he puts what he perceived to be the needs of his party above the needs of his people and of his nation. His name will be remembered in shame and infamy for all time.
Back to Harris. As horrifying as her cozying up to genocidal antisemites was, it was still a marginal issue for the vast majority of the American electorate, who, while disturbed by these acts of cowardice, were more concerned with the economy, immigration, and abortion than anything else. It would have remained a marginal issue had Harris made a smarter decision in her choice of running mate.
Not choosing Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was one of the great political blunders of modern times. Shapiro is popular in his home state of Pennsylvania, which was long seen as the most crucial swing state in this election with its 19 electoral college votes, and picking him would have given her a big boost there. In addition, his positions on issues such as energy would have been more appealing to moderate voters across the country.
Shapiro had one insurmountable problem. He is Jewish and Zionist, and this is unacceptable to the antisemitic progressives. How much of a role this played in the foolish decision to snub him may never be known, but it signalled to the antisemitic sharks that their hate was winning, and it may well have cost Harris the presidency.
Choosing Michigan over Pennsylvania proved to be the worst choice Harris and the Democrats could have made. Walz crumbled in his debate with J.D. Vance and has been the subject of numerous controversies relating to allegations of lying about multiple issues, including his military service. Harris lost Pennsylvania by a close margin, under three percentage points and two hundred thousand votes, according to the latest counts with more than 95% of ballots counted when this article was written. That is a margin that could easily have been made up for by the inclusion of the state’s popular governor.
Moreover, Harris lost Michigan as well. Like all constituencies, Muslim voters are not a single-issue monolith represented solely by the most extreme elements, and it was mistake to assume placating the “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” protesters would secure their votes.
It turns out that focusing on a small population of people who hate Jews and America is not a good campaign strategy. Standing up for what’s right and attempting to reach the widest possible voter base would have been the smarter move in addition to the moral move. Standing up to those who hate America and openly call for its destruction instead of defending them would have gone over far better with the 99% of Americans who love their country.
Would picking Josh Shapiro and thereby winning Pennsylvania have been enough to turn the entire election around? Maybe not, given the campaign’s other mistakes. But it would at least have been much closer and given Harris a much better chance than picking Walz. A few hundred thousand votes in four swing states could have made her America’s next president.
There are Democrats who have shown the courage and moral clarity Harris and Chuck Schumer have failed to show. Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and New York Congressman Ritchie Torres, the latter of whom was re-elected, have been outspoken in their defense of Israel and the Jewish people over the last year, beacons of reason and righteousness.
Torres called out the problem following reports that Trump received 43% of the Jewish vote in New York City, the highest percentage any Republican has received in 40 years, noting that “The Anti-Israel fanaticism of the far left is entirely to blame for the erosion of Jewish support.”
The Democratic party must take an accounting after this loss. The party as a whole must realize that the way forward and the way to regain the trust of the electorate is the way of John Fetterman and Ritchie Torres, not the way of Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar. If Fetterman had been Senate Majority Leader instead of Schumer, America would be in a better place now, because instead of cowering before it, the Senate would take antisemitism as seriously as the House.
Be John Fetterman and Ritchie Torres. Don’t be Chuck Schumer or Kamala Harris.
For Israel’s sake, America’s sake, and the world’s sake, I wish President-elect Trump luck and pray that can build on the successes of his first term such as the Abraham Accords and that this time he avoids letting his personal foibles damage his final term.
We can only hope that in 2028 the Democrats will as a whole have come to the realization that pandering to antisemites doesn’t pay, replaced the likes of Chuck Schumer with real leaders, and nominated a candidate who stands up to evil instead of fearing losing its vote, a candidate who knows the difference between right and wrong.