Hoover Institute senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson warned Friday on Fox Business how the Republican Party could potentially lose to Vice President Kamala Harris this November.
Hanson appeared on “The Bottom Line” to discuss Harris’ policies and if former President Donald Trump has the ability to beat her as the race draws closer. The senior fellow stated that while Harris‘ “radical” policy beliefs can benefit Trump, their team needs to focus on them warning they can’t be sidetracked by “ethnic background or cackling.”
Fox Business co-host Dagen McDowell began by asking Hanson if he believed the former president would be able to “Dukakis” Harris, referring to the 1988 election where former President George W. Bush ended up winning despite his opponent, former Democratic presidential nominee Mike Dukakis being ahead in the polls.
“That’s going to be the central issue of the campaign. Because on the one hand, they don’t have one or two years, they only have 90 days and she’s not going to be allowed, as was Biden not allowed in 2022, to do anything other than teleprompted set speeches in front of receptive audiences,” Hanson said. “They don’t have time to go down all of these cul-de-sacs about ethnic background or cackling, all that. They got to get right to the point and that’s to draw out on all these things they said.”
“The good news she’s never in her life spoke to an oppositional audience. She ran for state office in California, she ran for office in the Bay Area, she had aborted a brief primary candidacy in front of left-wing audiences. In all of those cases, her aim was to be the furthest left on the stage in a left-wing environment,” Hanson continued. “It’s not that she said all these things, she emphatically said them, she doubled down on them [and] she stressed that she was a radical. They’re all over the last 20 years in the record.”
Hanson continued to call out what Trump’s team is going to have to do in the race as he highlighted Harris’ “word salad” last night during an interview with reporters.
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“It’s going to be incumbent upon the Trump campaign to find them all, to document them, to air them and to force the journalists to ask her about them. The one time she has had one unscripted moment, and that was just on the tarmac with Biden the other night. In 60 seconds she did exactly what her handlers are afraid of, she just melted down in that word salad — wash, rinse, spin,” Hanson said.
“So that’s what Trump needs to do and anything he can do that will be conducive. He needs to look at the 1988 campaign when Dukakis was 17 points ahead on Aug. 1. Of course they had somebody named Lee Atwater, who demonstrated how to do it and he destroyed the image, or the mystique, or I guess you would call it the fantasy, that Mike Dukakis was just about competence and a technocrat,” Hanson said. “And he redefined him as a hard-core Massachusetts liberal, and he was a much more effective executive or politician than was Kamala Harris. So they can do it, but they don’t have a lot of time.”
Following Biden’s announcement to end his reelection bid, Harris received an onslaught of support from fellow lawmakers, donors and other political figures. While the vice president approval rating appears to not have improved, polls between her and the former president are showing an extremely tight race for this November.
Within a recent The Economist/YouGov poll conducted between July 27-30, out of 1,610 U.S. adult citizens 46% stated they would be supporting Harris, throwing Trump behind 2 points at 44% and the remaining 10% either being casted to another candidate, abstaining from voting or still undecided, data shows.
However, the margin of error within the poll is notably +/- 3.3% for data adjusted for weight and +/- 3.1% for registered voters, according to the poll.
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