The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has fundamentally transformed the presidential election in a way that may just deliver a lifeline to the Trump campaign. In picking Amy Coney Barrett, who will certainly face a barrage of personal attacks from Democrats on the Senate Judiciary, President Trump might just successfully reverse this election from a referendum against him to one against Kamala Harris.
Harris is only running for vice president, technically speaking. But between both Joe Biden and Harris’s repeated Freudian slips of “Harris administration” and a “Harris-Biden” ticket and Biden’s light campaign schedule, fears Biden is nothing but a puppet for Harris and the rest of the leftists are becoming more plausible.
Democrats won’t simply admit that Republicans have the votes to ram through Barrett’s nomination, cut their losses with a civil confirmation process, and campaign like hell in the swing states where Trump is still sorely underwater. Instead, they are keen to wage total war against Barrett, inadvertently giving Trump an effective campaign surrogate tailor-made to win over the suburban women and independents who may lean conservative but loathe Trump personally.
Consider, if you’re a generic Republican, would you rather have the news dominated by the thrice-married adulterer’s rage tweets, or on a brilliant, telegenic Catholic mother of seven getting attacked by every sexist and anti-religious smear in the book in an effort surely spearheaded by Harris on her plum seat on the Judiciary Committee?
Trump’s trailing poll numbers can be largely attributed to the fact that Biden is significantly less disdained than Hillary Clinton, and more Biden supporters cite the reason for their vote is to vote against Trump than any other candidate since at least 1988. While neither of these phenomena can be entirely reversed, they don’t have to be. Trump is only lagging by a few points in the states he needs the most. Given the historical stability of Biden’s number, that’s a catastrophe in an election largely arrested by a pandemic shutting down the country for half a year. But with a September surprise as stunning as a Supreme Court vacancy, that’s now an obstacle with a solution.
Just think about it: If Democrats were willing to unleash a strategy as ruthlessly evil as the one they used against Brett Kavanaugh, how low will they go against a judge far more conservative — perhaps in the mold of Clarence Thomas? In their pursuit of power, Democrats will give the GOP hours of attack ads featuring their senators, including the one vying to be one heartbeat away from the presidency. They will be smearing and shaming a woman for being Christian, which two-thirds of the country identify as, and for being pro-life, which 3 in 10 Democrats identify as. In addition, there will invariably be Handmaid’s Tale-esque claims that she must be some barefoot-and-pregnant doormat to her husband — despite, you know, her being such a successful career woman that she’s a Supreme Court nominee.
Biden, a likable liberal who ran explicitly with the appeal of a return to normalcy, was a uniquely effective candidate against Trump, the bombastic populist who turns off women and exhausts everyone. For the first time since the Kavanaugh hearings, the most covered person in the media heading into the election will be the brilliant and mild-mannered Barrett, and her primary antagonist will expose just how ruthless and norm-defying a Biden administration in name only would really be.
