Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge.
President Joe Biden is out of the presidential race, dismissed by the donors who run the modern Democrat Party.
As for the millions of primary voters who chose Biden, the deep state guardians of democracy, those acolytes of that fabled rules-based order … broke all the rules.
For those following along at home, Joe Biden’s been demented—er, he’s had dementia—for years now. This was a conspiracy theory until roughly two and a half days ago, when mainstream media declared it true in the face of polling saying that Joe would lose the election to former President Donald Trump.
At the moment, it looks like Joe’s replacement is his insurance policy VP, though there are murmurs that donors might replace Kamala Harris with somebody who is less annoying to voters, cackles and all.
The first question is what this does to the election.
My go-to is the betting sites, which are consistently more reliable than the so-called experts, and certainly more credible than the media’s gaslight polls. And, crucially, they take cheating into account.
In short, betting markets say Trump had 63% odds of winning against Biden, and now he has 62% against Harris. So, she’s a stronger candidate than a screaming dementia patient who sniffs kids, but just barely.
Still, for now, it’s Kamala for the Democrats’ nomination—betting markets say it’s 84%.
So, what would Kamala do to the economy?
We don’t have much from Kamala on either the economy or the Federal Reserve, but what we do have says she’d be substantially to the left of Biden.
On the Fed, Kamala was one of just 13 senators (including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts) to vote against Jerome Powell’s nomination as chairman because he’s not inflationary enough. As vice president, she mostly just pushed the Fed to focus on diversity.
On the broader economy, Harris mostly toed Biden’s line as vice president, so we have to go pre-Biden. As senator, Kamala was rated by the nonpartisan GovTrack as the most liberal U.S. senator—to the left of Warren or self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders.
Kamala scored a 7% from the National Rifle Association and a 4% from Club for Growth, meaning she’s a gun-grabbing tax hiker. The New York Times described her as a “pragmatic moderate,” which means she’s a raging communist.
In the Senate, Kamala pushed left-wing causes from affirmative action to sanctuary cities to a $10 trillion climate change plan.
She voted against Trump’s tax cuts. And she voted against the Trump administration’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement, because it didn’t “confront climate change.” The one thing she has liked is the forever wars.
We’re in the biggest presidential succession crisis since at least 1968. We don’t even know if Biden is of sound mind. So maybe Kamala will be president tomorrow. Or maybe donors will dismiss her out of the race altogether.
What we can say is that everybody currently on the radar on the Dems’ side would be as bad or worse than Biden. There are still centrists in the Democrat orbit, such as Joe Manchin, John Fetterman, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But with left-wing donors in charge, though, none of them are in the running.
As for the economy and government spending: If it felt like a runaway train with nobody in charge, now we know it’s a runaway train with nobody in charge.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.