Harris is not incompetent, but I don't think voters are as drawn to competence as they are to potential disruption of the status quo.
RocktheCasbah It goes on a bit, but Peter Oborne lays out the case for how Johnson and Trump systematically dismantled the norms of politics and converted the truth into something that means whatever they want it to.
This idea isn't so new though: it has been a mainstay of "normie" political philosophy at least since the relatively conservative moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt published ON BULLSHIT in the Dubya era.
I think the emphasis on truth is badly misplaced as we've seen no amount of truth shifts the viciousness of elite power for decades. Climate change politics around the world is an extremely salient example: there's been consensus on the truth for decades (despite a tiny minority of cynical and well-funded denialist propagandists) but it's not a decisive issue for the geographically mobile elite, so any movement to mitigate climate change has tended to be agonisingly slow.
(I was walking over Aletsch Glacier the other day and it'll probably barely exist by the end of this century.)
In this situation, what's going to mobilise the public is the sense of a way to restore their own power and possibly sovereignty—and repellent as he is and as allied to billionaires and dictators as he may be, Trump is still more at odds with the establishment than Harris.
(Should be noted this doesn't mean Trump commands all the support there is, the polls are evenly split. But I reckon this remains a significant factor in mass perceptions that works in his favour.)
Anyway I've been saying this on here for literal years whether it's been about Clinton, Biden, Harris, Miliband, Starmer etc. Starmer's been in power for about three months and already has over 50% disapproval ... and ... I did fuckin' tell you so. And no, this is not about me having the slightest skerrick of affection or respect for any right wing populist scumbag.
