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Johnson on Harris’s Campaign Strategy: ‘They’re Counting on the American People to Be Unintelligent’

September 4, 2024

If you’re wondering why Kamala Harris is outperforming expectations, a new poll might explain it. According to a survey from McLaughlin and Associates, most Americans have no idea what the vice president stands for. (And her campaign is certainly in no hurry to tell them.) Incredibly, “large majorities” of registered Democrats and Independents who voted for Joe Biden four years ago “are mostly in the dark about many of the controversial and radical positions Harris has taken,” researchers explain. And the Left is more than happy to ride that ignorance all the way to the White House.

A whopping 71% had no idea Harris wants to defund the police; 73% were unaware that she cosponsored the Green New Deal; and another 81% had no idea the former California attorney general wanted to eliminate private health insurance. Just as many were clueless about her push to abolish ICE (77%), allow death row inmates to vote (86%), or decriminalize illegal immigration (74%). As for the unfortunate label of “most liberal senator” that Harris earned in 2019 from GovTrack (a tag the Left has gone to great lengths to erase), that was news to three-quarters of her own party.

Asked where these respondents got most of their information, the top answers were broadcast or cable news — both of which seem to be doing a very good job covering Harris’s tracks. Every time the vice president abandons her unpopular positions, “the media is calling it just a flip-flop,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) shook his head. “It’s worse than that. They’re clearly lying to the American people.” Voters should know where Kamala Harris stands, he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s “This Week on the Hill,” “because she has always stood there.”

In fact, Johnson reminded people, Harris “even said in the CNN interview … that she stands by her old positions that she had when she ran for president in 2019, and that she’s had her entire adult life. That record is very clear. She was clearly on record and on video many times, supporting the banning of fracking and being opposed to the oil and gas industry, the energy industry. She was in favor of letting illegals come into the country without any legal impediment at all. She wanted to decriminalize illegal border crossings. She said the border wall was a comical waste of funds and that it was un-American and all the rest. And now she’s trying to feign and pretend as though she never said those things. We have the record,” the speaker insisted.

At the end of the day, he underscored, “This election is about fact or fantasy. It’s about record over rhetoric. The stakes are too high right now,” Johnson argued, “and I think the American people are going to see right through this ruse. They are counting on the American people to be unintelligent, and they’re not.” They understand the significance of who’s in charge of the White House and Congress.

And frankly, the federal races are only a small piece of the broader puzzle. So many of the good conservative policies we’re seeing across the country are bubbling up from the local and state level, where issues like parental rights, girls’ sports, gender ideology, and abortion are truly being debated. In those battleground states, Perkins suggested, “Democrats are [trying] to dial back their really leftist, radical ideas, because they know the American people are not there.”

Johnson could attest to that after visiting 198 cities this campaign cycle — and counting. His goal, as a party leader, was to field men and women who would fight for the basic values that every American cares about. “We did a very deliberate job of candidate recruitment this cycle,” he pointed out, “and we recruited some extraordinary candidates. You mentioned Ohio and North Carolina, two perfect examples. Derek Merrin is running in the ninth district of Ohio. … He was the runner up to be the speaker of the House in the Ohio Legislature. …[H]e can flip that seat. It’s been held by a Democrat, Marcy Kaptur, for 41 years, and it’s going to go red in November.”

Down in North Carolina, the speaker believes Republicans can pick up as many as four seats because of redistricting. “But one of those that everybody’s watching is Lori Buckhout’s district there, an extraordinary candidate — a retired Army colonel and a devoted wife and mother.”

As grueling as the weeks have been — “I’ve done campaign events in … 39 states as of this afternoon — Johnson knows how critical November is to a nation that hangs by a thread under this administration. “This is a contrast election,” he reiterated. “We have to make sure that our friends and neighbors and people at church and synagogue — everybody in your sphere of influence — that they’re well informed. You can’t make an emotional decision this time. You’ve got to make a decision based on policy, not personality. … And the truth has to prevail here.”

Asked what Bible-believing Christians should be praying for as we approach the November election, the House speaker was contemplative. “I think that we should be praying for God’s mercy upon our nation,” he said seriously. “Sometimes we get the government we deserve, and we need to be praying that we don’t — that He gives us another chance. And I believe that He will,” Johnson concluded. “…We have to preserve this republic.”

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.