by Christopher Roach
It is hard for highly ideological people, including me, to understand undecided voters. But some of it seems to come down to the “cool” factor. Cool candidates win and uncool candidates do not.
Something deep in our psyche looks for that combination of confidence, popularity, social skills, and independence that make up being cool. This time around, Trump is the cool candidate, and Kamala is completely cringe.
Her lack of authenticity and charisma seem to be the primary reason for her losing ground with traditionally safe constituencies. She has looked weak by avoiding the press until recently, and her lack of substance quickly became apparent in her few appearances to date.
By contrast, look at Donald Trump’s recent trip to McDonald’s. It was a huge hit, and the media looked petty in downplaying it. He was having fun, as were the many employees there. He is a celebrity, and he is often generous to humble people such as McDonald’s workers.
He did not pretend to be one of them; he still wore his crisp white shirt and power tie. But he showed everyone respect, was genuinely curious questions about how things are done, and, by lending his time and celebrity, elevated the status of a job that often does not receive adequate respect. The whole thing was iconic.
When Trump visited McDonald’s, he exposed Kamala’s lies about working there. Not a single coworker has come forward to corroborate this story. Of course, working at McDonald’s was not particularly cool until recently, but even less cool is a globe-trotting lawyer, whose parents both had Ph.D.s, engaging in “stolen valor” by pretending to have worked this traditional middle-class, entry-level job.
McDonald’s was not the only iconic moment of this campaign. After two failed assassination attempts, Trump has shown the country that he is brave, defiant, and cool under pressure. Even his haters must respect his failure to be broken by the many pressures he is under, including multiple criminal prosecutions and a steady drumbeat of hateful media attention.
Kamala can’t do cool. Like so many in politics, she is fake. Growing up in the age of media campaigns and her party’s dominance in California, she never learned retail political skills, particularly the skill of dealing with voters in diverse locales such as the South or Midwest. Moreover, having grown up in California and Canada, she never learned how unpopular her far-left views were with real Americans in the heartland.
The extent of Kamala’s lack of cool is hard to fully fathom. When talking about her bona fides, she often says that she grew up “middle class,” to the point it has become a joke. She recently said her favorite living rapper is Tupac, which is definitely a niche view considering his reported death 24 years ago. Lacking the courage of her convictions — or even of her tastes — nervous laughter always appears in any interview or unscripted setting.
Fair or not, the cool factor loomed large in recent elections. Barack Obama’s 2008 victory had much to do with his widely perceived coolness. He was younger than his opponent, John McCain, as well as being smoother rhetorically. He was popular with young and old voters alike and had a restrained and erudite style quite different from the militant black politicians of yesteryear, such as Jesse Jackson. In 2008, many voters hoped that his election would help bury the hatchet on America’s persistent and festering racial conflicts.
Bill Clinton had the cool factor when he ran in 1992. At the time, there was a lot of hype about him being the first Baby Boomer president, which he embraced by famously playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show. While his opponent, George H.W. Bush, was an incumbent, a war hero, and had a lifetime of experience in politics and foreign policy, Bush was also an aloof WASP of the old school. Clinton, who came from a humble background, famously “felt your pain.” The country was changing, and Bush’s traditional values of austerity and self-containment were no longer in fashion.
Trump’s attention-seeking and love of fame match the tone of our era and its penchant for “influencers.” He had been a media sensation even before he ran for president. He was capturing headlines in the 1980s and frequently appeared on TV, in movies, and in advertisements.
He personified the brash, go-go, money-and-attention-seeking ethos of that era. He later made headlines in the 2000s on his show The Apprentice. More recently, he was known for showing off his acerbic wit on Twitter.
Thus, in 2016, Trump was many orders of magnitude cooler than Hillary Clinton. He was also pretty hilarious — a cool quality — mocking his opponents with custom nicknames, such as Lying Ted, Low Energy Jeb!, and, the best of them all, Crooked Hillary.
By contrast, Hillary’s tone was consistently censorious and preachy, both boring and entitled. While he punched back at critics, she would punch down at voters, labeling Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables.” She lost in part because she lacked her husband’s charisma and political skill, and a lot of voters found the thought of being scolded by this schoolmarm for four years intolerable.
This same dynamic is present in 2024. Kamala’s awkward, hesitant, and braindead answers to questions, her failure to connect emotionally with voters’ struggles, and her utterly incoherent account of why she is running have not won over voters.
Kamala Harris is unqualified and in over her head. There is nothing cool about that.
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Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel.
Photos by TeamTrump.
Good analysis. Bush 41 was sick most of ’92, so that played a factor and McCain spent more time undermining Sarah Palin than he did Barry.