An Election Like No Other
Newsmax political expert Mark Halperin on what makes this race so different.
A
uthor and Newsmax political analyst Mark Halperin shook
up the political world in July by breaking the news that President Joe Biden would soon drop out of the presidential election. Other pundits contested the
accuracy of that report — but as events unfolded, Halperin was proven right.
He sat down with Newsmax Magazine to talk about the race.
country,” Hirsen adds. “It’s happening in constituency groups that wouldn’t normally be found shifting over from the left to the center right.”
Future at Stake In a nation where the political divide is now so vast that pundits openly talk about a “cold civil war” between Republicans and Democrats, it’s worth noting that there re- mains at least one thing both parties agree on: America’s future quite likely hangs in the balance of this election. Republican and Democrat activists both predict that if the other party wins, it will
Continued on page 74
Newsmax: Has there ever been a race in the modern political age featuring this much chaos and unpredictability? Halperin: This election features unique elements: an assassination attempt and an incumbent president giving up the nomination. But think back to 1992, when Ross Perot in the spring of that election year as an independent was actually leading the race, and we saw the victory of a Democrat presidential candidate. Think about 2000 with the Florida
recount, and all the craziness brought to an election that was decided, in effect, by the Supreme Court. And then there was 2008, with
a three-way contest between John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, plus the selection of Sarah Palin — a campaign I wrote a book
about, called Game Change. Certainly this cycle has been
extraordinary. But 1992, 2000, and 2008 were also very compelling, singular races.
Has the GOP done a good job defining Kamala Harris? One of the great ironies in the
switch from Biden to Harris is that, although [Donald] Trump is not technically the incumbent, he’s running with a lot of the disadvantages of an unpopular incumbent.
That means they have had to spend a lot of the summer and fall defining Harris on negative terms as best they could because she’s protected by the media, because she’s a more skilled performer than a lot of people gave her credit for. Because of the short time frame, they haven’t been able to do it in that robust a way. Probably the biggest problem has
been the reality that although Trump, in some circumstances, is a very formidable presidential candidate, the practice of reading opposition research, internalizing it, and really going out every day in a disciplined fashion and talking negatively about the other candidate — it’s just not his specialty. It’s alarming for Republicans who
felt they’d found themselves in a matchup where their candidate could do a lot of things on the campaign trail very well, but the thing he couldn’t do was bring discipline to dismantling somebody else at a time when that was all the party needed to win.
OCTOBER 2024 | NEWSMAX 73
HALPERIN/CRAIG BARRITT/GETTY IMAGES FOR SHOWTIME / MUSK/ DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES / WOMEN/KEREM YUCEL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
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