Post Trump victory and sleek-headed MSNBC Democrats-surrogate Joy Reid is on TV saying Kamala Harris ran a ‘flawless campaign’. Is she drunk? The like-minded panellists agree – are they drunk too, full of that lurching morality and celebrity name-checking you often spot on The View whenever Whoopi Goldberg pivots, editorialises and ‘refuses to say His Name’, like he’s an electoral Voldemort. Whoopi forgets that some people think the Bad Guy is cool. Isn’t she in showbiz?

An election campaign after an election result is like a corpse. Pollsters and commentators circle and prod, searching for answers. Even ones from Australia planning for next year’s federal election. Occasionally dependents will say how beautiful the body looks even as its laid out on the slab and the embalming fluid flows. More realistic friends will say this is only Stage One – Denial, ‘They don’t know what they’re saying. Do they need sedating, has anyone seen the will?’

The Kamala Campaign wasn’t good. Good campaigning requires a consistent world-view as it gives the popcorn-munching masses a sense of security, and the notion that who you’re investing your belief in believes in something too. The Harris campaign was anything but and went through many stages which for the sake of completeness need to be understood, or seen to be believed, especially if you’re a strategist hoping to pick up a future campaign consultancy. They are:

Strength through Joy – in the early weeks of the Harris campaign and with Biden freshly removed, a reset was required. Like all past vice presidents, Harris had gone largely unnoticed, but was mainly known for her signature, loud, occasionally inappropriate laugh – The Cackle – a personality tic that couldn’t be hidden (and why should it be? – if it feels good, do it! to quote the faux libertarian scolds of California and the doorman at a P. Diddy marathon). Sometimes it was a magnificent thing – a political replication of the high-voltage white-teeth smiles of Julia Roberts as she submerges her head in the bathtub during Pretty Woman or George Clooney in anything featuring Catherine Zeta-Jones. Oprah riffed on the joy. If joy was booze she’d be on the third bottle. She said this is a campaign about ‘JOYYYY!!’ like she does when announcing the free car under your seat on her now defunct show for middle-aged cat women who married well and outsource the grooming to illegals.

You’re Weird – Kamala chose Tim Walz as her running mate. A genuinely warm personality but eccentric as he flapped his arms and strutted onto the campaign stage. A recreational shooter who couldn’t get his gun to work during a photo op to highlight his masculinity, The Cackle meets The Walz: Weird meets Weird, which led to a classic moment of campaign projection when counterintuitively they started referring to the Trump-Vance ticket as ‘weird’. Certainly, there was a lot to work with: Vance’s cat ladies and eyeliner, Trump’s fixation on illegals eating family pets. With Trump though, it’s well established he doesn’t care what others think as he points at his bank account and looks to the scoreboard. For Harris-Walz it’s difficult given left-wing politics is predicated on worrying about what your neighbours think. ‘Weird’ seemed an odd projection given the DEI, woke project is largely based on the notion that nothing is ‘weird’, not even the  topless guy attending your rallies demanding women’s rights while wearing a vinyl dog snout.

Hard work is good work – this was the campaign’s Bob the Builder phase. Stung at the suggestion that Harris had announced few policies and lacked depth, she started riffing on the fact that her campaign fights, and when they fight they win, and its hard work and yes hard work is good work. This schoolmarmish flex played off the rhetoric of Tim Walz’s wife who would speak at rallies and wildly gesturing announce that we will ‘turn the page’, even though given the last four years have been a Biden-Harris presidency what are they turning the page from?

Bring in the clowns – that didn’t work, so if it’s Tuesday, then it must be Beyoncé. Wednesday, Bruce Springsteen, etc, ad nauseam. The Democrats have always done celebrity better than Republicans (though Hulk Hogan ripping off his t-shirt was funny), but if one of the main criticisms of your campaign is that you lack substance and you keep claiming you are ‘middle class’ (whatever that actually means), it’s probably not too smart rolling out wealthy entertainers to speak on your behalf. Cardi B, a deer frozen in the spotlight until someone handed her her phone so she could read her endorsement was a glittering metaphor for the campaign, even down to the occasional teleprompter glitches that left Harris lost for words.

You’re Hitler – when nothing else including celebrities works, call your opponent Hitler, fascist, Mussolini. Alas, as everyone who ever noisily posted an opinion on socials know, that’s the moment you have conceded you lost the argument. The memo seemed to go out across the mainstream media – which raises all sorts of questions about high-profile commentators seeming to use Harris’s campaign talking points in unison. This was campaign as moral blackmail – if you vote for Trump, you’ve literally killed democracy. Talk show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert kept this grift going – lost for words and almost crying in their post-result opening monologues.

Americans have spoken – ‘Literal Hitler’ not having shifted the dial (or quite possibly internal polling showing it pissed people off) the Harris campaign reverted to the safer waters of ‘hard work is good work’. The inspired choice that was Tim Walz is nowhere to be seen, his hectoring turn-the-page wife gone. Joy and Weirdness barely get a mention. As Trump realises he is about to – or has won – he’s the one with the optimistic spin – with melodramatic flourishes about a golden age for America. It’s a weird poetic riff coming from a notorious political pugilist. Harris gives a gracious concession speech to her followers acknowledging the result and saying we will work together. Strange thing to say if you really thought your opponent was Hitler.

She is being magnanimous – who knows she may want to run again. The weird thing is that as she addresses the crowd, she seems almost presidential.