Elections are not singular affairs. Every vote in the American system may be a binary output for or against one or the other candidate, but the simple yes-or-no, this-or-that of the vote bears with it a rich variety of inputs that yield the definable output. Campaigns are fundamentally about asserting and influencing those inputs. Abraham Lincoln called it “persuasion.” We can adopt the same term, but we must understand that the persuasion begins long before the campaign ever does.

This is worth remembering in this 2024 election season, especially as we head toward the final sixty days. History is a guide here, and we may expect a crowded passage to Nov. 5, but, as I predicted, the fundamentals are already in place. These fundamentals — an unpopular regime, a coronated nominee leading the ticket for that regime’s continuation and the sheer incapacities of that nominee — all neutralize the full-court press for a Democratic victory. “Vibes” and “joy” haven’t worked. At this writing, Kamala Harris has seen no convention bump in polling at all, and she is effectively tied in the polling aggregates with Donald Trump. The massive and orchestrated propaganda campaign in her favor, combined with the honeymoon period after her anointing, plus the convention means one thing: This is her ceiling.

It isn’t good enough to win.

One of the major reasons she’s stuck there — and why her opponent has every prospect of rising — is that prior persuasion. The electorate brings several hundred million lived experiences with them to the voting booth. And the reality is that those experiences have been almost uniformly poor.

Let’s face the facts: America has had a very difficult and — by American-historical standards — a very unhappy twenty-first century. From 9/11, to the seemingly endless and sometimes lost wars in the Islamic world, to the breakdown of the certainties of peace in Europe and Asia, to the failure of trade with China and Mexico, to the disappearance of American manufacturing, to the 2008 economic crisis, to persistent leftist violence in American cities since 2014 (sharply amplifying in 2020), to the return of serious crime to our big cities, to the fentanyl epidemic, to the COVID crisis, to the partisan weaponization of federal governance, to the migration crisis and beyond, the regime — whether Republican or Democratic — has consistently failed to deliver on the promise of the American Dream that was taken for granted for most of the preceding two centuries.

Those of the Millennial generation or younger have never seen anything else… except once. Except for one time, only, in their entire lives.

The sole exception to this downward trajectory came from roughly February 2017 to February 2020. We saw that brief moment in time when history seemed to reverse itself — when there were jobs, and no new wars, and security, and plenty, and promise and hope, even for the most marginalized communities in America.

And we know who was in charge when it happened.

That matters. That too is persuasion. That memory of how it was, linked to the promise of how it could be, how it ought to be, is an argument for the decision to be made. That’s a memory that gets linked directly to the choice before the American people now. And it is something that even the massive and orchestrated regime media efforts to push Kamala Harris over the top can do nothing about.

It isn’t about the superiority of Republican governance versus Democratic. Superficial analyses focus upon that partisan division and misses the fact that what Donald Trump brings to bear is a whole-of-regime case, landing squarely upon the inept stewards of both parties. The Harris case doesn’t quite grasp this. It misses the real division in American life, which isn’t that between Republican and Democratic, but between the rulers and the ruled.

The Democratic argument is that it brings together the rulers. The American argument is that the rulers have ruled long enough.

The rulers had a hard go across a quarter century. And while one candidate is advertising her endorsement from the people responsible for most of that time, signifying that she is in fact one of them, the other is reminding Americans that he presided over the one time when the rulers didn’t hold sway.

The former makes a case only for herself. The latter makes a case for the Americans.

Brooke Leslie Rollins is the President & CEO of the America First Policy Institute, and former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.