The fatal flaws in a doomed election bid

On November 6, 2024By Littum

WASHINGTON — When Kamala Harris appeared on ABC’s “The View” last month, it was supposed to be a friendly forum to introduce herself to Americans unfamiliar with her story.

Instead of explaining what she would do differently from President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate struggled. “Not something that comes to mind,” Harris, the incumbent vice president, told the hosts.

After President-elect Donald Trump’s lopsided election victory over Harris, the televised moment underscored a fatal flaw in Harris’s campaign that doomed her campaign—an inability to differentiate herself from an unpopular president whose approval rating has hovered around 40% in the most of his choices. four years in the White House.

David Axelrod, former longtime adviser to Barack Obama, called the exchange − which turned into a Trump ad − “disaster” for Harris as he summed up the election results on CNN early Wednesday morning. “There’s no doubt about it. The question is: What motivated it?

In poll after poll, Americans overwhelmingly said for months that they believe the country was headed in the wrong direction.

Harris cast himself as a “new generation of leaders” and the forward-thinking candidate who would work across the aisle and seek solutions, not political warfare, to address America’s concerns with rising housing costs and affordability.

But given Harris’ status as a sitting vice president, she never fit the bill of a traditional “change” candidate, and she remained tied to Biden — and remained loyal to him even as Americans made it clear they disapproved of his handling of inflation and migration on the southern border.

In the end, the election was not a nail-biter as many had expected. It was a resounding victory for Trump and a rejection of Harris and the Democratic Party, with Republicans also gaining control of the US Senate.

Harris fares worse among black, Latino voters

Trump’s victory was far from certain, as the former president was the expected winner of the battleground state of Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes. It’s a state Democrats had lost only once since 1988. That came in 2016 with Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton.

The Harris campaign spent significant resources on four Sun Belt battlegrounds—Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina—but she was unlikely to win any of them. And the Democrats’ so-called “blue wall” crumbled with Harris trailing Trump in Michigan and losing outright in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Harris and her campaign hoped to win the White House by bringing moderate Republican and independent voters fed up with nearly a decade of division in the Donald Trump era.

Still, the Democratic candidate lost the election in large part because she was unable to prevent core Democratic constituencies — black, Latino and young voters — from splintering.

Harris underperformed with voters of color — especially Latino voters — but also black voters in urban centers like Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. Despite maintaining the Democrats’ growing strength in college-educated suburbs, it was not enough to overcome Trump’s gains in Democratic strongholds.

Harris had black voters 86%-12% and Latino voters 53%-45%, according to CNN exit polls. But in the 2020 election, Biden won black voters by a larger margin of 92%-8% over Trump and Latinos 65%-32%.

Meanwhile, Harris worked to stem the bleeding in heavily Republican rural areas in states like Pennsylvania, but she ultimately outperformed Biden in 2020 in those places, returning to Clinton’s 2016 levels.

Did Harris focus too much on Trump?

From the beginning, Harris tried to turn the race into a referendum on Trump.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Harris escalated his rhetoric, calling the former president a fascist, warning that he is “unhinged and unstable,” and highlighting the assessment of Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, who claimed , that Trump had done it. previous admiring statements about Adolf Hitler.

She leaned more and more toward portraying the election as a battle for democracy, just as Biden did before he dropped out of the 2024 race.

“Kamala Harris lost this election when she turned to focus almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump,” veteran pollster Frank Luntz said on Xformerly Twitter. “Voters already know everything there is about Trump – but they still wanted to know more about Harris’ plans for the first hour, first day, first month and first year of her administration.

“It was a colossal failure for her campaign to focus on Trump more than on Harris’ own ideas,” Luntz said.

Harris, who fought aggressively to restore access to abortion, won women voters by a significant margin of 54%-44%, according to CNN exit polls, but that was a smaller margin than Biden’s 57%-42% performance with women in 2020 .Trump won male voters over Harris by the same 54%-44% margin that Harris won women.

The abortion issue ended up not being the galvanizing force it was in 2022, as Democrats outperformed expectations in the midterms.

Harris’ loss marks the second time in three election cycles that Democrats have fielded a female presidential candidate in hopes of making history — only to lose both times to Trump.

The Democrats have enough to guess

Harris was an unproven political commodity outside of California, ending her 2020 Democratic primary bid before voting began. She secured the Democratic nomination this time without receiving a single vote, as Democrats quickly rallied around her after Biden’s exit. She sought to distance herself from some of the liberal positions she took as a 2020 Democratic primary candidate in an appeal to Republicans and moderates.

At the same time, polls consistently showed that Americans today had fonder memories of Trump’s four years in office — especially his handling of the economy — than they did when he was in the White House. Many Americans were willing to forgive Trump’s well-documented baggage: four criminal indictments, two impeachments and his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Most voters, 51%, said they favored Trump over Harris to handle the economy, which 31% of voters cited as their top issue, according to CNN exit polls.

For Democrats, the second-guessing has now begun: Was Harris the right choice to take on Trump? Should they have looked elsewhere? Or should they have stuck with Biden?

Reach Joey Garrison at X, formerly of Twitter, @joeygarrison.