Why Kamala Harris Lost to Donald Trump

Almost a month ago, Kamala Harris appeared on ABC’s The View in what was expected to be a friendly interview aimed at pitching herself to Americans who wanted to know more about her.

But the sit-down was quickly overshadowed by her response to a question about what she would have done differently from incumbent President Joe Biden: “Not one thing comes to mind.”

Harris’ response — which became a Republican attack ad on loop — underscored the political headwinds that her jumpstart campaign failed to overcome in her decisive loss to Donald Trump on Tuesday.

Publicly, she conceded the race late Wednesday afternoon, telling supporters “don’t worry.”

But soul-searching over where she went wrong and what else she could have done is likely to take longer as Democrats begin to point fingers and raise questions about the party’s future.

Harris campaign officials were silent in the early hours of Wednesday, while some aides tearfully expressed shock at what they had expected to be a much closer race.

“Losing is incredibly painful. It’s tough,” Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in an email to staff Wednesday. “This will take a long time to process.”

As the incumbent vice president, Harris was unable to break away from an unpopular president and convince voters that she could offer the change they sought amid widespread economic anxiety.

After Biden dropped out of the race after a disastrous debate performance, Harris was anointed to the top of the ticket, bypassing the scrutiny of a primary without a single vote being cast.

She began her 100-day campaign promising a “new generation of leaders” who will rally women around abortion rights and vowed to win back working-class voters by focusing on economic issues, including rising costs and affordable housing.

With just three months until Election Day, she generated a wave of initial momentum that included a flurry of social media memes, a star-studded endorsement list that included Taylor Swift and a record-setting donation. But Harris couldn’t shake the anti-Biden sentiment that permeated much of the electorate.

The president’s approval rating has consistently hovered in the low 40s throughout his four years in office, while some two-thirds of the electorate say they believe the United States is on the wrong track.

Some allies have privately questioned whether Harris remained too loyal to Biden in her bid to replace him. But Jamal Simmons, the vice president’s former communications director, called it a “trap” and argued that any distance would have only given Republicans another line of attack for being disloyal.

“You can’t really run away from the president who elects you,” he said.

Harris tried to walk the fine line of addressing the administration’s record without throwing shade at his boss, showing a reluctance to break with any of Biden’s policies while also not outwardly promoting them on the campaign trail.

But she failed to deliver a convincing case for why she should lead the country and how she would deal with economic frustrations as well as widespread concerns over immigration.

About 3 in 10 voters said their family’s financial situation was behind, up from about 2 in 10 four years ago, according to data from AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 American voters conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago .

Nine out of 10 voters were very or somewhat concerned about the price of groceries.

The same survey found that 4 in 10 voters said immigrants living in the U.S. illegally should be deported to their country of origin, up from about 3 in 10 who said the same in 2020.

And while Harris tried to spend her entire campaign stressing that her administration would not be a continuation of Biden’s, she failed to clearly outline her own policies, often skirting issues rather than addressing perceived failures .

The Harris campaign had hoped to rally the voting base that powered Biden’s 2020 victory, winning over the Democratic core constituencies of black, Latino and young voters, as well as making further inroads with college-educated suburban voters.

But she fared worse with these key voting blocs. She lost 13 points with Latino voters, two points with black voters and six points with voters under 30, according to exit polls, which can change as votes are counted but are considered representative of trends.

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who lost the 2016 Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton and the 2020 primary to Biden, said in a statement that it was “no big surprise” that working-class voters were leaving the party.

“First it was the white working class, and now it’s also Latino and black workers. While the Democratic leadership is defending the status quo, the American people are angry and want change,” he said. “And they’re right.”

While women largely threw their support behind Harris over Trump, the vice president’s lead did not exceed the margins her campaign had hoped her historic candidacy would show. And she was unable to fulfill her ambitions of winning over suburban Republican women, losing 53% of white women.

In the first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, Democrats had hoped her focus on the fight for reproductive rights would deliver a decisive victory.

While about 54% of female voters cast their ballots for Harris, that fell short of the 57% who supported Biden in 2020, according to exit poll data.

Even before she was catapulted to the top of the ticket, Harris had tried to frame the race as a referendum on Trump, not Biden.

The former California prosecutor leaned on her law enforcement record to prosecute the case against the former president.

But her nascent campaign chose to drop Biden’s core argument that Trump posed an existential threat to democracy, prioritizing a forward-looking “upbeat” message about protecting personal liberties and preserving the middle class.

Lately, however, Harris has made a tactical decision to again highlight the dangers of another Trump presidency, calling the president a “fascist” and campaigning with disgruntled Republicans fed up with his rhetoric.

After Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, told the New York Times that Trump spoke favorably of Adolf Hitler, Harris made remarks outside his official residence, describing the president as “unhinged and unstable.”

“Kamala Harris lost this election when she turned to focus almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump,” veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz said Tuesday night.

“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 Harris’ own ideas,” he added.

Ultimately, the winning coalition Harris needed to beat Trump never materialized, and voters’ resounding rejection of Democrats showed the party has a deeper problem than just an unpopular president.