Last night Americans decisively elected Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States. Unlike in 2016, Democrats don't look like they will have the popular vote/Electoral College split to fall back on as a rationalization. Trump swept all seven battleground states and Republicans took the Senate, leaving Democrats clinging to tenuous hopes of an improbable victory in the House as consolation. Party strategists and elites will spend months, if not years, dissecting this disaster, how it transpired and where to go from here, but in terms of why Kamala Harris lost this election, it really isn't terribly complicated. Voters were miserable and it should not be surprising, despite Trump's unfailingly repugnant antics, that they took that misery out on the sitting vice president of the United States.
For two years voters have been telling pollsters that they are angry about the economy and immigration policy. Harris not only failed to offer those voters a compelling vision of change, but she also generally refused to capably defend her administration's own policies. Instead, especially in the campaign's closing days, she doubled down on the democracy rhetoric which, while I happen to think it is perfectly justified, was not resonating with undecided voters. Those undecideds seem once again to have broken for Trump according to exit polls, contrary to the hopeful Democratic narrative that took shape over the final week of the campaign. Whatever you think of his policy agenda, if nothing else it offers a clean break with the Biden-Harris record. And voters picked the clean break.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the outcome has been baked in all along. Swapping Harris in for President Joe Biden likely kept down-ballot races from getting out of hand and may preserve Democrats' ability to flip the Senate back in 2026 with a strong performance. But Harris, while she ran a disciplined campaign that made few day-to-day mistakes, was clearly operating with several flawed theories of the electorate. Were these errors the difference makers? We'll truly never know, but it is certainly worth exploring where the candidate and the party went wrong, starting with their appeal to Never Trump Republicans.
The first flawed assumption was that there were further inroads to be made with Republicans who are uncomfortable with Trump. As I argued here recently, most of those people have already switched parties and have been Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents for years. Nothing that Trump did over the past six months, as crazy as this seems, is much different from things he did beginning in 2015. If you were going to get off the Trump train, you did so six stops back. Harris was waiting patiently at the station for passengers who had already disembarked.
That means that her closing flurry of campaign stops with former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney and indeed the whole "Republicans for Harris" effort along with the deeply conservative messaging and rhetoric that the campaign adopted beginning at the Democratic National Convention in August, was likely all for nothing. Worse, it may have actively alienated young people and lower-propensity voters who were looking for change. These are groups of voters who are disproportionately dissatisfied with the status quo, and nothing says "I am the status quo" more than cavorting with a widely disliked Republican congresswoman who is the icon of a long-vanished Republican political coalition that steered the country into several gigantic icebergs in the early 2000s and which no longer has any meaningful political constituency in America.
The second assumption is that Harris could not afford to break decisively with President Biden on anything of substance. Rather than making a meaningful pivot on Israel and Palestine, Harris inexplicably dispatched Rep. Ritchie Torres and former President Bill Clinton to Michigan to appeal to Arabs and Muslims who, unsurprisingly, ended up rejecting her anyway. And instead of acknowledging that the Biden-Harris campaign may have erred in some early administration immigration decisions, she went on The View and said that she couldn't think of anything that she would have done differently. This worked out about as well for her as refusing to disavow George W. Bush's Iraq War did for Republican nominee John McCain in 2008.
I will never understand why the campaign calculated that it couldn't do this. Who were they afraid of? Joe Biden? What was he going to do, call her into the Oval Office and slur his way through some sort of admonishment? And if she wasn't going to break with Biden, the least she could have done was try to convince people that the economy is actually good. I know voters tuning in at the last minute aren't known for their understanding of nuance, but if the story is that the administration believes real wages outpaced inflation, and that the U.S. recovery from the pandemic is the best in the world, why not say that over and over? Why not brag about the stock market? Why not open every rally by asking people to take out their phones and load their 401k charts? It certainly worked for Trump.
Pinning this entirely on Harris, however, is a mistake. Voters seemed tired of being governed by Democrats and, fairly or unfairly, blamed the party for their sense that the country is on the wrong track. It is not clear to me that any candidate could have successfully navigated through those headwinds, even with a perfect campaign. Democrats will certainly have plenty of time in the wilderness over the next two years to think about how to avoid putting themselves in this position again.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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