The fatal flaws in a doomed election bid

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.

The Democratic presidential candidate instead struggled to explain it what she would do differently then President Joe Biden. “Not something that comes to mind,” Harris, the sitting vice president, told the hosts.

Following the example of the president-elect Donald Trump‘S lopsided election victory over Harristhat televised moment underscored a fatal flaw in Harris’ campaign that doomed her election bid — an inability to break away from an unpopular president whose approval ratings hovered around 40% for most of his four years in the White House.

David Axelrod, former adviser to Barack Obama, called the exchange − which became a Trump ad − “disastrous” for both Harris and him repeated the election results on CNN early Wednesday morning. “There’s no doubt about it. The question is: what motivated this?”

In poll after poll, for months Americans overwhelmingly said they believed the country was heading in the wrong direction.

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

But given Harris’s status as a sitting vice president, she never fit the mold of a traditional “change candidate” and remained allied with Biden — staying loyal to him even when Americans made it clear they didn’t like his handling of inflation and migration. moment rejected. southern border.

Ultimately, the election was not a nail-biter as many expected. It was a resounding victory for Trump and a rebuff for Harris and the Democratic Party, including Republicans gaining control of the US Senate.

Harris is performing among black, Latino voters

Trump’s victory became all but certain when the former president was the projected winner of the battleground state of Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes. It is a state that Democrats have 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 seemed unlikely to win any. And the Democrats’ so-called “blue wall” collapsed as Harris trailed Trump in Michigan and lost outright in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

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

Yet the Democratic candidate lost the election largely because she could not prevent key Democratic constituencies—black, Latino, and young voters—from splintering.

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

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

Meanwhile, Harris worked to limit the bleeding in heavily Republican rural counties in states like Pennsylvania, but she ultimately underperformed Biden in these places in 2020, returning to the levels Clinton achieved in 2016.

Has Harris focused too much on Trump?

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

In the final weeks of the campaign, Harris escalated her 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 previously admiring statements about Adolf Hitler.

She increasingly came to view the election as a fight for democracy, just as Biden did before dropping out of the race in 2024.

“Kamala Harris lost this election when she focused almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump,” veteran pollster Frank Luntz said on Xformerly Twitter. “Voters already know everything 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 of her campaign to focus the spotlight more on Trump than on Harris’s own ideas,” Luntz said.

Harris, who campaigned aggressively to restore access to abortion, won women voters by a significant margin of 54%-44%, according to CNN exit polls, but it 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 as Harris won women.

The abortion issue ultimately failed to prove the galvanizing force it was in 2022, when Democrats exceeded expectations in the midterm elections.

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

Democrats have plenty to think about

Harris was an unproven political asset outside California and ended her 2020 Democratic primary before voting began. She secured the Democratic nomination this time without receiving a single vote, as Democrats quickly rallied around her after Biden’s departure. 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 showed that Americans today have better memories of Trump’s four years in power — especially his leadership in the economy — than 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 Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Most voters, 51%, said they preferred Trump over Harris when it comes to managing the economy, which 31% of voters cited as their top issue, according to CNN exit polls.

For the Democrats, the doubts have 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 Twitter, @joeygarrison.