Dem
47
GOP
53
Welcome to the first installment of "Whose Fault Was It?" There are going to be studies, reports, and autopsies for months, maybe years, trying to understand why Kamala Harris, armed with policies that voters like and a billion dollars, not only lost, but lost decisively, losing all seven swing states and the popular vote. While Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, it was due to the Electoral College. She got 3 million more votes than Donald Trump.
Maybe the first thing to deal with is: "Was the loss Harris' fault?" She got into the race late and was joined at the hip to a historically very unpopular president with an approval rating in the 30s. No president has ever been reelected with that kind of rating. Everyone said he was too old. In the exit polls last week, 72% of the voters felt the country was moving in the wrong direction. How could the sitting vice president run as an outsider who would change things? No candidate could do that. Inflation was high during most of the Biden administration. Incumbent parties are losing all over the world. Harris ran an almost perfect campaign. She had a vast amount of money, hundreds of thousands of volunteers, a great ground game, and a unified party. But could any Democrat have won when the voters were angry and the fundamentals were against them? Some people think a white man might have been able to pull it off. In any event, now Trump has a track record of beating two women but losing to a man. Some Democrats think there might be a clue in there somewhere. Sorry, Gretchen. Walz/Shapiro 2028?
One person who surely deserves a lot of the blame is Joe Biden. He knew a year ago that he was not up to the job. If, after the 2022 midterms, he had announced that he had saved the country from Donald Trump and was not running for reelection, the Democrats would have had a normal primary process. Maybe Harris would have won, although we have not forgotten how badly she did in 2020. In any event, the winner would have had more legitimacy than someone who parachuted in 100 days before the election and would have had more exposure all year and more time to prepare. Nancy Pelosi is a strong proponent of this view. So is Barack Obama's strategist, David Axelrod, and many others. So Joe gets part of the blame.
Next up is Dr. Jill Stein. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and got an M.D. from the Harvard Medical School. She is not stupid. In 2016, she knew very well that while Hillary Clinton was not perfect, she was infinitely better on all the issues Stein held dear than Donald Trump. In the fall of 2016, when she saw the risk of Trump winning was real and she knew how much damage he could do to the environment, she could have dropped out, endorsed Clinton, implored her supporters to vote for Clinton to save the planet, and actively campaigned for Clinton. If most of her supporters had then voted for Clinton, we would now probably be saying goodbye to Clinton after 8 years of her doing her best to protect the environment. Did Stein learn anything from 2016 and 4 years of Trump? Nope. She ran again, despite her own adult children begging her to drop out and support Harris. She didn't get enough votes to flip any states this time, but she might have convinced some Democrats to stay home. Oh, and she seems to have forgotten the planet, except for the 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip, which is 14% the size of Rhode Island, so one can even question her dedication to saving the whole planet as priority #1. She forgot she was running on the Green Party ticket, not the Peace Party ticket.
When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) ran for president, everyone knew what his top priority was (helping working folks) and he never budged an inch from it.
Finally comes Harris herself. Politico convened a round table with five political reporters to discuss what happened. The bottom line is that high prices were the dominant issue, with immigration second. For a lot of people, prices of eggs and milk were lower during Trump's first term than now and they somehow expect that Trump will be able to press some magic UNDO button on his iPhone and get them back down, despite imposing heavy tariffs on imported goods. College-educated voters know that is impossible, but noncollege voters never took Economics 101. (V) understands this because he took Economics 101 from Prof. Paul Samuelson himself.
On immigration, right-wing media called Harris the "immigration czar," so it was her fault that illegal immigrants keep pouring in, largely because Trump ordered Senate Republicans to tank the Lankford bill which would have beefed up the border enormously. Voters think that Trump will take a much tougher line and don't especially care if what he does is legal (see above). Given that Latinos are an important part of the Democrats' base, Harris was in a bind. If she came down hard on immigration, many of those Latinos would be furious with her. If she downplayed immigration as an issue, the many voters who want to clamp down on it would be furious with her. What could she do? The Republicans simply have it easier since their base is unified against immigrants and the Democrats' base is fractured.
Another thing outside Harris' control was the assassination attempt on Trump. It lit a fire under Trump's supporters and got them all to the polls. His response under pressure was seen by many people as true bravery. The campaign used the iconic photo of him with the bloodied ear and raised fist in its ads the final week. In fact, that is why Trump went back to Butler, PA—to remind people of it.
This said, there are things Harris could have said to gain votes and things she could have avoided that cost her votes. The key takeaway is that she should have known that winning over some working-class white men was crucial. Given that high prices were a leading issue, she could have gone full Bernie and blamed big corporations. She could have argued for new and much tougher antitrust laws to break up many big companies to create more competition that would force prices down. Four companies control almost all beef and pork production. She could have talked about splitting each one into four smaller companies to increase competition. Poultry is almost as concentrated. She could have talked about tax cuts for people making under $100,000 to be financed by tax hikes on people making over $1 million. She could have talked about a new law forbidding interest rates on credit cards to be above 10%. She could have talked about changing patent laws to allow cheaper generic drugs to come to market faster.
Another piece of the economy is jobs. She could have made Going Green a big part of her campaign on account of its creating millions of new jobs manufacturing, installing, and maintaining solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear reactors, electric vehicles, more efficient appliances, and much more. She could have pushed for a law giving people a subsidy to junk inefficient cars and appliances, which would have created factory jobs making new, energy-efficient ones. She could have talked about retrofitting houses to be more energy efficient. She could also have thrown in some patriotism and talked about beating China in this area.
Of course, other strategists have said she should have moved much more sharply to the center and rejected some of the things she said in her 2020 run for president. She could have said that as vice president she has talked to many people and learned a lot and realized her earlier views were off base.
Since Harris' problem was always with working-class men, she should have ditched all the culture war stuff early on and said she is not woke and intends to stay that way (however, without implying she is asleep, like her boss). Trump ran $65 million worth of ads condemning government funded gender-confirmation surgeries for prisoners (of which there have been two so far). She could have come out four-square against that, saying that people who are in prison for committing a crime lose some of their rights as a punishment for their misdeeds and that is one of them. She probably also should have come out against (former) boys on girls' teams except where strength is not an advantage, like chess teams or debating teams. Many prominent Democrats have said this, including Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY), Greg Landsman (D-OH) and Seth Moulton (D-MA). This issue really angers a lot of working-class men who have traditional ideas about gender. If she is one of those people who would rather be right than be president, she shouldn't have run for president.
Harris had a lot of A-list female celebrities endorse her, including Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga, and Cardi B. Some people question whether palling around with exceedingly wealthy (female) megastars was the best way to impress working-class men that Harris understood their lives and problems. This might well have backfired and made her look even more elite than she already was. She did get Bruce Springsteen, but maybe she should have tried to get (male) stars who are popular with working-class men and whose music relates to their lives. If she felt she needed endorsements, famous football or basketball players might have worked better with working-class men, especially Black ones. She did get a few Pittsburgh Steelers, but it was too little, too late.
Harris ran a great campaign, but a conventional one. The days where that gets it done are gone. Trump focused on social media and podcasts. She did a bit of that, but should have done more in order to address young voters (and see below). There was a ton of disinformation out there and she barely attempted to deal with it. She could have called J.D. Vance a baldfaced liar and racist bigot (about the cats and dogs) and that's why Trump picked him. She could have had more simple signs, like: Trump is a criminal/Harris is a cop.
Did any Democrat come out of this smelling like a rose? We think there is one: Rep. Dean "Cassandra" Phillips (DFL-MN). He gave up a job he could have kept forever in a vain attempt to convince Democrats that Biden was a couple of decades past his use-by date. He could have been the new Bernie. He was right, but nobody listened. Now he has to go back to making ice cream. (V)