Mar.24

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Why Did Harris Lose?

Based on conversations with dozens of top Democrats, Axios has compiled a list of some of the many diagnoses for what went wrong last November. It could easily have been some combination of these factors as well:

• Biden: The Democrats should never even have entertained the idea of running a deteriorating 80-year old for president. After the 2022 midterms, where the Democrats avoided an expected disaster, the party muckety-mucks should have thanked him profusely for saving the country from Trump and told him gently, but firmly, that now was the time to announce that he would not run for reelection so the Democrats could have a vigorous primary in 2024 and select a new—and much younger—leader. It wouldn't have been easy, but if Nancy Pelosi had quietly told Biden: "If you don't go quietly, I will hold a national press conference, thank you for your service, and say you are too old to run again," that could have scared him out of it. In the end, that is what she did, but it should have happened 18 months earlier.
  
  
• Harris: Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate in 2019 and got to be vice president only because Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) saved Biden's neck in the 2020 South Carolina primary and Biden owed Clyburn big-time. Clyburn's price was a Black veep. She was catapulted into the 2024 race with only 100 days to go. Biden was very unpopular and voters felt the economy sucked. She should have made a major break with him and talked mostly about how the Harris administration would be very different from the unpopular Biden administration. She could have talked about the many ways she would work to get prices down (e.g., build hundreds of thousands of new housing units to flood the market and drive home prices and rents down). She didn't do anything and clung to Biden like a baby koala.
  
  
  
  
• Podcasts and Social Media: Harris' campaign was focused on doing things the old way. Trump was all over podcasts (especially Joe Rogan's) and social media. That is how you get through to marginal voters who do not read The New York Times. She should have had a team churning out a dozen TikTok videos of her doing cool things every day. She had over a billion dollars, so hiring some influential new media people and giving them whatever resources they needed wasn't a problem. She was stuck in old-think.
  
  
• Wokeness: Harris should have known that she needed to make a dent in the blue-white market (blue-collar white men). The Trump campaign spent $65 million on the infamous "She is for they/them; President Trump is for you" ad attacking Harris for her 2019 support of taxpayer-financed sex-change operations of federal prisoners. There have been only two of them. Given how unpopular "woke" is with many blue-collar men, she needed to backtrack on that and other woke issues hard. She could have said: "As vice president, I have talked to many voters and I now better understand what their concerns are. As president I will address them. In 2019, I was a bit naive." At the very least, she could have punted on damaging hot-button issues and said they are up to the states and the federal government has no role in them. That was Trump's position on abortion, and it largely neutered the issue.
  
  
• Elitist Words: The Democrats are coming over as a very elitist party that doesn't care about noncollege voters. Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" remark was the high point (low point?) on this. Harris had to find a way to avoid any inference that she was condescending, and didn't do it.
  
  
• Elitist Policies: Too many of the policies of the Democratic Party are aimed at the wishes of one or more of its internal activist groups. Harris needed to fight that. For example, she should not have talked about fighting climate change as being important for the planet, but for creating millions of blue-collar jobs in factories building solar panels and wind turbines, installing them, and maintaining them. She could have opposed free trade with China specifically and maybe gotten into a bidding war with Trump over tariffs.
  
  
• Testosterone: It would have been tough for Harris or Tim Walz to out-testosterone Trump, so Democrats had a lot of trouble with young men, especially minority men who like "macho." At the very least, she could have signed up some tough-guy rapper or sports hero to be a surrogate and parade him everywhere.
  
  
• Inflation: There wasn't a lot Harris could do about inflation as vice president, but at the very least she could have put her plans to get it in check front and center. Another approach would have been not to focus on prices, but to focus on wages so people could afford the new prices. How about a $15 minimum wage? That could have been a big hit with blue-collar workers.
  
  
• The Border: She didn't have to say she wanted to build a wall, but promising to hire 20,000 new border patrol agents would be a twofer—better border security along with many new jobs for border-patrol agents. It could have swung Arizona. She could also have supported more immigration judges and expedited procedures for rejecting asylum claims and deporting immigrants. For better or worse, this is what the voters want and the Democrats ignore that at their peril.
  
  
• Trump as Sui Generis: Many voters liked Trump. There was no way to win over voters who saw his cruelty as a feature, not a bug. But not all his supporters were like that. Emphasizing how Trump was betraying everything Ronald Reagan stood for might have peeled off 2-3% of Trump supporters who simply vote Republican out of habit but don't actually like Trump. She forgot that about 20% of Republicans voted for Nikki Haley in the Republican primaries. Some of them might have been gettable.
  

And of course, it could have been that Harris was simply the wrong candidate for the moment and nothing could have saved her. Among Western democracies, there is a general movement to the right of late and it is tough for any leftish candidate to swim against the tide. Figuring out the cause or causes doesn't solve the problem, but it is a necessary first step.

All of this said, we're not expressing our assessment here; we're summarizing the one from Axios, which was based on their interviews with dozens of top Democrats. We'll return to our series assessing the election as soon as time allows. It's the two T's that have forced the subject to the back-burner: teaching and Trump. (V)