Why Kamala Harris lost

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Four years after Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election and left office in disgrace, the American people returned him to power in the 2024 election.

Major news outlets called most of the major swing states — North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — for Trump late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, giving him an Electoral College majority. Vice President Kamala Harris no longer has a path to victory.

The trend was broader than the swing states; there was a shift toward Trump across the nation, as he significantly improved on his performance in the 2020 election.

Indeed, it looks quite plausible that Trump could end up winning the national popular vote for the first time ever, though that will take some time to determine for sure, as it depends on the exact margin in slow-counting states like California.

Trump’s win will come with a new Republican Senate majority, as Democratic incumbents lost in Ohio and Montana. But as of Wednesday morning it is not yet clear which party will control the House of Representatives, and it could take some time to find out.

What is clear is that Trump won. How did this happen?

The blame game among Democrats will come fast and furious. But though the Harris campaign’s strategy is sure to be second-guessed, the extent and nationwide nature of the shift in Trump’s favor suggest she had an uphill battle all around — because of the widespread unpopularity of President Joe Biden and public disapproval of his record in office.

When Harris unexpectedly joined the presidential race in July after Biden stepped aside, she faced three formidable obstacles.

The first was a global trend: In the years since the pandemic, incumbent parties have been struggling in wealthy democracies across the world. The reasons for this are debated, though post-reopening inflation is likely a big one. But to win, Harris would have had to defy this trend.

The second was Biden’s unpopularity. The president was historically unpopular long before his disastrous debate with Trump, and poll after poll showed voters irate with his handling of the economy and immigration. Foreign policy, particularly the Israel-Gaza war that divided Democrats’ coalition, was a problem too. And since Harris had served in his administration as vice president, she had to figure out what to do about that.

Typically, such dynamics would seem to point to a “change” election where the incumbent party is booted. In such elections, the opposition can often put the blame for the current state of affairs on the incumbents, make vague promises that they’ll do things differently, and ride to victory.

Yet there was nothing typical about Harris’s opponent: Donald Trump. The fact that he had recently served as president in his own controversial term, with his own controversial record, seemed to present Harris with an opening. Perhaps she could brand herself the change candidate who would deliver a fresh, new approach, breaking from the failed politics of the past.

That brings us to the third obstacle: Harris’s own record. While running for president in 2019, Harris embraced progressive policy positions that Democrats now view as politically toxic, including banning fracking and decriminalizing unauthorized border crossing. So she had a choice to make: Should she stand by her old positions and promise bold progressive change, or should she tack to the center?

In the end, Harris took a kind of middle path. She downplayed, disavowed, or simply avoided mention of the policies she’d supported in 2019 — but she didn’t deliberately pick fights with the left in search of centrist cred, like Bill Clinton did in his 1992 presidential campaign. Harris wanted to keep the Democratic coalition happy, pleasing as many people as she could, rather than taking sides in any factional fights.

In addressing Biden’s record, too, Harris tried to strike a balance. She didn’t criticize Biden, throw him under the bus, or break with him — or the Biden-Harris administration’s policies — in any significant way. When pressed about voter anger over inflation and unauthorized immigration, she did not acknowledge error. Rather, she tried to argue that the economy was doing well now, and blamed Trump for not supporting a bipartisan immigration bill. And she did not shift on Israel-Gaza.

Harris’s hope was that she’d done enough to present herself as a new face, and that the fundamental unfitness of Donald Trump — and his unpopular record on issues like abortion and his attempt to steal the 2020 election — would ultimately prove to be decisive to voters disgruntled with both parties.

That hope was in vain.

Ultimately, much of the public was more resentful of inflation under Biden than they were about Trump’s attempted election theft. And so voters turned back to the candidate they kicked out of office just four years ago.