Vice President Kamala Harris may have had the joy, the upstart campaign, the money and the star power, but in the end Democrats were left feeling a sense of déjà vu on Wednesday morning.
Former President Donald Trump has now defeated two Democratic contenders, preventing them from become the first female president, and the 2016 comparisons were abundantly clear throughout the night.
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The writing was seemingly on the wall early in the night when Harris campaign co-chairman Cedric Richmond took the stage at Howard University in Washington D.C. to tell supporters to go home and get some sleep. Richmond reprised the role of John Podesta, who was tasked with letting down the crowd at the Javits Center in New York City for Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign.
Exit polls indicate the economy was top of mind for voters in both races. Clinton was criticized for not appearing to understand the economic pain of people across the country and Democrats, more broadly, scrutinized for not addressing the education divide.
Despite Harris stopping President Joe Biden’s political and polling hemorrhaging, she was a candidate who struggled with unscripted messaging, running as an incumbent when voters repeatedly told pollsters they did not consider the country to be headed in the right direction.
Pundits may not know whether Harris was helped or hindered by her historically short campaign, whether engaging with the news media earlier and more regularly would have made a difference, or whether choosing Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) could have assisted her in Pennsylvania, though the idea that Biden would not have lost to Trump is more dismissible.
But even before Election Day, Democrats were concerned Harris was concentrating too much on Trump rather than herself and her policy priorities amid Republican attacks on economy, immigration, and social issues. She also encountered difficulties distancing herself from Biden as his vice president, undermining her argument that she was the change agent, as her party claimed sexism and racism were a dynamic as well.
“The reason Kamala Harris lost is quite simple: voters compared her record on inflation, the economy, and the border with Trump’s,” Republican strategist Cesar Conda told the Washington Examiner. “She was unable to convince voters that she would do anything different. Trump was the change agent.”
In the end, Harris did not recreate the Obama or Biden coalitions. She could not coalesce enough women, young people, and independents, even Republicans who dislike Trump over issues such as the importance of democracy and abortion access. Meanwhile, the traditional Democratic base of blue-collar workers defected to the former president over Biden’s electric vehicle mandate. Her other base problem was with liberal Democrats angry over the Israel–Hamas war in Gaza.
Harris’s criticism of Trump escalated last month after their one and only debate as polling underscored that she was not connecting with men, especially minority men, regardless of her own father being a Jamaican-American. In response, she released policy platforms for black and Hispanic men, which included economic, health, and pro-marijuana proposals, in addition to broadening her media strategy by granting interviews.
Although Harris sat down with more non-adversarial podcasts, such as Call Your Daddy, her agreeing to interviews with news outlets, from CBS‘s 60 Minutes to ABC‘s The View, created controversy. The Trump campaign has sued CBS over how the TV network edited its interview with Harris to shorten at least one of her lengthy, convoluted answers, while the vice president not answering a question on The View about how she would have been different from Biden was produced into a Trump ad.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of [anything that she would have done differently], and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact on the work that we have done,” Harris said.
Though she performed well during her debate with Trump in September, goading him over his crowd sizes and reputation on the world stage, Harris has been condemned for both not providing detailed proposals and for having positions at odds with those of the Biden administration during her first presidential campaign in 2020, including decriminalizing illegal border crossings and co-sponsoring Medicare For All. Harris did have economic plans, such as the first federal ban on price gouging to $20,000 to help first-time homeowners pay for their deposit.
The prospect of Harris’s defeat is still fresh for Democrats, many of whom approach Trump through the prism of an existential threat, and the process of comprehending what went wrong is only beginning.
At Harris’s election night watch party, Democrats would not denounce the vice president, preferring instead to attribute the defeat to the electorate.
Madeline Bist, a 20-year-old Washington, D.C. student, described her Michigan hometown as a “politically apathetic community, where a lot of people just continue to vote Republican, even though they don’t like Donald Trump.”
“They’re like, ‘I’m a long-time Republican, and his whole thing is, like all his buddies, they’re not gonna vote for a woman,” Bist said. “It’s just like white, middle-aged men, which I know she tried to, like, you know, kind of target,” she said.
For John Chambers, an Annapolis, Maryland technical recruiter who graduated from Howard University like Harris, the election “speaks a lot to who we are as a country and what we value.”
“I have seen a lot of controversial comments in terms of maybe black men aren’t really willing or ready to vote for a black woman, but everyone I have been able to surround myself with was more than willing,” Chambers said.
Bist added she was in sixth or seventh grade when Trump “first came on the scene” and has “gone through” middle school, high school, college, and now interning in Washington “having to hear about all the heinous crap that’s gone on.”
“I’m done, I’m over it, and I want to move on,” she said.
Harris spent Election Day in Washington, D.C., phoning radio stations from her vice presidential residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory before dropping into a phone bank at the Democratic National Committee and having dinner with her family. She never attended her election night watch party at her alma mater, but is expected to make remarks on Wednesday.
The previous night, Harris held her last rally on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, one of eight events hosted simultaneously around the country for a national livestream. After appearances from Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey, Harris closed with a more positive message as she tried to recapture the good vibes that propelled her campaign this summer shortly after Biden succumbed to Democratic pressure and suspended his bid.
Days earlier, Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general, and California U.S. senator, had delivered her closing argument speech on the Ellipse, the national park south of the White House, during which she criticized Trump for being a “petty tyrant.” That rhetoric had been used throughout her campaign. Just last week Harris and her surrogates scrutinized Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, where a comedian joked Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage,” and amplified his former White House chief of staff John Kelly saying he fit the definition of a fascist.
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Harris’s defeat is the culmination of an election cycle that will be remembered for being unprecedented, including Trump becoming the first former president to be criminally convicted to Democrats pushing Biden to step down as their party’s nominee 100 days before polls closed on Nov. 5. Trump also survived two assassination attempts, though he did not emerge unscathed: a bullet grazed his ear during the first attempt on his life.