The leaders of Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign are starting to acknowledge that the fundamentals of the 2024 race for the White House favored President-elect Donald Trump all along.
Joy and hope were no match for dissatisfaction with the economy, the direction of the country, and incumbent parties across the globe, dooming the Democrats earlier this month and paving the way for Trump’s return to the Oval Office.
“The headwinds were just too great for us to overcome, especially in 107 days,” Harris campaign Chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon told the Washington Post in a representative postmortem. “But we came very close to what we anticipated, both in terms of turnout and in terms of support.”
What they were unable to do, however, was win a single battleground state or the popular vote even after replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.
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Harris was undoubtedly dealt a bad hand. She was also an incredibly risk-averse candidate, while her opponent, who faced the prospect of incarceration if defeated, aggressively sought out new media opportunities to target infrequent voters. She had no compelling answer to how she would be different from Biden, despite that being the central question of the campaign, even though she was serving as vice president under an octogenarian who, from 2019 to 2023, had seriously considered only serving a single term.
Many explanations of the election outcome that seek to absolve Harris of responsibility for her defeat subtly make the case against her candidacy in the first place. As Biden’s vice president, she would have to do more than other Democrats to distance herself from the incumbent administration, if it could be done at all.
Having 107 days to reintroduce herself to the electorate after dealing with low poll numbers as vice president and a previous failed presidential bid that didn’t even make it all the way to the 2020 Democratic primaries wasn’t ideal. But she and her team also clearly hoped to take advantage of the abbreviated campaign, running out the clock with the candidate switch, the Democratic convention, the debate, and Trump’s sentencing before having to delve too deeply into the details of her policy views.
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Harris sought to recreate the anti-Trump coalition that gave Biden 51.4% of the vote in 2020, stretching all the way from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to Liz Cheney. But the pandemic was gone, inflation raged, the border was overflowing, Gaza was splitting the coalition, and progressives were restless now that Biden was the incumbent rather than Trump.
In the end, it was Trump, rather than his steadfast opponents, who was able to cobble together a national plurality out of disparate elements.
Biden didn’t do Harris many favors, though he did throw his support behind her moments after dropping out and he didn’t force Democrats to spend their Chicago convention trying to remove him by force. But his reelection campaign was heavily fueled by denial. “Then we find out when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign that the Biden campaign’s own internal polling at the time, when they were telling us he was the strongest candidate, showed that Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes,” said Jon Favreau, the former Obama speechwriter and current host of the liberal Pod Save America podcast.
This is in line with reporting that Biden finally exited the race when his own campaign’s polling indicated his reelection prospects were dire. “When the campaign commissioned new battleground polling over the last week, it was the first time they had done surveys in some key states in more than two months, according to two people familiar with the surveys,” Politico reported hours after Biden beat a hasty retreat. “And the numbers were grim, showing Biden not just trailing in all six critical swing states but collapsing in places like Virginia and New Mexico where Democrats had not planned on needing to spend massive resources to win.”
Yet what that suggests is that the Biden campaign had been assuring Democrats that the race was close based at least in part on polling that actually predated the disastrous June 27 debate with Trump.
Harris held onto Virginia, with just 51.8% of the vote, and New Mexico, winning 51.9%. These slender margins support the contention that these states were truly at risk and Biden’s loss might have been even worse, which could have imperiled several Democratic Senate candidates who ended up running ahead of Harris by just enough to win their seats.
But after a weekslong honeymoon phase, Harris only restored the race to its pre-Biden debate status quo. “On the eve of the election, the campaign’s internal models showed Harris winning Wisconsin and Michigan by a tiny margin and essentially tied with Trump in Pennsylvania, officials said,” writes the Washington Post’s Dan Balz. “Those models showed Harris running behind Trump in the other four battlegrounds: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.”
That means Harris had the same narrow path to an Electoral College majority that Biden did: the Rust Belt “blue wall” states plus Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District. She only won the latter.
Maybe a Rust Belt governor or two could have done better. Few Democrats will say so publicly, although former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) expressed support for an open process before Biden dropped out and lamented the absence of one after Harris lost.
Democrats will now spend the next four years debating whether the $1 billion Harris experiment was truly worth it.