The fatal flaws of an election campaign doomed to failure

WASHINGTON — When Kamala Harris appeared on ABC's “The View” last month, it was intended to be a friendly forum to introduce herself to Americans unfamiliar with her story.

Instead, the Democratic presidential nominee struggled to explain what she would do differently than President Joe Biden. “Nothing comes to mind,” Harris, the sitting vice president, told the hosts.

After President-elect Donald Trump's lopsided victory over Harris, this televised moment highlighted a fatal flaw in Harris' campaign that doomed her candidacy – an inability to distance herself from an unpopular president whose approval ratings have hovered around 40% were in the White House for four years.

David Axelrod, a former longtime adviser to Barack Obama, called the exchange – which became a Trump ad – “disastrous” for Harris as he summarized the election outcome on CNN early Wednesday morning. “There is no doubt about that. The question is: What motivated it?”

In poll after poll for months, Americans overwhelmingly said they believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.

Harris presented herself as a “new generation of leadership” and a forward-thinking candidate who would work across borders and seek solutions rather than political warfare to address America's concerns about rising housing costs and affordability.

But given Harris' status as sitting vice president, she never fit the mold of a traditional “candidate for change” and remained committed to Biden – remaining loyal to him even as Americans made it clear they disapproved of his handling of inflation and southern migration Border.

Ultimately, the election wasn't as exciting as many expected. It was a stunning victory for Trump and a repudiation of Harris and the Democratic Party, with Republicans also gaining control of the US Senate.

Harris performs worse with black, Latino voters

Trump's victory became all but assured when the former president was the projected winner of the battleground state of Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes. It's a state Democrats had lost only once since 1988. That was in 2016 with Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton.

The Harris campaign invested significant resources in four Sun Belt battlegrounds — Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina — but it seemed unlikely she would win any of them. And the Democrats' so-called “blue wall” collapsed as Harris trailed Trump in Michigan and lost completely in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Harris and her campaign hoped to win the White House by bringing together moderate Republican and independent voters fed up with nearly a decade of division in the Donald Trump era.

But the Democratic candidate lost the election in large part because she failed to prevent divisions among the Democrats' core constituencies – black, Latino and young voters.

Harris performed worse among voters of color — especially Latino voters — but also among black voters in urban centers such as Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. Although Democrats' growing strength was maintained in college-educated suburbs, it was not enough to overcome Trump's gains in Democratic strongholds.

According to CNN polls, Harris reached 86-12% of black voters and 53-45% of Latino voters. But in the 2020 election, Biden won black voters by a larger margin of 92% to 8% over Trump and Latino voters, 65% to 32%.

Meanwhile, Harris worked to limit the bleeding in heavily Republican rural counties in states like Pennsylvania, but she ultimately underperformed Biden in those places in 2020, returning to levels reached by Clinton in 2016.

Was Harris focusing too much on Trump?

From the start, Harris tried to make the race a referendum on Trump.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Harris ratcheted up her rhetoric, calling the former president a fascist, warning that he was “unhinged and unstable” and emphasizing the assessment of Trump's former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, who was said to have voiced opinions on Trump past admiring statements about Adolf Hitler.

She has increasingly tended to portray the election as a fight for democracy, much as Biden did before dropping out of the race in 2024.

“Kamala Harris lost this election because she focused almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump,” veteran pollster Frank Luntz said on X, formerly Twitter. “Voters already know everything about Trump — but they still wanted to know more about Harris' plans for the first hour, day, month and year of her term.

“It was a colossal failure for her campaign to spotlight Trump more than Harris' own ideas,” Luntz said.

Harris, who aggressively campaigned on restoring abortion access, won by a sizable 54% to 44% margin among female voters, according to CNN exit polls, but that margin was smaller than Biden's 57% to 42% performance among women in 2020. Trump won male voters by the same margin of 54-44% as Harris won women.

In the end, the abortion issue was no longer the driving force it was in 2022, when Democrats exceeded expectations in the midterm elections.

Harris' defeat marks the second time in three election cycles that Democrats have fielded a female presidential candidate in hopes of making history – only to lose to Trump both times.

The Democrats have a lot to question

An unproven political commodity outside of California, Harris ended her candidacy in the 2020 Democratic primary before voting began. This time, she secured the Democratic nomination without receiving a single vote as Democrats quickly rallied around her following Biden's departure. In an appeal to Republicans and moderates, she sought to distance herself from some liberal positions she took as the 2020 Democratic primary candidate.

At the same time, polls have consistently shown that Americans today have better memories of Trump's four years in office – particularly his leadership on the economy – than of when he was in the White House. Many Americans were willing to forgive Trump's well-documented baggage: four criminal charges, two impeachment proceedings and his role in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Most voters, 51%, said they prefer Trump over Harris when it comes to tackling the economy, which 31% of voters said was their top issue, according to CNN polling.

For Democrats, the thinking has now begun: Was Harris the right choice to take on Trump? Should they have looked elsewhere? Or should they have stuck with Biden?

Reach Joey Garrison on X, formerly Twitter, @joeygarrison.

Harris performs worse with black, Latino voters

Was Harris focusing too much on Trump?

The Democrats have a lot to question

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