A presidential campaign post-mortem

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This article was published 08/11/2024 (512 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Between when Kamala Harris entered the presidential race in July and election day on Tuesday, her campaign and its allies raised more than US$1.5 billion. She became an internet phenomenon over the summer, dominating meme culture. Democratic voters disillusioned by President Joe Biden’s fading presence and faltering leadership flocked back to the party.

But these advantages, and more, still didn’t translate into a win. Democrats didn’t even gain the moral victory of securing the popular vote. Instead, nearly 73 million Americans opted for seismic change.

The country’s next leader will be Donald Trump — a convicted felon and aspiring dictator.

There’s no singular cause why the Harris campaign failed. And many contributing factors were beyond the vice-president’s control. Others, however, were not.

First, the contest perhaps wasn’t as deadlocked as polls suggested. Measuring voter opinion is an inexact science; professional pollsters have chronically struggled to grasp Trump’s support levels. That’s because most people have grown wary of responding to calls or texts from unknown numbers.

But Harris’ favourability rating had already begun to slip by mid-October, especially among Black and Hispanic men — essential to any successful Democratic coalition. This trend carried through into election day.

“Democrats seem unwilling to believe that a small but significant portion of Black voters might be willing to overlook Trump’s racism, and are even drawn to aspects of his nationalism, xenophobia and traditionalism,” wrote Tyler Austin Harper recently, a Black professor from Bates College in Maine. Harris arguably took female support for granted, too. More importantly, Harris couldn’t sell her vision and policies on the two issues that mattered most: the economy and immigration.

America’s economy is the envy of the world right now. Its growth trajectory, wage increases and rising asset values are outpacing any other industrialized nation.

Yet at the ballot box, voter perceptions matter more than cold macroeconomic indicators. And months of surveys and media reporting emphasized most Americans feel they were better off during Trump’s tenure than under the Biden administration — from which Harris was unable to distance herself.

The same rings true for immigration. Although the number of irregular migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border is indeed falling, the vice-president couldn’t shed her reputation of being the nation’s hapless “border czar” when illegal crossings peaked at 2.2 million in 2022. This in contrast to Trump’s unabashed nativism and strongman promises of militarized mass deportation. Harris also alienated large chunks of the progressive wing of her party. “She has taken a harder-line stance on the border than has any member of her party in a generation and has talked more prominently about owning a Glock than about combating climate change,” reported the New York Times a few weeks ago.

Several Arab American groups — historically Democratic stalwarts — also declined to endorse Harris over her devout support for Israel amid its ongoing decimation of Gaza and brutal incursions into Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Harris’s campaign advisers unwisely sheltered her from unscripted media appearances for a month after she became the nominee. When these finally happened, Harris seemed lost and inauthentic without a teleprompter. Aside from a fiery performance on Fox News, Harris often appeared uncomfortable and unprepared — even when facing friendly audiences.

During a much-hyped CNN town hall, she gave bizarrely evasive and vapid answers to basic questions on immigration, tax policy and foreign affairs. When asked by hosts on liberal talk show The View if she wished to redo any decisions made by President Biden, she blurted out “nothing comes to mind.” This astonishingly bad answer became an instant staple of Republican attack ads.

What’s more, attacking Trump as a fascist may have been warranted based on ample evidence. It also somewhat backfired by taking oxygen away from issues Democrats were strong on, like health care.

“Purely negative attacks on Trump’s character are less effective than contrast messages that include positive details about Kamala Harris’s plans to address the needs of everyday Americans,” a pro-Harris super PAC warned in an email to Democratic leaders in late October, based on the group’s reading of social media analytics data.

Harris and the Democrats ultimately couldn’t understand how to connect with working-class voters of every race and gender. Their campaign celebrated her raft of A-list celebrity endorsements; Republicans microtargeted their messaging to those living paycheque to paycheque.

A second Trump presidency is now poised to profoundly reshape America, as well as global trade and geopolitics. This might not have been the case had Harris done things differently.

Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based political risk analyst and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.