WHAT HAPPENED?!?
Why did Kamala Harris lose? The answer is simpler than you may think.
If you’re a Democrat, now is a great time for optimism.
That seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? After all, you just watched your candidate fall to Donald Trump — Donald Trump, of all people! — for the second time in eight years. Starting at about 3:00 a.m. EST the morning after Election Day, cable news pundits have been using somber, serious tones to talk about the important work Democrats have to do to win back minority votes or to reach out to rural voters if they want to be competitive again.
But the answers are not that complicated.
Vice President Kamala Harris should have won the election. But she and her campaign made a mistake over the final six weeks which was as critical as it was simple: She abandoned a message strategy that worked for one that failed.
Do you remember how Harris came out of the gate after President Joe Biden stepped abdicated the nomination? Democrats had resigned themselves to a race where their crazy old white guy would face off against the Republicans’ crazy old white guy. Suddenly, they had the novelty of a new, historic candidacy. They loved it. Voter enthusiasm surged and donations swelled. She punctuated her ads and captioned her campaign with the tagline “A New Way Forward” to capitalize on her positioning as the hip new thing in presidential politics. She smiled and laughed through rallies, and observers noted how positive (and joyful) her campaign was. She looked like she was having a blast.
Then Harris had to decide how she and Gov. Tim Walz would frame their opponent.
Most candidates who have faced off against Trump over the past near-decade have tried to make the case that he was unfit for office in some way or another. Biden was maybe the sharpest in his criticism. But Walz influenced the campaign early on to try something different: Ridicule.
The Democratic ticket characterized Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance as “weird.” And it worked! Whether Trump was openly musing about Harris’s racial identity or Vance was completing history’s most awkward doughnut order, the description seemed to fit the GOP ticket. During her sole debate against Trump, Harris spent most of the night rolling her eyes and laughing at him (particularly when he made outlandish claims about migrant communities eating family pets). She walked off the debate stage as the unquestioned winner, and still looked like she was having fun.
Then a funny thing happened. Polls tightened, as they naturally do during the course of a campaign. She struggled through even the softest of softball interviews. As the pressure increased, Harris turned down the joyful, positive campaign messages to make room for darker, foreboding warnings of the threat Trump posed to the country. She warned that a Trump presidency would be a retribution tour as he checked names off an “enemies list.” Her pledge to be a “President for all Americans” was set aside briefly in LaCrosse, Wisc., when she condescendingly told some protesters they were “at the wrong rally.”
The happy warriors turned into dour worriers. The fun was less obvious.
As the Democrats ratcheted up their warnings, Trump used the coverage of his debate gaffe about pet consumption to refocus attention on immigration. He showed up to work the fry-o-lator with hourly workers at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. When Biden inartfully called Trump supporters “garbage” in response to a racist joke at that inexplicable Madison Square Garden rally, Trump highlighted the response by posing for a photo op in a garbage truck and giving a speech clad in a safety vest. In the campaign’s most visible images, Trump began to look like the one having fun.
That’s not to say Trump’s campaign was any sort of a master class in political communication. Even without comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s “joke” calling Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, the Madison Square Garden rally was disjointed and pointless. He looked noticeably tired during his long, rambling speeches. At one rally, he made a bizarre joke about Arnold Palmer’s junk. At another, he appeared to mimic fellatio on a microphone.
And that’s weird, right?
There’s the irony: Walz’s original framing — calling the Trump-Vance ticket “weird” — would have been more effective in the final month. Trump’s campaign would have fed right into that more dismissive tone. You might credibly call the guy cheerfully waving from a McDonald’s drive-through window a clown, but trying to cast him as the heir to 1930s European fascism is hyperbole bordering on comedy.
As of this writing (Thursday after Election Day 2024), only the people in the inner circles of the Harris-Walz campaign know why this shift happened. (Perhaps the people of the inner circle, including the candidate herself, do not even know yet. Each of us has made decisions without comprehending why, particularly in high-pressure situations.)
Maybe they (or she) panicked at the sight of tightening polls, thinking she should be well ahead and shaking up the plan to raise the stakes. Or maybe this was the only path left for a campaign that never forged a substantive message about what its candidate stood for. (In the final few weeks, promising to restore Roe v. Wade as part of a final push for female voters was the closest she came.) For all her warnings about a Trump presidency, she gave voters only the vaguest back-of-the-envelop sketch of a potential Harris presidency. She couldn’t even tell a favorable interviewer how her administration would differ from the deposed Biden’s.
Harris lost because she was a bad candidate who abandoned a winning strategy — and opted for one that was a proven loser. Instead of telling us what she wanted to do as president, she spent most of the final month talking about her opponent.
The late Earl Weaver, Orioles manager and baseball philosopher, gave us an apt saying: “Momentum is the next day’s starting pitcher.” Politics isn’t much different. Most of the problems that beguiled the Democratic Party in 2024 will go away surprisingly quickly with a more savvy standard bearer.
When pundits ask rhetorically where the Democratic party goes from here, the answer is concrete and simple: Nominate someone better.
Momentum is the next cycle’s candidate.
