As Greymantle has written before, and will doubtless write again on these pages, I really hate being wrong. That’s doubly true when I make a confident prediction about an important and high profile event like a U.S. Presidential election, and make the wrong call. But as my father always told me, “when you screw up and make a bad call, it’s best to just admit it, dust yourself off, and move on”. Wise words.
The dust of the November 5 U.S. general election is still settling and, indeed, the absentee ballots are still being counted. Nevertheless, based on what we already know – and we know a lot – there are some general conclusions we can reach about why Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. election so handily, and why Kamala Harris lost. This post will focus on the Harris campaigns mistakes, lost opportunities and inherent challenges that led to the defeat. Our next post will dissect the Trump victory.
In our analysis, these are the seven reasons Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election. This is not an exhaustive list, but these are the seven most critical drivers of the defeat, in our view.
1# AN UNPOPULAR ADMINISTRATION AND ANTI-INCUMBENT MOOD WEIGHED ON HARRIS
President Joe Biden has among the lowest approval ratings for an American President since pollsters began measuring public opinion in the early 20th century. Biden’s rating has not risen above 50% since late 2021, was as low as 36% last July, and has tended to hover around 43%.
With such unpopularity hanging around the neck of the incumbent president, it was always going to be an uphill battle for his Vice President to make a successful case for what would essentially be the continuation of the Biden Administration under new management.
The popular mood against incumbents, not just in U.S. elections, but around the world, has been intense in 2024. Britain’s Conservative Party lost to the opposition Labour Party in a catastrophic landslide defeat – the Tories’ worst showing at the polls in over 200 years – in early July. The French centrist party of President Macron took a drubbing in the June French parliamentary elections. Even Indian Prime Minister Modi’s coalition lost nearly a third of their support in the spring 2024 Indian elections.
No matter where you look, incumbents are being turned out of office due to a combination of high inflation and a general feeling of unease among voting publics that political elites are self-serving, and that the world is spinning out of control.
This mood among voters weighed heavily against the Harris campaign. The campaign and most left-leaning journalists and campaign staffers attributed most of this sentiment to Biden’s age and increasingly visible infirmity, but step outside the ‘blue bubbles’ for a while and you’ll see that the problem wasn’t just President Biden’s age, it was that much of the public was not fully on board with the administration’s policies or priorities (e.g. fighting climate change, supporting Ukraine).
#2 THE HARRIS CAMPAIGN’S RELATIVELY LATE START IN JULY
Most candidates for the office of the American presidency throw their hats into the ring more than a year, and often enough close to two years before election day. That Harris became the Democratic candidate for president in late July, with less than four months to go until election day, was a major disadvantage.
Although Harris has served as Vice President since the administration was sworn into office in January 2021, Harris – in common with most other U.S. vice presidents in history – has not had a particularly visible role in the administration. Furthermore, she was somewhat associated with the administration’s border policies and relations with Central America since early in the term. These are areas where much of the public believes the Biden Administration has failed. It wasn’t a good look for Harris.
With less than 16 weeks remaining between the date of Biden announcing his decision to bow out of the race (July 21) and the election date, Harris had to make up for lost time on the very delicate and complicated task of defining herself positively to voters. Harris is a quick study and actually did a fairly good job on the campaign trail and at the Democrats’ August convention, presenting herself to voters as a safe pair of hands. It apparently wasn’t enough. Too many voters voiced doubts about Kamala through late October, claiming that they didn’t feel they knew her or what she stood for.
#3 FAILURE TO CONNECT TO, AND LEVEL WITH, AMERICAN VOTERS
The compressed time frame of Kamala Harris’s campaign clearly weighed against Harris’s chances of winning the election, particularly during the crucial month of October, during which undecided voters and late registrants tend to make up their minds about which candidate they feel they can trust.
Notwithstanding the Vice President’s shorten window of time in which to connect with voters, it seems evident to Greymantle that Harris suffered from a challenge that is very particular to her, and has been so since she began her career in politics in the mid-1990s: Harris does not come across as genuine.
Despite running as a moderately liberal Democrat in California throughout most of her career – in other words, a safe place for politicians of that persuasion – Kamala Harris had always struggled to win elections. Until the 2020 U.S. general election, Harris had not won an election by more than 1% of the vote, despite being matched against eminently beatable Republicans in deep blue California.
Harris just does not seem to be good at connecting with people. Additionally, she often comes across as both insincere and heavily scripted. Harris’s infamous ‘word salad’ answers in response to tough questions are the stuff of political legend. Even with a lot hanging on the line and faced with sympathetic groups of voters, Harris has never demonstrated that she has a core set of convictions. She has changed her policy positions often, seldom giving clear reasons for her shifts in policy.
Moreover, Harris never created any distance between herself and President Biden during the campaign, or suggested what she might do differently as President. When asked at the start of her September 10 debate against Donald Trump whether she believed Americans were better off in 2024 than they were in 2020, Harris avoided giving a straight answer.
Harris responded: “So, I was raised a middle class kid. And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America. I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people. And that is why I imagine and have actually a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy.”
A better answer might have gone something like this: “The American people are better off in some ways now than they were four years ago, and worse off in other ways. Inflation has been a big problem for a lot of families and has really eaten into the paychecks of many Americans. The pandemic has had a long half life on the American economy due to port closures and other supply chain disruptions. We are still working our way out of it, but I think we’ve turned a corner. I have a plan to keep pulling the nation out of this period of high inflation and spur income growth for Americans.”
It would have been better to acknowledge the economic difficulties faced by the 65% of Americans without a college degree, but Harris more or less dodged the question. That was a poor way to begin the debate. Although Harris’s debate performance gradually improved as the night wore on, her bad start may have stuck out in the minds of voters.
#4 THE MESS AT THE SOUTHERN BORDER
Whether you liked the overall policies of the Biden Administration or not, it would be tough to argue that their immigration policy has been a success. After dropping to historically low levels in 2019 and 2020 in the last two years of the first Trump Administration, illegal border crossings rose quickly soon after Mr. Biden was sworn into office as the 46th President. Between January 2022 and December 2023, an estimated 5 million persons crossed the U.S. southern border illegally. An estimated total of 6.5 million illegals entered the U.S. during the Biden Administration.
Most Americans when asked say that control over the borders and reducing illegal immigration are important to them. When polled in early 2024, 62% of those asked stated that they would be in favor of deporting all 20 million estimated illegal aliens living in the United States.
That latter poll result is striking. President Trump’s tough actions at the border during his administration came in for a lot of criticism from voters and were not always popular. However, it’s clear that voters, in retrospect, appreciated Trump’s immigration policies more than was clear at the time. A majority now believe that Biden’s U-turn on immigration has been bad for the country, straining communities and social services and creating a feeling of disorder and unease.
In an era of 24-hour cable news, a constant stream of images of families from South and Central America, and other places, crossing the U.S. border on foot or by swimming the Rio Grande has been burned into the national consciousness. For Fox News watchers, these images created (or, were used to create?) intense anxiety and a desire for political change.
Harris’s association with Biden’s unpopular immigration policies probably did much to seal her fate.
#5 KAMALA WAS NEVER A STRONG CANDIDATE TO BEGIN WITH
Though it has been pointed out several times by other commentators, it’s worth repeating that Kamala Harris was never a strong candidate for the U.S. Presidency. By virtue of her hailing from the most liberal state in the country and having taken a number of hard-left progressive positions in 2019 during her first, failed bid for the U.S. Presidency, it should have been evident to Democratic grandees (can anyone say, ‘Nancy Pelosi’?) that Harris would be unacceptable to many Independent voters.
The average Independent voter in America tends to be somewhat socially conservative, but fiscally and economically somewhat liberal. For example, an Independent voter in Michigan or Ohio that might have voted for Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012 is likely to support private sector labor unions and a strong social safety net, but be unmoved by, or more likely very opposed to ‘transgender’ rights.
In winning over such voters, as Joe Biden did in 2020, it helps to speak to ‘bread and butter’ concerns rather than rights for minority groups. A Democrat can still win over swing voters, provided that they are not too socially liberal or repeat the buzzwords of ‘inclusivity’ and ‘sensitivity’.
Harris ran far to the progressive left in her failed presidential primary campaign of 2019 and early 2020, flopping badly among mainstream Democratic voters in Midwestern and southern states. Was there ever any hope that Harris would be able, without Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, to win over midwestern Independents in Michigan and Pennsylvania?
I’ll be very honest here and confess that Greymantle actually thought that she would win over such voters by jettisoning her positions of 2019 and running to the center, a strategy that she largely did adopt. The trouble was, Harris ran away from her 2019 positions without ever giving a cogent reason for why she had abandoned her former views, or what she had learned.
To Independent voters, this must have seemed like equal parts cold calculation and insincerity, the very qualities of “typical politicians” that Independent voters claim to hate. In 2024, it was bad show to appear to be – and in fact, to be – a typical politician, especially when running against Trump. Layer over Harris’s liberal, California pedigree, and it must have been the kiss of death.
Kamala Harris received slightly north of 71.2 million votes on November 5, an 10 million negative swing from the 81.2 million votes Joe Biden received in 2020. Donald Trump’s vote tally in 2024, 74.8 million, barely budged from 2020. But his voters showed up, and Biden’s voters did not show up for Harris.
#6 THE INTERNET AND iPHONE HAVE PERMANENTLY CHANGED AMERICA
It may sound a little bit wonky, but Greymantle became convinced in 2024 that 30-odd years of exposure to the Internet and 17 years of using the iPhone have cumulatively changed the way Americans process information, both mentally and emotionally, and not necessarily for the better.
The unending stream of algorithm-curated images and bite-sized videos fed to American adults through their iPhones has turned the U.S. into a nation of short-term thinkers. Granted, Americans were never much good and planning for the long-term, at least not since the mid-20th century search in major infrastructure projects such as the Hoover Dam and the Interstate Highway System.
The difference between now and then, I surmise, is that Americans seem to treat their national life as a kind of unending reality TV show. There is a lot of zero-sum-game conflict going on, constant temper tantrums and insults, but the show just…goes on.
If life is a TV show and the show must go on, then the suggestion that elected Donald Trump might usher in a permanent change of government seems a bit too fantastical. How could it be real? Does that mean that the reality TV show of post-modern American politics won’t return for another season?
Riding the commuter train in and out of Manhattan this year, I could not help noticing that 95% of the other passengers kept their faces glued to their iPhones for the entire commute. As I passed by them on my way to my seat, I would catch glimpses of what they were watching. Invariably, they were watching video loops of various online ‘influencers’ demonstrating some new product or putting on a live fashion show or propounding some kind of propaganda via TikTok or another ‘application’.
None of these people appeared to be particularly worried about the future. Certainly, barely anyone was reading or watching the news. It was as though they were living in a dream.
Lotus eaters don’t go turn out to vote as if their lives depended on the outcome.
#7 LOW LEVELS OF SOCIAL TRUST HELP TRUMP AND OTHER POPULISTS WIN
The vagaries of dream politics aside, it is more clear than ever that were are living in a time of rock bottom social trust. How else could Americans have elected the most demagogic candidate ever to the highest office in the land despite the unemployment rate standing at 4.1%?
When I was growing up, which wasn’t so very long ago, incumbent U.S. presidents got re-elected when national unemployment was below 5% and U.S. GDP has experience six or more successive quarters of growth above 2%. Both of those statistics describe the U.S. economy today. Nevertheless, three and a half years of steady jobs growth, low unemployment and an expanding GDP – and many other very favorable economic statistics aside – did seemingly nothing for Harris and the Democrats.
As in some Third World country, perception is everything and facts are as nothing in our national political campaigns. Not so very long ago, that would have described a national election in an African developing country, the Indian subcontinent, or Latin America. Perceptions over facts and tribalism, tribalism, tribalism above all.
But in 2024 that describes America.
THE THREE BIGGEST SURPRISES OF THE HARRIS DEFEAT
1. The abortion issue did not motivate more women to vote for Democratic candidates
The biggest surprise of the ‘Boys vs. Girls‘ election was that women did not break as hard for Harris and the Democrats as many (mostly left-leaning) commentators predicted they would. Even in right-leaning states that have historically been anti-abortion such as Montana, abortion rights referenda passed handily in the same jurisdictions that elected Donald Trump by a landslide.
We must admit, Greymantle was astounded by this development. The way that voters in Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania broke for Democrats in 2022 was something that we believed would be handily repeated in 2024. We were wrong, and we are stumped as to why.
2. Popular Democratic governors in the swing states could not turn out the vote for Harris
Gretchen Whitmer, Joshua Shapiro, Tony Evers and Katie Hobbs are household names among voters in their states and all except Evers have a strong national profile. That’s saying something in a nation with a low opinion of elected leaders, and in which Democrats are derided as out of touch ‘elitists’.
Yet all of these Democrats were elected to the governorships of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona in 2022 by decent margins. Shapiro was elected governor of Pennsylvania by a landslide (56.5% of the vote) in 2022 against a hard-right Trump acolyte, Doug Mastriano, who was personally involved in organizing the January 6 demonstrations.
How then, did 51% of Pennsylvanians vote to return Donald Trump to the Oval Office in 2024 compared to Mastriano’s 41.7% in 2022, and after Josh Shapiro campaigned alongside Kamala Harris for weeks on end in the Keystone State?
For Greymantle, it’s a complete mystery. Despite the fact that inflation has abated considerably since 2022 and the pandemic lockdowns, recent in 2022, are a thing of memory in 2024, a plurality of Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin voters chose Donald Trump over the Democratic alternative two years after the worst of the inflation had passed. Why?
3. What happened to all those ‘Nikki Haley voters’?
Moderate Republicans who supported Nikki Haley over Donald Trump in the 2024 GOP primaries were supposed to hold the secret sauce for a Kamala Harris to defeat Trump in the 2024 general election. Out of all the GOP primary voters, 17% or 155,000 voter for Nikki Haley in the May 2024 Republican primary election in Pennsylvania. What happened to these people in November?
Haley voters has just voted against Trump in May. Why did they vote for him in November, given all of his baggage and hard-right rhetoric? Do they all just hate Democrats? Or despise Harris?
Or did the ‘Haley voters’ in fact vote for Kamala Harris on November 5, only to be swamped by the surge in Hispanic, Muslim, Black and Independent voters who swung toward Donald Trump?
Greymantle doesn’t have an answer to any of these questions. But they are going to perplex us for a very long time. As we said at the start of this post, we really HATE being wrong.
Until next time, we are —
Greymantle
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