WASHINGTON – When Kamala Harris appeared on ABC’s “The View” last month, it was supposed to be a friendly forum to introduce herself to Americans unfamiliar with her story.
The Democratic presidential nominee instead struggled to explain what she would do differently from President Joe Biden. “Not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris, the incumbent vice president, told the hosts.
After President-elect Donald Trump’s lopsided election victory over Harris, that television moment underscored a fatal flaw of Harris’ campaign that doomed her election bid – an inability to separate herself from an unpopular president whose approval ratings have hovered around 40% for most of his four years in the White House.
David Axelrod, former longtime adviser to Barack Obama, called the exchange − which became a Trump ad − “disastrous” for Harris as he recapped the election outcome on CNN early Wednesday. “There’s no doubt about it. The question is: What motivated it?”
In poll after poll, Americans for months overwhelmingly said they believed the country was headed in the wrong direction.
Harris cast herself as a “new generation of leadership” and the forward-looking candidate who would work across the aisle and seek solutions, not political warfare, to address America’s concerns with rising costs and housing affordability.
But given Harris’ status as a sitting vice president, she never fit the mold of a traditional “change candidate” and she remained tethered to Biden – staying loyal to him even as Americans made clear they disapproved of his handling of inflation and migration at the southern border.
In the end, the election wasn’t a nail-biter like many expected. It was a resounding victory for Trump and a rejection of Harris and the Democratic Party as Republicans also gained control of the U.S. Senate.
Harris underperforms among Black, Latino voters
Trump’s victory became all but certain when the former president was the projected winner of the battleground state of Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes. It’s a state that Democrats had lost only once since 1988. That came in 2016 with Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton.
The Harris campaign devoted significant resources to four Sun Belt battlegrounds − Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina − but she appeared unlikely to win any of them. And the Democrats’ “blue wall” crumbled as Harris trailed Trump in Michigan and lost outright in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
A New York Times analysis found Trump expanded his 2020 margin in 2,367 counties nationwide and decreased his performance in only 240 counties.
Harris and her campaign hoped to win the White House by bringing over moderate Republican and independent voters fed up with nearly a decade of division in the era of Donald Trump.
Those efforts didn’t work. And Harris was also unable to prevent core Democratic constituencies − Black, Latino and young voters − from splintering.
Harris underperformed with voters of color − particularly Latino voters − but also Black voters in urban centers such as Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. Harris carried Black voters 86%-12% and Latino voters 53%-45%, according to CNN exit polls. But in the 2020 election, Biden won Black voters by a wider 92%-8% margin over Trump, and Latino voters 65%-32%.
“I think this calls into question a lot of the traditional identity politics,” Julián Castro, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration, said on MSNBC. “This is going to rewrite I think how the parties approach Latinos and other groups.”
Harris also lost ground in many college-educated suburbs, which have become Democratic strongholds in recent election cycles. In Montgomery County outside Philadelphia, Harris defeated Trump by 23 percentage points. Biden carried it by 26 points.
Meanwhile, Harris worked to limit the bleeding in heavily Republican rural counties in states like Pennsylvania, but she ultimately underperformed Biden in 2020 in these places, returning to the levels Clinton got in 2016.
Did Harris focus too much on Trump?
From the beginning, Harris tried to make the race a referendum on Trump.
In the final weeks of the campaign, Harris escalated her rhetoric, calling the former president a fascist, warning that he is “unhinged and unstable,” and highlighting the assessment of Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, who alleged Trump had made admiring statements about Adolf Hitler.
She increasingly leaned into framing the election as a fight for democracy, much like Biden did before he dropped out of the race in 2024.
“Kamala Harris lost this election when she pivoted to focus almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump,” veteran pollster Frank Luntz said on X, formerly Twitter. “Voters already know everything there is about Trump – but they still wanted to know more about Harris’ plans for the first hour, first day, first month and first year of her administration.
“It was a colossal failure for her campaign to shine the spotlight on Trump more than on Harris’ own ideas.”
Harris, who campaigned aggressively on restoring abortion access, won female voters by a sizable 54%-44% margin, according to CNN exit polls, but it was a slimmer margin than Biden’s 57%-42% performance with women in 2020. Trump won male voters over Harris by the same 54%-44% margin as Harris won women.
Abortion ended up not being the galvanizing force it was in 2022 when Democrats exceeded expectations in the midterms.
Harris’ loss 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.
Democrats have plenty to second-guess
Harris was an unproven political commodity at the top of the ticket, ending her 2020 Democratic primary bid before voting got started. She secured the Democratic nomination this time without receiving a single vote as Democrats quickly rallied around her after Biden’s exit. She tried to distance herself from some of the liberal positions she took as a 2020 Democratic primary candidate in an appeal to Republicans and moderates.
At the same time, polling consistently showed Americans held fonder memories today of Trump’s four years in office − particularly his leadership of the economy − than they did when he was in the White House. Many Americans were willing to forgive Trump’s well-documented baggage: four criminal indictments, two impeachments and his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Most voters, 51%, said they trusted Trump over Harris to handle the economy, which 31% of voters cited as their top concern, according to CNN’s exit polls.
For Democrats, the second-guessing has now begun: Was Harris the right choice to take on Trump? Should they have looked elsewhere? Or should they have stuck with Biden?
