Why Kamala Harris lost (a winnable election?)

Charts showing the four factors that caused Harris to lose -- and that point to what Democrats should do next

There are as many prognoses out there about why Kamala Harris lost as snowflakes at the North Pole. It’s that time of the election cycle for the pundits to step into the batter’s box and take a big swing at “what happened.” I’ve approached reading these treatments with a mixture of intrigue and disinterest. Intrigue because it seemed like this election should have been winnable for Harris, given the high negatives of her opponent, yet she lost so handily. Disinterest because, with the gap being so large, clearly all the pundits were wrong. Why spend time reading their justifications for why they overestimated Harris and (once again) underestimated Trump?

So I’ve been letting the dust settle a bit as I take it all in. Now, here goes my own big swing, reflecting on what I’ve seen out there as I’ve tried to make sense of it all.

The four factors that sunk Harris

Kamala Harris lost due to four dominant factors:  1) a so-so economy, with high prices (not inflation) the dominant metric of defeat, 2) the Biden administration’s unpopular immigration policy, 3) the Biden administration’s horrific Israel-Gaza policy and 4) Harris’s shortcomings as a candidate, beyond her positions on the other three factors. Roughly in that order, these are the dominant themes that decided the election.

In a number of crucial ways, Harris turned out to be little more than a stand-in for President Joe Biden, since as his vice president she inherited his policies on the economy, immigration and Gaza, certainly in the perceptions of the public. And she didn’t do nearly enough to separate herself from those unpopular Biden policies.

The so-so economy and high prices (but not inflation)

Lou Jacobson from US News and World Report reported out a number of illuminating charts that illustrate the high wall that Harris had to climb. As Jacobson wrote, “happy consumers lead to two-term presidents.” The 40-year-high inflation during 2022 returned to roughly normal levels, but Americans still reported in surveys that they were shellshocked by prices. It turns out that $18 hamburgers in a restaurant are not conducive to presidential re-elections. The Biden administration has continuously cited statistics that “inflation is down,” but inflation is only a measurement of the rate of price increases. Even as inflation dropped, prices stubbornly remained at their new high level, and voters were reminded of that every time they went to the grocery store, the gas pump or a restaurant.

Since President Jimmy Carter, every president with a University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index rating above 82 has won a second term. Biden was at 70.1. When Trump lost reelection in 2020, he was just below the threshold.

Beyond consumer sentiment, since the term of President Richard Nixon, every president with an approval rating higher than 50% has won a second term. Biden's approval was only 39%.

Harris proposed some credible family-oriented economic policies, such as expanding the child tax credit or $25,000 in home down-payment support and a $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers. But the “prices gone wild” factor and sour consumer sentiment were the headwinds she inherited from Joe Biden. Any candidate would have had to be in peak form to change the perceptions that had been embedding themselves for a couple of years since the COVID-19 pandemic waned. In September, a Pew Research Center poll found that eight-in-ten registered voters (81%) said the economy would be very important to their vote in the presidential election. That did not bode well for Harris, especially with only three months to campaign.

Unpopular immigration policy

Under President Biden, immigrants crossing the border with Mexico reached record levels.  Since January 2021, when Biden came to office, there have been more than 10 million “encounters,” four times more than under Trump (the number of encounters is not a count of individuals who stay in the US, as some migrants will be returned and the same person can be recorded trying to enter multiple times, and these figures also don't include people who may have crossed the border undetected).  The US Department of Homeland Security has estimated there are 11 million illegal migrants living in the US as of January 2022. That’s greater than the population of 43 states.

Unsurprisingly, many Americans have grown increasingly concerned, including Americans of all races and walks of life. Modern welfare societies simply cannot have so little control over migration flows and arrival of the neediest of human refugees from troubled lands. That’s not to say that immigration, managed properly, can’t play a necessary role in the development of wealthy societies. But it’s a charged issue for understandable reasons, as it can impact the use of government resources and taxes, blue-collar wages in certain occupations, overcrowding in urban areas and strain cultural differences. The left sometimes seems to not want to admit this hard-boiled reality.

Even some Democratic leaders in border states criticized the administration for not acting quickly enough to address the crisis. Finally Biden issued an executive order in June 2024 to quickly deport migrants at the border without processing their asylum claims, if the average number of weekly encounters exceeded a certain threshold. A month after the order was introduced, encounters at the southern border fell by a fifth.

Late in her campaign, Harris finally said she would make it harder for migrants to seek asylum in the US, but by that point the damage had been done in terms of public perception. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that this turned out to be a decisive factor, since 6 out of 10 Americans rated immigration as “very important” in determining how they would vote, according to the Pew Research Center.

This issue was particularly important to voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And the big surprise this election was that it was not just a significant concern among white voters – Latino voters, many of them blue-collar men, were troubled by cheap immigrant labor competing for their jobs. That led to an unprecedented turnaround in the Latino vote.

Exit polls show that Latino men went from strongly backing Biden in 2020 by 23 points to backing Trump by 12 points, a stunning 35 point reversal. Trump also improved his vote share among Latina women by 17 points (though Harris still won the Latina vote overall) and with Black men by four points. It was the best showing for a GOP presidential candidate among Hispanics in at least 52 years, and among Black voters in 48 years. See the chart below.

These demographic shifts amounted to an earthquake. Given this political landscape, Harris simply did not do enough to distance herself from the Biden administration’s unpopular immigration policy. Quite the contrary, when she was asked on the popular TV talk show The View if there was anything she would have done differently than President Biden, she responded, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

That was a terrible response, about as bad as a presidential candidate could utter, given the political landscape and Joe Biden’s low favorability rating on these issues. This was possibly Harris’s defining moment, like Al Gore sighing like an irritating smart aleck in his debate with George W. Bush; Gore won the debate and lost the personality contest, and finally the election. The Trump campaign immediately jumped on Harris’s vacuous answer, and it may have been the key turning point in her presidential bid, given the overriding importance for many voters of all races, especially in several battleground states, of the economy and immigration issues.

Voters were looking for a change agent, and had two flawed candidates to choose from.

Horrific Israel-Gaza policy

Take a second look at the chart above of Trump’s gains among key demographic groups, specifically the group called “Age 18 to 29.” Biden won the support of young people by 24 points, but Harris won them by only 11, a shift towards Trump of 13 points. In Michigan, incredibly Trump matched Harris among youth, 49-49. As CNN noted, this was the best showing for a Republican presidential nominee among young voters in two decades.

The Harris handlers presented her as the “joy candidate,” laughing, smiling and dancing to thunderous music with celebrities at her rallies. But for many young voters, there was no joy to celebrate due to the Gazan Palestinians, who were being pulverized back to the Stone Age by bombs provided week after week to the genocidal Israelis by the Biden administration. And there was to be no joy, ultimately, for the Harris campaign as it lost key votes among young people and Arab/Muslim voters in battleground states.

In addition to young voters unexpectedly so concerned about matters in a faraway land, the Harris campaign also grossly underestimated the impact of Arab and Muslim-American voters in several battleground states. Their numbers were small but mighty. Led by the Uncommitted National Movement, they spent months pleading with the Biden administration to scale back its support for Israel’s war in Gaza, and with the Harris campaign to toss them a political bone.

The Uncommitted movement, which sent 30 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, offered to endorse Harris in exchange for merely having a speaker at the convention to address the plight of Palestinians. The Harris campaign, caught in their triangulations between Jewish and Muslim/Arab voters, foolishly rebuffed all their pleas. Meanwhile Trump – yes, the perpetrator of a Muslim ban in his first term – visited Muslim leaders and surreally portrayed himself as their champion.

The Harris campaign colossally fumbled and bumbled this delicate situation, and she paid a price. In Michigan, which Biden won in 2020 by only 150,000 votes, there were an estimated 242,000 Muslim adherents. Similarly in Wisconsin (21,000 vote margin and 69,000 Muslim adherents), Georgia (12,000 vote margin and 123,000 Muslim adherents) and Arizona (10,500 vote margin and 110,000 Muslim adherents). Muslim-Americans voted overwhelmingly (69%) for Biden in the 2020 presidential election. But a nationwide exit poll by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) found that significantly less than 50% of Muslim voters backed Harris. Instead, large chunks of the Muslim vote went to Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who advocated for ending U.S. military support for Israel, or Trump, who received the backing of several Arab and Muslim community leaders and elected officials in Michigan.

In Dearborn in key battleground Michigan, where more than 55% of the residents are of Middle Eastern descent, Trump won more than 42% of the vote, up from 30% four years ago. Harris received just 36% from a community that gave Biden nearly 70% of its vote. In nearby Hamtramck, the first majority-Muslim city in the U.S., Trump picked up 43% of the vote, up from just 13% in 2020. Harris secured just 46%, down from the 85% that Biden won four years ago. Stein received 9% and 18% in Hamtramck and Dearborn respectively. No question, the lost Muslim and Arab votes hurt Harris’s bid to win Michigan and its 15 electoral votes.

“While Kamala Harris was ignoring…Muslim Arab communities here in Dearborn,” said Uncommitted co-founder Lexis Zeidan, Trump “was coming to these communities and pandering to these communities, and he was capitalizing off of these vulnerable emotions and telling them what they wanted to hear.” 

Kamala Harris, the candidate

The previous three factors were all headwinds from the Joe Biden administration that—it should have been clear to Harris and her campaign advisors—she needed to overcome, both through clear and concrete policy shifts as well as through the force of her personality. Unfortunately, Harris was deficient on both counts.

A bit of background on Harris. From my longtime San Francisco perch, I have watched her political rise since she first ran for district attorney in San Francisco, defeating a longtime personal acquaintance of mine, the progressive incumbent Terrence Hallinan. Harris came out of the Willie Brown machine, and showed no remarkable campaign ability or policy brilliance other than doing and saying what was necessary to get elected.

When she ran in 2010 for statewide office for the first time, in California’s attorney general contest, she won the Democratic primary in a very split seven-candidate field with only 34% of the vote. In looking at the spread among the other candidates, it’s not clear that if the Democrats had used a majority requirement like ranked choice voting/instant runoff that Harris would have won the Democratic primary.

Then, in the general election, when Democratic nominee Jerry Brown beat the well-funded GOP candidate for governor, eBay CEO Meg Whitman, by 13 points, Harris beat a relatively unknown Republican nominee by less than one percentage point. That was a wake-up call that she was not a strong campaigner.

After two terms as attorney general, she ran for U.S. Senate in 2016, and due to her greater statewide name recognition and fundraising prowess, she handily beat a relatively unknown Democratic congresswoman from Southern California in a “top two” primary election. Harris distinguished herself in the Senate and rose in the Democratic firmament and the media spotlight, not with her political sagacity or policy brilliance, but primarily with her telegenic prosecutorial inquisitions of Trump nominees like Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Then she tried to steer her rising star toward a run for the presidency in 2019. Initially, following Harris’s blockbuster debate performance in June 2019, her star was shining brightly in the multi-candidate field of the Democratic primary. But by November she was out of the race, her support declining to single digits and funders jumping ship. The conclusion at the time was that Harris lacked policy depth or certainty, and that in turn resulted in a lack of consistent connection with voters. Damaging assessments like “typical politician” and “an empty suit” became tagged to her now falling star.

In fact, it was a surprise to many, myself included, when Biden selected her as his running mate. But she ticked a few of the right boxes that Democratic strategists figured that the presidential ticket needed, and Biden’s victory over a badly damaged incumbent seemed to justify the strategy. Harris had an unremarkable term as VP, and that’s how things stood as Biden headed for his reelection campaign in the spring of 2024.

And then came the Biden meltdown during the presidential debate with Trump on June 27, which revealed his obvious unfitness to campaign for president. At this point, the Democratic Party lurched into frantic mode. The party leaders and funders themselves became culpable, because not only had they failed to realize how far down the rabbit hole Biden’s elderly-ness had progressed, but as leaders they then picked the wrong candidate to succeed him, without the benefit of any kind of replacement primary.

Someday some insider will write a tell-all detailing what went down in those frantic hours and days. I will be curious to hear how these leaders and funders failed to remember who Kamala Harris was, from her earliest days in California politics to her failed presidential campaign in 2019 to her unremarkable tenure as VP.  Granted, Biden had left them in a terrible lurch with time running out, and a broken convention could have gone disastrously, leaving the Democratic candidate driving a jalopy with a flat tire.

But still, to state the obvious:  Harris is a black and Asian woman…from liberal San Francisco and Los Angeles …who took ultra-liberal positions when she ran against Biden for president in 2020, including joining calls to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, calling the idea of adding more police officers “wrongheaded thinking,” supporting a controversial program requiring gun owners to relinquish their assault weapons, and eliminating private health insurance in favor of a single-payer health care system. Did the Democratic masterminds and strategists really believe that they could wallpaper over these uncomfortable realities with the $1.5 billion that the Harris campaign burned through in only 15 weeks?

If they thought that, they were awfully wrong. Harris's past liberal positions came back to haunt her. In a September Gallup poll, 51 percent of voters described Harris as “too liberal,” while just 6 percent deemed her “too conservative.” Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker said, “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things.”

It was during her first presidential run when more voters began to notice that oftentimes Harris did not appear to be certain about what she believed on a number of important issues. That pattern continued in 2024. Even Democrats like Obama strategist David Axelrod began calling Harris’s vague and evasive responses to key questions “word salad.”

The result is that Harris underperformed Biden with almost every demographic and in every state. Harris received 11 million fewer votes than Biden nationwide, and even in her home state of California, Harris got 2.2 million fewer votes than Scranton Joe. Heck in her home base of San Francisco, Harris received 50,000 fewer votes than Biden and 20,000 fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 (even accounting for a small recent decline in San Francisco’s population). In 2020, Biden won low income voters making under $50,000 by 11 points, but remarkably that group swung toward Trump by 3 points (50 percent to 47 percent) in 2024. The wealthy populist Trump apparently won over many working class voters during this election. Everywhere you look, the enthusiasm factor never kicked in for Harris.

One of the most astounding demographic shifts exhibited in the chart above was that, according to exit polls, many pro-abortion voters did not let that issue drive their presidential vote. In 2020, voters who said they believed abortion should be legal all or most of the time backed Joe Biden by 38 points. This year, despite Harris’ clear focus on abortion policy, these pro-choice voters split evenly between her and Trump. Instead, for many of those voters some combination of the other factors noted above decided their vote. That 38 point shift amounted to a tidal wave that threw the Democrats into chaos.

Riding the crest of all of these demographic shifts, not only did Trump easily win the presidential race, taking all 7 battleground states, but riding Trump’s coattails Republicans took control of the Senate and the House. Indeed, 2024 has turned out to be the best GOP showing in the US House popular vote since 1928.

It was an incredible gamble, perhaps even an irresponsible roll of the dice, for the Democrats to run a black woman for president. Especially one who had previously struggled on the big stage like Kamala Harris. The fantasy was that such a candidate would mobilize new voters, both minority and young voters, to overcome other deficits. But that elusive chimera, even if it ever had any basis in reality, was undermined by the Biden administration’s controversial record on the economy, immigration and the murderous Israeli policy in Gaza.

What lesson should the Democrats learn from all this? That’s the $69,000 question, going forward. The answer is not so clear. I will offer some thoughts on this in a future article. Keep in mind: voters have voted against the party in power in 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024. There is a lot of restlessness in the electorate. Fasten your seat belts.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776