Democrats have faced a bitterly disappointing defeat, and the debate is on about why that happened.
Amid the opportunistic finger-pointing and evidence-free assertions that Vice President Kamala Harris could have won if only she had done this or that, there is a genuine search for explanations about what happened. The answer Democrats find most persuasive could greatly influence the party’s direction as it tries to win again.
This debate will clearly go on for some time, and disentangling causality is difficult. But one way to think about it is to break up the question.
How much of the defeat was about Harris’s weakness as a candidate or her campaign strategy? How much was about Donald Trump’s strengths? How much was about Joe Biden’s record? How much was the Democratic Party brand generally? And how much was due to larger structural factors like a global anti-incumbent trend?
It’s possible that all of these played some role in the outcome, especially because issues like inflation can resonate across them all. But let’s go through them.
Was Harris an unusually weak candidate?
Any candidate who loses tends to get defined, in retrospect, as an obvious loser. So naturally, lots of the Democratic finger-pointing has been pointing at Harris. But how convincing is it?
Harris had some real strengths: her record as a former prosecutor, her formidable fundraising, and the fact that she was a fresh face. But many had grave doubts about her prospects all along.
Harris’s political rise in deep-blue San Francisco, and later statewide in California, came by cultivating support among Democratic elites; she had never had to run in a swing state and therefore never developed a political style designed to appeal to swing voters. It was far from clear what those swing voters would make of her when she entered the 2024 race. (The one time before this year that she faced a decent Republican opponent — her first run for California attorney general, in 2010 — she barely won.)
Her campaign strategy was cautious and defensive. In her prior presidential campaign and during the vice presidency, she’d done several high-profile interviews that went poorly, which spurred her to avoid such interviews. In this bid, she was happy to prosecute the case against Trump on the debate stage, but seemed much less comfortable when it was her being grilled. She often spoke in talking points and platitudes.
There was also her record. When Harris was trying to win the 2020 Democratic primary, she ran to the left, taking several policy positions (like banning fracking) that did not seem politically tenable. Trump’s team used one clip from that campaign, when she touted how she’d worked to ensure transgender inmates in California could access gender-affirming care, in a heavily funded attack ad. It concluded with the line: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Her campaign strategy hinged on trying to tack to the center, disavowing or simply avoiding her past positions, sending out signals to the business community that she’d be friendlier to them, while using former Rep. Liz Cheney as a Republican validator. She did not break with the Biden administration or the mainstream Democratic consensus on any issue of significance. She did not run as a bold populist or progressive, either.
Finally, there’s gender and race. Many have wondered whether the voter backlash against her was due to sexism — particularly due to preliminary numbers suggesting the swing against her was most intense among men. The New York Times reports that the Trump team’s ads often showed Harris “laughing or dancing in a colorful blouse and pink pants,” because Trump’s goal was “to make her look like a lightweight.”
But is Harris getting too much of the blame? Evidence suggests the guy she replaced at the top of the ticket, Joe Biden, would have done much worse. One post-election poll found Trump would have beaten him by 7 percentage points nationally. Perhaps she did a decent job of playing a bad hand: the Biden administration’s record.
Biden’s initial attempt to run for reelection — before it was curtailed by his disastrous debate — limited the time and options available to Harris. But the bigger problem may have simply been that she was his vice president, and his administration was very unpopular.
Blueprint, a Democratic polling initiative, published research showing that two of the three most effective arguments for pushing swing voters away from Harris were that “inflation was too high under the Biden-Harris administration” and that “too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris administration.”
Polling all year has shown that inflation and immigration were Democrats’ biggest vulnerabilities. So part of the party’s second-guessing will naturally involve whether Biden should have made different policy choices to produce different outcomes in those areas.
Biden did not cause inflation, but his American Rescue Plan did make it worse, which resulted in higher prices and necessitated bigger interest rate cuts than would have happened otherwise.
His administration was also slow to adjust, and though a “soft landing” without a recession eventually resulted, voters hated the enduring high prices.
On the border, too, Biden only belatedly pivoted. After a huge increase in the number of unauthorized immigrants arriving at the border in 2021 and onward, Democrats in blue states and cities struggled to deal with the logistics of so many arrivals, and public backlash brewed. Late in 2023, Biden tried to pass a border security bill through Congress, but failed — in part due to opposition from Donald Trump.
In mid-2024, the combination of a deal with Mexico and new executive orders seemed to finally cut down on border crossings. But it’s possible Biden could have done more earlier, limiting the effectiveness of immigration as an attack on Harris.
Finally, Israel’s war in Gaza bitterly divided the Democratic coalition. There was probably no way to make everyone happy here, and polling does not show it as a top reason swing voters turned against Harris. But the ugly controversy over Biden’s support for Israel (and Harris’s support for Biden’s policy) may have hurt her in Michigan and cut down on the left’s enthusiasm for her. It’s unlikely to have been decisive, but it certainly didn’t help.
Was Trump an unusually strong candidate?
The political conventional wisdom has generally been that Trump is a weak candidate who’s been holding Republicans back — that his 2016 win was a fluke reliant on the Electoral College; that he was quite unpopular as president; that voters rejected him and his party in 2018, 2020, and (sort of) 2022; and that the GOP was taking a massive risk by nominating him again after he tried to steal the last presidential election and was indicted four times.
But Trump may have been unusually well-positioned to take advantage of dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s record on the economy and immigration.
Trump’s persona as a celebrity businessman, one who many voters view as especially savvy about the economy, has been an advantage for him in polls since his first campaign. That wasn’t enough to save him amid the chaos of 2020, but given what’s ensued since, many Americans have looked back on Trump’s governing record more fondly. Voters have given him retrospective credit for the strong economy and low inflation environment of 2017 through 2019, while not really blaming him for the pandemic. Focus groups again and again came back to the idea that voters hated the Biden economy and thought Trump could fix it.
Indeed, Trump’s outperformance of many down-ballot Republican candidates in key races — in part due to split-ticket voting, in part due to Trump voters simply not voting down-ballot — suggests there was a significant bloc of “I don’t like Republicans much, but the economy was better under Trump” voters.
On immigration, too, there was a stunning swing of public opinion to the right during Biden’s term, as border arrivals soared, which may have played to Trump’s advantage.
Was this a backlash against the Democratic Party for going too far left?
One theory floating around is that the results show the public is punishing the Democratic Party for having moved too far left.
Josh Barro made this argument in a Substack postciting poor Democratic governance in blue states and cities as well as “woke” far-left policies on crime, schooling, and trans rights as likely causes of public frustration. Perhaps this explains some of the disproportionate shifts against Harris we saw in deep-blue states like New York, as well as progressive prosecutors losing and a tough-on-crime ballot proposition passing in California.
A counterpoint to this is that Democrats’ swing-state Senate candidates did well — several of them won despite Harris losing their states — and that even amid the backlash in New York, Democrats flipped several House seats in New York. That could be read to suggest the problem had less to do with the Democratic Party and more to do with the top of the ticket.
Still, Democrats did likely lose the national popular vote as well as the presidency, so it’s hard to argue that the party’s political positioning is optimal.
Was it just due to a global trend?
Finally, another school of thought holds that perhaps the explanation for the outcome doesn’t lie in the United States at all. Perhaps it’s just the latest example of a worldwide trend of incumbents doing poorly in democracies holding elections in the post-pandemic years. Inflation, as a worldwide trend caused by supply-side disruptions and foreign crises, is a big part of the reason for that global struggle.
“Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened,” John Burn-Murdoch reported for the Financial Times. “It’s possible there is just no set of policies or personas that can overcome the current global anti-incumbent wave.”
Still, it is worth keeping in mind that Trump won quite narrowly, by just 2 percentage points or less in the decisive swing states. On the one hand, that could suggest Democrats did a surprisingly good job among structural headwinds, starting from behind and closing the gap as much as possible — even if it wasn’t ultimately enough.
On the other hand, it could suggest that more could have been done. Was it really fated that there was absolutely nothing Democrats could have done over the past four years to improve their margin by 2 more points, however strong the headwinds?
Whatever the answer, Democrats have two years until their next chance to take back a branch of the federal government — and plenty to figure out in the meantime.
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