I, like many, was outraged and disappointed by the results of this election. But I don’t find it politically expedient to blame voters for what we perceive to be bad choices. Rather, we must examine the failures of the campaign and learn the right lessons. Anyone saying Kamala Harris ran a perfect campaign is wrong—a perfect campaign would have won. There are a few factors which were not key to this election, and a few which were. Let’s break them down.
First: what this election was not. This was not an ideological rejection of left-wing politics. In fact, down ballot races paint no coherent ideological picture at all. Tammy Baldwin and Ruben Gallego, candidates with strong progressive records, both won in states that Harris lost, but so did Elissa Slotkin and Jacky Rosen, who billed themselves as moderates.
And as shown by the cases of Slotkin and Rosen, who both ran as strongly pro-Israel, this was not a referendum on the Biden administration’s disastrous policy on Gaza. Democrats on either side of this issue may want to believe it was, either as an expression of anti-Zionist electoral power or as a convenient scapegoat for the loss. Neither is true — although polls show that Democratic support for an arms embargo would have boosted support in swing states, it’s unlikely that a change of course on Gaza could have led to an electoral college victory. Only in Michigan, where the Uncommitted primary vote exceeded the margin by which Trump won, could this issue feasibly have flipped the state.
Racism and misogyny certainly played a role, but they seem insufficient to explain the loss. For one, Trump made gains among women and racial minorities compared to 2020, despite the campaign embracing racist rhetoric and taking credit for the Dobbs decision, which was hugely unpopular among women. We might also look to our neighbor Mexico—a poll showed that 75% of Mexicans believe their country is somewhat or very sexist, and yet they just elected a Jewish woman president in a landslide. To the extent that bigotry does play a role, the lesson would be that we should only run white men, which I feel is misguided on its own merits
Still, there is one lesson to be taken here: Democrats’ strategy for this election was to try to win over moderate Republicans by shifting right on key issues like immigration and enlisting prominent Republicans like Liz Cheney as campaign surrogates, netting Harris criticism from Democratic insiders. That strategy failed; Harris did not manage to win over significant amounts of Republican voters.
Despite a moderate campaign, 45% of voters still saw her as too liberal/progressive while only 7% saw her as not liberal/progressive enough. But if there is an ideological indicator here, it’s that progressive economic populism is broadly popular and worth running on — it’s the Democratic brand which is toxic.
Take, for instance, races in the red states of Missouri and Nebraska, neither of which has voted for a Democratic president this century. In Missouri, a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and require employers to provide paid sick leave passed with a comfortable margin. In Nebraska, independent Dan Osborn ran for a Senate seat on an economic populist platform. He lost, but wildly outperformed expectations for a relatively unknown independent candidate in a solidly red state, outperforming Harris by about 7.5 points.
So what was this election about? I suggest we simply take voters at their word. Trump voters broadly cited two issues as their highest priorities: the economy and immigration. Trump’s plans for high tariffs and mass deportation will not solve either issue, but in the interest of pragmatism, it’s important to understand why people might have felt this way and not simply write them off as misinformed.
On the economy, the Biden-Harris administration managed many successes with narrow margins in the legislature. They averted the recession which many economists expected and brought inflation back down to normal levels. Wages began outpacing inflation in mid-2023. And yet, people still feel the economy is bad. But the campaign could have foreseen this and messaged against it. Public perception of the economy tends to lag behind reality; for example, Bill Clinton won an election in part by attacking George H.W. Bush’s economic record, even though the recession ended 20 months before the election of 1992.
So we must look to the first half of Biden’s presidency for answers, during which people were experiencing negative real wage growth, and (as I cautioned a year ago in The News-Letter) the phasing out of the COVID-era welfare state. And while wage growth is now outpacing inflation, people may personally take credit for their wages rising but blame the government for prices rising. People may still be feeling the conditions of the first half of the administration, and to the extent that they now have more money in their pockets, they are not likely to give the government credit for it as long as they are seeing higher prices for eggs.
Trump’s immigration platform is based on lies — his main contention is that illegal immigrants are bringing drugs and crime. This is false — over 90% of fentanyl seizures are at legal crossing points and 86.3% of convicted fentanyl drug traffickers are American citizens, not illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants have a lower offending rate than U.S. born citizens.
But from the beginning, Biden has played into the lies, going so far as to highlight an instance of a crime allegedly committed by an illegal immigrant in his State of the Union address, and the Harris campaign continued with some of these narratives. If it were all true, Trump would seem to be the sensible choice. It is true that, as Democrats advertised, he told GOP senators to kill a major border bill, but the broader point they were trying to make — that Harris would be tougher on the border than Trump — was not convincing.
We saw what his first term looked like on this issue. It was brutal. And although polling does show a hunger for mass deportations, people’s opinions are often contradictory. The percentage of Americans supporting mass deportations of illegal immigrants has grown since Trump’s first term, yet an even wider majority supports a legal path to citizenship, despite the two being inherently contradictory. Democrats should have spent more time making people aware of the facts which undermine Trump’s border policy rather than conceding on the framing and trying to compete on the “solution” to a nonexistent problem.
The biggest factor in this election was not on the ballot: Joe Biden. Regardless of his successes, the fact remains that he is a historically unpopular incumbent in a year in which incumbents have faced losses around the world (with the exception of the aforementioned Mexico). And while voters’ distrust of the administration is not always grounded in reality, it could have been mitigated with better strategy and a more effective communicator in charge. Biden did the right thing in stepping out of the race, but he should have either done so earlier so a real primary could be held, or for Harris to present a new path forward and cut herself loose of the dead weight of his incumbency.
No single issue or demographic is to blame for Kamala Harris’ loss, but there were clear errors in Democratic messaging and strategy which have ushered in a second Trump term. We must be careful to learn the right lessons.
Max Hsu is a junior from Fort Lauderdale, FL majoring in Writing Seminars and Political Science.
