What Just Happened?

Part the First: Why Kamala Harris Lost

“Okay, so I exploded on the launch pad. But the fight goes on…”

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Why Donald Trump won and why Kamala Harris lost are related but not identical questions. It seems to me that clarity lies in considering each question separately: There are some reasons unique to this election, others that interact, and others still that stand alone. Herewith, then, is my analysis of the Harris fail, to be followed, in a subsequent article, by my analysis of the Trump triumph.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: Kamala Harris was not just defeated but soundly trounced. There’s no single, all-encompassing explanation for that. On the contrary, there were a number of factors, some trivial in and of themselves, that conspired to undermine the Harris campaign. In combination, they achieved critical mass and blew her away on Election Day.

Orange Man Bad: The Harris campaign and its media allies labored long and hard to make the election about Donald J. Trump: vulgarian, misogynist, racist, antisemite, convicted felon, fascist, clown, senile lunatic. Some of those charges had a certain plausibility, others were pure paranoid fantasy, but they had one thing in common: The public had heard it all before. From the day in 2015 when Trump descended the golden escalator, the Left has been reviling him in precisely those terms. And by 2024, the law of diminishing returns has long since dulled their edge.

Many of the people who voted for Trump don’t particularly like him—but they were given no new reasons to reject him. All of the charges listed above had long since been factored into their Election Day decision. And those charges did not outweigh their discontent with the status quo. Orange Man Bad was a poor substitute for real solutions to real problems.

The Biden Record: The Harris campaign never did figure out how to deal with the awkward fact that its candidate was associated with a profoundly unpopular president. When Harris pledged to “put the past behind us” & etc., there was no concealing the fact that “the past” included almost four years of Biden Administration failures. The President’s slide in the polls, dating from Biden’s disgraceful Afghanistan skedaddle and its dismal aftermath, was only exacerbated by the border crisis (caused by the Biden Administration’s refusal to enforce immigration laws) and the inflationary spike (caused by the Biden Administration’s profligate spending).

The candidate tried to dodge around Biden, but as his vice president she couldn’t escape the presidential shadow. Every time she pledged a fresh start, innovative solutions, “a new generation of leadership,” etc. and so forth, the question, actual or implicit was: But what have you been doing for the past four years? We did get an answer to that one, sort of, when Harris was asked what, if anything, she’d have done differently from Biden. Nothing came to the candidate’s mind.

The Biden Defenestration: For a candidate and a party pledged to the defense of “our democracy,” the means by which Kamala Harris secured the nomination was something of an embarrassment. And for that, the Democrats have nobody to blame but themselves. It had been obvious for a long time that Joe Biden’s mental decline rendered him unfit to run for reelection. But instead of taking timely action to remedy the situation, the party grandees, the people around the President, and some in the media tried to cover for him. Only when Biden self-destructed in his debate with Trump did they panic and force him off the ticket. Kamala Harris, as vice president, was therefore able to lay claim to the nomination—this despite the fact that in her previous presidential run, she’d proved herself to be a terrible candidate. All in all, the defenestration of Joe Biden was an unseemly spectacle. And the voters noticed.

The Issue Set: More than once, I’ve heard former Democratic congressman Harold Ford Jr. remark (on FNC’s The Five) that to succeed, a candidate for office must meet the voters where they are. Sage advice! But this the Harris campaign declined to do. On one issue only, abortion, was Harris clear about her position. On all the others she was vague to the point of obfuscation. Inflation? She would go to war against “price gouging”! The economy? She would rain down freebies and tax cuts on “small businesses” and “the middle class” while raising taxes on billionaires and corporations! The border crisis? Well, it wasn’t really a crisis—but she’d fix it anyway! Foreign policy? Scarcely mentioned!

And she never showed her work. Price gouging? That explained the inflation spike? Could the candidate provide, oh, six examples of greedy corporations that were gouging the consumer? No? Okay…

Ideological Baggage: The record of a California progressive would have been a burden to any candidate—and for Harris it was especially heavy. She came to the nomination lugging that ponderous baggage, with the result that her necessary lurch to the center was awkward in the extreme. Gender transition surgery for prison inmates, soft on crime policies as a prosecutor and state attorney general, her support for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, her extremely progressive voting record in the Senate—all that and more contradicted her attempt to pose as a pragmatic centrist.

She, her campaign, and the Democratic Party tried pretending that Harris’s well-documented progressive record didn’t exist. That conspiracy of silence and her dodgy answers to questions about her record did nothing to lend credibility to her candidacy.

Tim Walz. It is a truism of American politics that a presidential candidate’s vice-presidential pick is of scant importance. Perhaps the running mate can fill some gap in the presidential candidate’s resume; perhaps picking the popular governor of a swing state will move the needle a bit. Barack Obama (showing that he has a malicious sense of humor) went with the former option by choosing Joe Biden (!) as his foreign policy-savvy running mate. Kamala Harris passed on the latter option by choosing Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, over Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro. In general, however, the guiding principle when picking a running mate is: First do no harm.

Harris botched that one by picking Walz. The Knucklehead, as he accurately described himself, turned out to be a bit of a liability: kind of weird, something of a fabulist, with a nasty blot on his military record. Hilariously, the campaign paired him with the Second Gentleman, Doug Emhoff, to model the new profile of authentic American masculinity. It wasn’t a good look. None of this amounted to much, really, but in a small way the Walz pick suggested that Harris’s judgement might be open to question.

And finally—Kamala Harris. To be rudely frank, she was a terrible candidate. That should have come as no surprise, given the flameout of her first run for the presidency and her comic turn as vice president. But though Harris often gave the impression that she’s as dumb as a box of rocks, I never really thought that was true. The explanation for her failure to launch lies in the fact that she has no natural political skills. Bill Clinton may have been a shameless, glad-handing sack of crap, but he possessed charisma and knew how to deploy it. Clinton was a natural—a politician to the manner born.

But there’s not a trace of charisma in the makeup of Kamala Harris: It was as if one of the Stepford Wives was running for president. The frequent air of unease, the brittle joy, the disquieting cackle, the rote talking points endlessly repeated, the variety of accents, sent forth vibes at odds with the persona of a leader. Her rhetoric echoed with the clang of boilerplate; her righteous anger came across as ineffectual petulance. Though I despise Hillary Clinton, when she was running for president, I was able to envision her as president. But Kamala Harris? No.

As for the connections among the various points raised above, I invite the reader to trace them out and determine the interactions. No doubt there are many possible combinations of factors, e.g. Orange Man Bad > The Biden Defenestration (Who was really undermining “our democracy”?) And yes, some of the reasons why Kamala Harris lost are intimately connected to some of the reasons why Donald Trump won—coming soon.