Kamala Harris is the loser of the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump has 277 electoral votes, according to the Associated Press, with several states still left to be decided, but also leaning in Trump’s direction. Even in reliably Democratic strongholds, Harris underperformed.
For instance, Harris won New York, but by a mere 11-point margin as of press time; in 2020, Biden’s margin there was 23 points. Harris and Trump were neck and neck in Hidalgo County, Texas—a heavily Latino county that both Biden and Hillary Clinton handily won. NBC News exit polls suggested Harris experienced significant losses with Latino voters, who went 65 percent for Biden then but were breaking only 53 percent for Harris.
Already, some people are chalking Harris’ loss up to sexism, misogyny, and racism.
Surely some voters were motivated by these things, as some people always are. But one needn’t imagine a mass hate wave to explain Trump’s victory.
In the weeks leading up to the election, candidate Harris struggled to define herself as polls repeatedly showed little daylight between her and Trump. Often, it seemed that Trump’s flaws were Harris’ main selling point. She was not Trump. But, who was she? Even Harris herself seemed scared to say.
Throughout her brief campaign, Harris strenuously avoided laying out detailed plans or positions, outside of protecting abortion access. She had an especially hard time articulating how her administration would be different from the not-terribly-popular Joe Biden presidency or how she would turn things like inflation around.
This struggle to differentiate herself from Biden makes sense in light of her career history. She’s probably best understood as an ambitious vessel for whatever drives Democratic voters in a given era. She represents the Democratic Party establishment through and through.
If Harris has any personal political priorities or animating ideology at her core, they’ve been buried so deep by this point as to basically be undetectable—entirely subsumed by skilled pandering to the progressive zeitgeist. That’s why Harris has a reputation as a flip-flopper. That’s why she spent much of her short 2024 campaign walking back positions she took during the quite-different political days of 2019 and 2020. And it’s why she tried hard not to stake out strong positions on most issues this time around.
Yes, Harris had reproductive rights on her side. But while that’s been a huge issue this election, it’s only one issue—and not even one where Trump, who says he doesn’t want a nationwide abortion ban, totally disagrees.
Though Harris’ campaign largely avoided detailed policy proposals, we did get some glimpses of what a President Harris hoped to have in store for us. It included an incoherent “Medicare at Home benefit,” national rent-control policies, tax hikes on businesses, giving $25,000 to first-time homebuyers, giving “1 million loans that are fully forgivable” to “Black entrepreneurs and others” who want to start businesses, and some form of federal price controls for groceries—or, at least, a federal clampdown on price gouging, whatever that turns out to mean. And a continuation of Biden-era foreign policy, hostility toward mergers, intrusion into health care policies (including forcing insurance companies to cover over-the-counter contraception, and perhaps all sorts of over-the-counter products, with no cost-sharing), and a weird fixation on so-called junk fees.
A lot of these proposals are promoted as ways to lower prices, increase opportunity, and help economically struggling Americans. But in practice, these policies would shift costs around or even drive them up, while throttling innovation and making everything from housing to condoms less affordable. They also lack a sort of cohesive appeal—a meta-narrative or vision that the campaign could easily sell.
In many ways, a Harris presidency promised to be a continuation of the past four years. Harris would have put a glossier and more modern spin on the surface, but underneath it was the same selectively progressive and economically nonsensical schtick. Not a huge departure—but not an old white man (take your pick which) of questionable cognitive functioning.
That seems mostly what the Harris campaign was selling. Voters apparently wanted more.
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