What to Take Away From Kamala Harris’ Incredibly Painful Defeat

For the second time in eight years, Democrats are facing their nightmare scenario: Americans have chosen Donald Trump as the president of the United States, this time possibly even as the popular vote winner. Trump’s four-year-long quest to return to power, first with an unprecedented assault on the peaceful transfer of power following the 2020 election and now via the ballot box, has succeeded. While ballots are still being counted, Trump appears to have swept the seven consensus battleground states—some narrowly, like Wisconsin and Michigan, and some more decisively, like Nevada—for what is likely a 312–226 victory in the Electoral College. Perhaps even more jaw-dropping is the Democratic collapse in deep-blue states like New Jersey, which Biden won by 14 points and Harris looks to carry by around just 5. Eating into Harris’ margins in Democratic landslide states without quite winning them is exactly why Trump may actually win the popular vote, although that may take weeks to determine as slow-counting states like California and New York finalize their tallies. There’s no sugarcoating this: By the standards of 21^st century American politics, this was a Republican rout.

For Democrats, the long, dark night of the soul is just beginning. They must simultaneously figure out how to rally their coalition against the coming onslaught of far-right policy madness while conducting a thorough autopsy of how the party has once again found itself in this dreadful position. But whichever direction you find yourself pointing your finger, the underlying reality is ice-cold and extremely sobering. Republicans will hold at least 52 and perhaps as many as 55 seats in the Senate. While it is not at all clear who will win the House of Representatives, it is hard to see Democrats flipping it given the outcomes up and down the ballot elsewhere. Democrats have likely kicked away the presidency and both branches of Congress in four short years, just like Trump and his allies did between 2016 and 2020. And the worst is very much yet to come.

Cue the finger-pointing.

Unlike Republicans, Democrats have the advantage of introspection. The GOP hasn’t performed a postelection autopsy since 2012, when party strategists insisted that anti-immigration rhetoric was hurting the party with the growing Latino voting bloc. Of course, Republican primary voters had different ideas, making Donald Trump the party leader and making nativism the heart and soul of the party. And because they won the 2016 election, they could believe, with some justification, that it had all worked out fine. After 2020, Republicans chose not to look inward and instead descended into a conspiratorial morass of denial and rage that prevented them, at least publicly, from addressing the sources of their defeat. And yet despite all that, Trump seems to have once again made major gains with Latino voters; less so with Black voters. It’s not yet a realignment, but it’s a major challenge for Democrats looking to put together a winning coalition moving forward.

There’s also this: The unique nature of the 2024 campaign, during which Democrats switched nominees less than four months before the election, will pose serious challenges for their own internal audit. How much of this disaster can be pinned on Joe Biden, and how much of it on Kamala Harris and her campaign? How much of it was just the dumb luck of having to guide the country out of its pandemic misery into a new era, and how much of it was voters seeing Democratic policies in action and running away from them? Unfortunately, there will be no easy answers, just ideological factions with knives out, grievances to air, and plenty of time to kill. One silver lining is that the scale of the defeat cannot be pinned on any one decision, such as Harris choosing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate rather than Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

But there is some low-hanging fruit to dispense with. Few credible analyses suggest that the final round of COVID stimulus spending—the only one that Joe Biden and the Democrats were directly responsible for via the American Rescue Plan—caused the inflation crisis that began in 2021. So austerity hawks who want to use inflation as a cudgel with which to beat the economic left need to be shut down as quickly as possible. Democrats were left holding the bag when this inflation crisis hit, they paid dearly for it, and there’s not much more to say about it other than that the Biden administration seemed constantly wrong-footed by it and never settled on a strategy to manage the fallout.

Immigration obviously looms large, and the party needs to have a reckoning with it. This is an enormously complicated subject, but this is another area where the Biden administration failed to promptly respond to growing public dissatisfaction, and the party as a whole has now paid a dire price. Following the pandemic, which was a time of enormous psychological and economic hardship for Americans, hearts seemed to harden toward undocumented immigrants, and in particular, toward Venezuelan migrants fleeing chaos in their home country. And while you can’t lay the whole problem at the Biden administration’s feet, there is a very clear story to be told here.

In May 2021, the Biden administration offered Temporary Protective Status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan nationals who had fled to the United States. Venezuelans continued to seek refuge in the United States in such large numbers that the administration was forced to expand the order again in 2023 to cover hundreds of thousands more new arrivals.

It’s not that this was inherently bad policy or without moral justification. But it became clear by 2022 that the administration had bitten off a lot more than it could chew. A recalcitrant Congress refused to pursue systemic reform, state and local governments were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the new arrivals, and Biden stubbornly refused to use emergency powers to unlock the requisite resources to manage the crisis. Republican governors like Greg Abbott in Texas cynically exploited this human suffering by busing and flying migrants in large numbers to blue cities like Chicago and New York. A significant number ended up living on the streets, hanging out in Aldi parking lots, highway off-ramps, and city streets and generally reinforcing the impression that social disorder was out of control. People—with some justification—did not like this at all, which can be seen quite clearly in Trump’s gains in big Democratic metropolitan areas like Chicago, where—although votes are still being counted—Trump will likely decrease the Democratic margin from 2020 by at least the high single digits.

At the same time, Democrats from Biden and Harris on down refused to justify anything that they had done, or to speak about immigration as a vital part of America’s dynamism and economic growth. They retreated into a defensive posture about the issue and then capitulated to the right by signing on to a highly restrictive border security bill early in 2024 that Trump and his allies nevertheless cynically torpedoed. The bottom line here is that Democrats cannot pursue liberal immigration policies while signaling to voters that they are actually ideologically closer to Republicans on the issue. And they certainly can’t win a debate that they refuse to join. In four short years, immigration went from a Democratic strength, one that they successfully contrasted with Trump’s draconian, inhumane policies and rhetoric, to an anchor on the party’s fortunes. God knows what will happen to immigrants now, both those here illegally and those here legally under Biden policies that Trump will surely try to reverse as one of his first orders of business. Democrats simply cannot afford to make these kinds of mistakes the next time they win power in Washington, if indeed there is a next time.

Then there’s the Harris campaign. If Joe Biden had not selfishly plunged the party into a deep crisis by insisting on running for reelection as a profoundly unpopular, 81-year-old incumbent, Democrats could have had a vigorous debate about policy and chosen a consensus nominee as part of their ordinary primary process. The nomination certainly might have gone to Harris anyway, but she would have had an extra year to prepare her campaign, stand up a policy shop, and strategize how to reconcile the unabashed progressive who sought the nomination in 2019 with the more cautious, conservative figure that Americans got to know on the campaign trail since the summer. Nevertheless, her campaign was focused and well-funded, and Harris made almost no ad hoc mistakes. She immediately brought energy and vitality to a party that was drifting inexorably into sclerosis by having an out-of-touch and visibly declining man as their party leader. It just wasn’t nearly enough.

But there were what now look like two enormous strategic errors. Perhaps the most damaging was encapsulated during her interview on The View in which she was asked what she would change about the Biden administration’s record and she said, “Not a thing comes to mind.” It was one of her few obvious gaffes, but it was, more importantly, indicative of Harris’ refusal to distance herself from the radioactive president, or a calculation that creating that distance wasn’t politically possible. Exactly why that is remains a mystery. The president is not the vice president’s boss in any traditional sense. Had Biden won the nomination, he could have chosen a different running mate, but the Constitution does not grant the president a role in dispensing with the VP. Once the nomination was hers, there would have been nothing that Biden could’ve done to her had she chosen to separate herself from him or criticize his record on immigration or Israel–Palestine.

The second strategic error, which was quite obvious to many even as it was unfolding, was to stake the campaign’s fate on a bid to win over moderate Republicans in the suburbs. As I argued when Harris was inexplicably campaigning with former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, most Republicans who could not stomach Donald Trump are now called Democrats and were already priced into the polling. This was supposed to lead to Democratic gains in the suburbs, which do not appear to have materialized. The embrace of discredited Republicans may also have contributed to further losses in rural areas, as well as with independent voters and young voters who are extremely unhappy with the status quo. If this outcome doesn’t bury the conventional wisdom that Democrats must court Republicans by moving to the center over and over again, I just don’t know what could possibly do it.

In campaign terms, this is an extremely perplexing outcome. It’s the third consecutive presidential election in which the campaign that had what appeared to be the less organized ground game won. The Sept. 10 debate didn’t matter. Harris’ superior favorability numbers didn’t matter. Trump’s felony convictions not only didn’t matter, as some polling earlier this year suggested they might, but rather actually appeared to help him. His bizarre decision to spend a lot of his final campaign days in states he won’t win didn’t matter. Voters simply chose to forget that less than four years ago, Trump tried to overthrow the American system of government, live on national television. Procedural democracy has no meaningful constituency in the United States of America, which is chilling. The electoral backlash against the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade was not enough to bring voters to Democrats, a lesson that will not be lost on Republicans as they plot their next move to chip away at reproductive rights.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is nothing that Donald Trump could possibly have said or done to lose this thing. He staged the most chaotic and repulsive stretch-run that anyone has ever witnessed. There was Trump’s bonkers Madison Square Garden rally, situated in a state that Harris will end up winning by double digits, where some sophomoric comedian cracked jokes about how Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage” and Trump himself made some of his most outlandish remarks of the campaign. There was letting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. start free-associating policy ideas about what he might do in Trump’s Cabinet, including (as if he were a character in Dr. Strangelove) eliminating the fluoridation of America’s water supply. And then finally Trump himself seemed to go out of his way to offend people at every opportunity, including when he said that he would protect women “whether the women like it or not.” I’d call it a gaffe but that implies that it was accidental, and you could tell the guy knew exactly what he was saying and doing.

Yet it is not clear how much any of these factors really impacted what might have been an election decided more than anything else by voter dissatisfaction with the Biden administration. The simplest explanation of this election outcome is that voters genuinely disliked the outcome of four years of Democratic governance and wanted a change, and in the end the fact that the Republican in front of them happened to be a deranged, babbling narcissist with authoritarian impulses and ludicrous policy plans didn’t matter to enough people to make a difference. And so we will be treated to another four years of the Trump circus.

Let us hope that we can find a way to survive them with what is left of our democracy and sanity intact.