The postmortems about US Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 US presidential election will go on for a long time. Many books will be written, pundits’ reputations made and unmade, and academic careers launched as the polling data behind this baffling, unprecedented election are pored over for years to come. But as a first rough draft of history, there are a few ominous road markers that stand out.
After a remarkable start to her campaign, Harris failed to close the deal rhetorically. In an unfortunate echo of Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, Harris spent far too much time trying to argue that Trump was unfit for the presidency and too little time delivering a coherent message about why she would be better.
Despite overpowering Trump in their only debate on 10 September and raising more than $1bn in donations in just three months—a new record—Harris often floundered when challenged to deliver a convincing summary of her agenda on critical issues such as the economy and immigration. She also fumbled badly in explaining her flip-flops on issues such as fracking (which she once opposed and later supported, but without pointing out the simple fact that improved technology had made it environmentally safer). That led Wall Street Journal commentator Peggy Noonan to label Harris an “artless dodger.”
And, in the end, Harris failed to find a politically agile way of distancing herself from her unpopular boss, US President Joe Biden.
In an interview with Politico in the final weeks before the election, Trump campaign manager Jason Miller put his finger on what he called the turning point of the race. This came after weeks of polling in Harris’ favour following her abrupt—and, by some accounts, undemocratic—emergence at the top of the ticket on 21 July. Miller said it was Harris’ botched answer to an easy question from a friendly TV anchor, Sunny Hostin, co-host of The View, who asked Harris on 8 October if she would have done anything differently from Biden over the past four years. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris awkwardly responded, horrifying her advisors and sparking an eruption of Trumpian triumphalism online.
In subsequent weeks, Harris tried to recover, telling CNN, “(My administration) will not be a continuation of the Biden administration,” but the damage was done. “Who would have thought that Sunny Hostin from The View really killed Kamala Harris’s candidacy?” Miller said. “But you can make the case that Sunny did.”
In fact, Harris may have faced a nearly impossible task in trying to overcome Biden’s consistently poor disapproval ratings, with some two-thirds of voters or more believing the nation was on the wrong track.
Through most of 2024, Biden and leading members of his party convinced themselves that he’d earned a second term handily based on his remarkable legislative record, including a major bipartisan infrastructure spending bill, historic climate investment, and the CHIPS and Science Act, all of which poured billions of dollars into manufacturing and clean energy. One reason Biden refused to step aside for as long as he did, despite concerns about his age and mental acuity, was that he was convinced voters would sooner or later realise how effective a president he’d been.
Indeed, after the 2022 midterm elections, when the Democrats performed far better than pundits had predicted and ascribed that to anti-Trump sentiment, Biden sounded overconfident, if anything. Speaking to reporters the day after the midterm elections, the president was asked what he might do differently to address voters’ concerns about the economy and the widespread sentiment that the country was generally moving in the wrong direction. He replied, “Nothing.”
