Few reasonable political observers anticipated a blowout for Kamala Harris. However Donald Trump’s victory within the 2024 presidential election was removed from assured, both. For many of Harris’ comparatively temporary candidacy, she and Trump seemed to be locked in a really tight race. So Harris’ extremely dismal exhibiting was additionally considerably surprising. She got here up quick in each the Electoral School and the fashionable vote, misplaced all seven swing states, and misplaced floor with most demographic teams. Even in reliably Democratic strongholds equivalent to New Jersey and New York, Harris underperformed.
Some individuals are chalking Harris’ loss as much as sexism, misogyny, and racism. And little question some small phase of voters have been motivated by such issues, as some individuals at all times are. However one needn’t think about a mass hate wave to elucidate Trump’s victory.
Within the weeks main as much as the election, candidate Harris struggled to outline herself as polls repeatedly confirmed little daylight between her and Trump. Usually, Trump’s flaws appeared to be Harris’ essential promoting level: She was not Trump. However who was she? Even Harris herself appeared scared to say.
All through her temporary marketing campaign, Harris strenuously prevented laying out detailed plans or positions, outdoors of pledging to guard abortion entry. Shehad an particularly exhausting time articulating how her administration could be completely different from Biden’s not-terribly-popular presidency or how she would flip issues like inflation round.
This wrestle to distinguish herself from Biden is sensible in gentle of her profession historical past. Harris might be finest understood as an formidable vessel for no matter drives Democratic voters in a given period. She represents the Democratic Celebration institution via and thru.
If Harris has any private political priorities or animating ideology at her core, they have been buried so deep as to principally be undetectable—totally subsumed by expert pandering to the progressive zeitgeist. That is why Harris has a popularity as a flip-flopper. That is why she spent a lot of her quick 2024 marketing campaign strolling again positions she took in the course of the relatively completely different days of 2019 and 2020. And it is why she tried exhausting to not stake out sturdy positions on most points this time round.
Sure, Harris had reproductive rights on her facet. However whereas that is been an enormous challenge this election, it is just one challenge—and never even one the place Trump, who says he does not desire a nationwide abortion ban, completely disagrees.
Although Harris’ marketing campaign largely prevented detailed coverage proposals, we did get some glimpses of what a President Harris hoped to have in retailer for us. It included an incoherent “Medicare at Dwelling” profit, nationwide rent-control insurance policies, tax hikes on companies, giving $25,000 to first-time homebuyers, giving “1 million loans which might be absolutely forgivable” to “Black entrepreneurs and others” who need to begin companies, and a few type of federal worth controls for groceries—or, at the least, a federal clampdown on worth gouging, no matter that might have turned out to imply. And a continuation of Biden-era overseas coverage, hostility towards mergers, intrusion into well being care (together with forcing insurance coverage corporations to cowl over-the-counter contraception, and maybe all kinds of over-the-counter merchandise, with no price sharing), and a bizarre fixation on so-called junk charges.
A number of these proposals are promoted as methods to decrease costs, improve alternative, and assist economically struggling People. However in follow, these insurance policies would shift prices round and even drive them up, whereas throttling innovation and making every thing from housing to condoms much less inexpensive. Additionally they lack a type of cohesive attraction—a metanarrative or imaginative and prescient that the marketing campaign may simply promote.
In some ways, a Harris presidency promised to be a continuation of the previous 4 years. Harris would have put a glossier and extra fashionable spin on the floor, however beneath it was the identical selectively progressive and economically nonsensical schtick. Not an enormous departure—however not an outdated white man (take your decide which) of questionable cognitive functioning.
That appeared to be principally what the Harris marketing campaign was promoting. Voters apparently wished one thing completely different.
