Why Harris lost
Trump and the republicans seem to end up with a landslide victory with Trump winning the popular vote, 53 seats in the senate and with a slim majority in the house of representatives. After four years of Joe Biden, voters said enough is enough and decided to send VP Harris back to California. She had ample opportunities to distance herself from the unpopular president but did not bother to formulate her own agenda. The democrats likely would have benefited from a proper primary process, as Harris likely would have lost given her inability to articulate policy and her history of losing. She was not a popular VP, and she did not run a good campaign.
Voters are clearly tired of open boarders, transgender talks, wasteful government spending, reckless foreign policy, legal warfare against Trump and his associates and the list can go on. Harris also managed to make certain groups angry such as Catholics, Amish people in key state Pennsylvania, Christians in general, the working class, black men to mention a few. The blowout victory of Donald Trump and the republican party will lead to major changes in important policy areas, from immigration to Ukraine.
Harris was also hobbled by Biden’s low approval ratings and struggled to break from him in the eyes of voters yearning for a change in direction. She is not a moderate and made it clear that she would not change direction from the Biden years. She had three-plus months to reintroduce herself to the country and she failed to do that. She was inarticulate, came up with crazy ideas such as price controls and tax on unrealized gains, and she is clearly not an overall thoughtful, articulate, and smart person.
The Biden years have led to significantly higher prices and the middle class has suffered from this. Harris had no answer to how this trend could be changed and how she would manage the economy. Prices spiked more during the Biden administration than at any point since the early 1980s. In some categories, they remain unsustainably high. Home prices have jumped an astonishing 47 percent since early 2020. This has made homeowners wealthier on paper but has priced millions of people out of the housing market. The situation with rented homes is no better. Costs are up more than 20 percent since Covid hit and have doubled in some places. The number of cost-burdened renters is at an all-time high.
Harris had no plan to deal with immigration. The open border policy would remain the same, and this issue became a major issue in the election as most voters want to see a secure border and a policy focused on law and order. Also there, Harris had no change plan.
Trump also made better choices than last time. He forged key alliances, including with tech billionaire Elon Musk, who spent at least $119 million on canvassing for Trump in the seven battleground states. He also resisted calls to fire senior campaign staffers, choosing to keep together a team that avoided the internal chaos of Trump’s previous bids. And he kept the spotlight on immigration, rather than abortion, where democrats have an edge with voters. Trump managed to attract new voters so, for the first time, millions of black people, in particular men, Latinos, Jews, and young people voted for Trump. Instead of constantly seeking to portray him as the next Hitler, democrats and the media need to ask themselves why he manages to appeal to such a wide and diverse audience of regular Americans, many of whom used to vote democrat. Trump has managed to attract a multiethnic working-class constituency to the republican party as its populist economic message begins to resonate. The 2024 election offers emphatic evidence for that appeal.
In a contest with razor-thin margins and toss-up polls, the Trump campaign pursued a strategy that did not seek to expand support significantly beyond his traditional base. Instead, it successfully energized and mobilized new voters within his core demographic, especially young male voters, who turned out in huge numbers.
The Trump campaign also hammered the economy. It ignored the reality of the positive aggregate indicators presented by a buoyant stock market, high levels of employment and rates of GDP growth. Instead, Trump and his surrogates and campaigners focused people’s minds on the day-to-day hardship wrought by many years of high inflation, which had eroded household incomes and purchasing power.
A wild card feature of this election is the concerted support Trump enjoyed from billionaire Elon Musk, who provided a huge number of followers through his control of the social media platform X. This helped the Trump campaign amplify and reinforce his message and deliver it directly to millions of followers. Trump also had an interview with Joe Rogen, a wildly popular podcaster, which Harris declined.
Trump’s victory is the most powerful example this year of a political and economic environment that has been brutal for incumbents around the world and brought home the fact that inflation is political kryptonite. This lesson will not soon be lost on governments, growth is not enough if prices are high, and wages perceived to not keep pace. The dividing lines in U.S. politics remain bright along geographical, educational, and gender lines, with Trump’s strongest support coming from working-class men.
On a global level, there is no getting away from the fact that Trump’s victory will be transformational for both the US and the international system, with geopolitical and economic risks heightened.
Other reasons were for the republican landslide were Trump’s skill at convincing voters he is on their side and success in appealing to marginal voting groups, the Israel-Hamas war dividing the democratic base, the assassination attempts on Trump and legal persecutions boosting his favorability, and Harris’ failure to move from left-wing to moderate or articulate a clear vision for America. The Democrats’ hasty replacement of the first-term unpopular president with Harris, one of the most unpopular VPs in history, deprived them of a better-tested candidate who could potentially have rallied broader support. Much of the country read Trump’s legal woes as part of a larger corrupt conspiracy to deny him, and them, power.
Trump is surprisingly winning the popular vote with more than 74 million votes. Harris is doing relatively well and will win about the same number of votes as Obama’s most successful election with more than 69 million votes. Bill Clinton’s best performance was around 47 million votes. It is still a mystery how Joe Biden, a moderately popular candidate with no charisma, won a record number of votes in 2020, with more than 81 million votes. The highest in history by a huge margin. Truly a mystery.