Kamala Harris Squandered Her Opportunity to Win

For a few brief weeks in the summer, it appeared like the Democratic Party was listening to voters. In July, President Joe Biden announced he would no longer seek reelection, and Vice-President Kamala Harris stepped in; soon, she announced that Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota would be her running mate. Walz had a reputation for pushing through a relatively progressive agenda in a purple state with a large rural population, and Harris herself adopted a message of freedom. She didn’t shy away from discussing abortion on the campaign trail, and in August, she released a number of economic policies that were partly aimed at addressing voters’ top concern, inflation, with proposals like a ban on grocery-store price gouging.

Even so, Harris was never my great hope as a leftist. Though I believed at the time that she was the most obvious candidate to replace Biden on the ticket, I knew she wouldn’t run like Senator Bernie Sanders. Perhaps she wouldn’t have won no matter what she did or said — a reflection of Biden’s toxicity. At the same time, the magnitude of her loss has brought her strategy into focus, and as Wednesday dawned, it was evident that she and her aides had misread the electorate. She squandered her early momentum by not distancing herself from an unpopular president while courting a moderate vote that never materialized. In doing so, she failed to mobilize voters, including many white women. The fault ultimately lies with Harris, Biden, and the party.

Early on, Harris claimed her candidacy marked a generational shift away from Biden and Trump, but it was never entirely clear what she meant by that. Perhaps she thought the facts spoke for themselves. She could speak coherently and she wasn’t in her 80s. Although she never ran on her gender or race, her identity as a woman of color also sharpened the contrast between herself and the president. But it’s always a mistake to conflate a politician’s identity with transformational change, and as Harris ran, she never truly broke with Biden. Not on Gaza, or on much of anything else. During an appearance on The View, she said that she couldn’t think of much that she would have done differently than Biden had — other than putting a Republican in her cabinet. Like the president, she stressed her willingness to work across the aisle. She embraced Liz Cheney, a right-wing chicken hawk, and brandished endorsements from Never Trump Republicans.

As the race wore on, it became clear that Harris was no populist at all. Instead, she was beholden to the very establishment that had elevated her. The Never Trumpers who backed her might be fixtures on cable news, but they were never going to deliver enough voters to Harris. Their audience consists of liberals who want to believe that our norms still work and the center still holds. It doesn’t. It hasn’t for years. To some extent that falls on Biden, who pledged a return to normal politics and failed to deliver, but Harris also did not recognize the danger he’d put her in. She tacked consistently to the center right, hoping that a handful of technocratic economic policies and a pro-Roe message would be sufficient. Meanwhile, a majority of voters knew that our norms had failed, and felt keenly that the economy didn’t work for them. That includes many women, who don’t vote solely on abortion. They are often in charge of the household pocketbook, and although inflation is going down and inequality has narrowed, they’re still affected by the high cost of living. Rents are up and mortgages are expensive, as are child care and health care. Despite this, the New York Times reported that Harris spent more time with billionaire Mark Cuban in October than she did with Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers.

Donald Trump had bet on a sense of aggrieved masculinity as the return path to power, and while there’s much we don’t know about who turned out to vote and why, his strategy did not alienate white women in the numbers Harris needed to win. Misogyny and racism should receive due attention in postmortems to come, but they can’t explain Tuesday on their own. The story is more complicated, and dire. Though she spoke of freedom, of forward motion, of change, voters did not trust her to deliver. Some will blame the left for this, but Harris tried centrism as did Biden and Clinton before her, and that didn’t work, either. Leftists do not control the Democratic Party and never have; only consider the party’s intransigence on Gaza. If the Democratic brand is poison now, blame its grifter consultants, who never fail out of politics no matter how many pivotal races they lose. Blame Harris, too, whose message was simply too anemic to overcome decades of Democratic failure.

Trump will now return to power, perhaps with a Republican Congress. Women will inevitably suffer, even those who voted for him. When they begin to hurt, they will need help, and someone will have to offer it to them. Maybe that person will be a Democrat. Maybe they’ll be an independent. Maybe we know their name already and maybe we don’t. Whoever they are, they have to do what Harris didn’t, and break with recent history in order to try something new. “Sometimes, the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win,” Harris said during her concession speech on Wednesday, and that could be true but only if her party restructures itself. I’m not entirely sure what that ought to look like, but I do believe it’s possible to glean some insight from the wreckage of Tuesday evening. Some will say that Trump’s opponents must sacrifice the rights of transgender people and immigrants and women to win, which fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Voters believe, wrongly, that Trump works for them. Democrats — or whoever else — must convince them otherwise, preferably with a populist economic message that addresses their concerns without throwing our most vulnerable workers to the wolves. It’s possible. More than that, it’s necessary. Women deserved more from Harris and her party, and so did everyone else.