Failed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ White House aspirations are over after being defeated by President-elect Donald Trump. Now, Democrats are doing some deep digging to determine what went wrong.
The Democrats pushed President Joe Biden out of the race and replaced him with Harris despite not winning a single primary vote. The party, including Harris, lied to the American people, telling them Biden was fit enough for office when he clearly wasn’t, and then kicked him out once their lie had been exposed. Harris opened the southern border and allowed millions of illegal immigrants into the country, destroying small American communities and killing innocent lives. Her administration caused rampant inflation and ruined the nation’s economy, all while giving tens of millions of dollars to foreign countries and snubbing the U.S.
Despite this, Democrats are scratching their heads, wondering what could have gone wrong that cost Harris the election.
TIME Magazine noted that most of the blame shouldn't be pinned on Harris but on Biden for setting the stage for catastrophic campaign failure.
Political strategist David Axelrod blamed Biden’s late exit from the race for the failure of the Harris-Walz campaign.
“The story might have been different if he had made a timely decision to step aside and allowed the party to move on,” Axelrod said, adding that she had an added challenge of navigating running the country while it was still “suffering” from the pandemic.
“At the end of the day, being the VP of an Administration that people wanted to fire may have been an insurmountable obstacle,” he continued.
The publication also suggested that those who enabled Biden to run for re-election and those who shielded the 81-year-old president from his declining health should be blamed for the left’s loss as well.
That's not all. TIME said that Harris’s donors and PACs are also part of why the vice president failed to bring home a win.
The party’s soul-searching is likely to extend to the groups it relies on to turn out the vote. Take, for instance, NextGen America, the party's biggest youth-vote machine, which spent almost $56 million, hired 256 staffers and recruited almost 30,000 volunteers. It was a massive undertaking—and yet Harris won just 55% of voters under the age of 30, lagging Biden’s performance by five points. Another group, Swing Left, raised $25 million from Red State Democrats for on-the-brink districts, knocked on almost 350,000 battleground doors in the final weekend, and placed more than a half-million calls in that final push. The celebrity-tinged GOTV machine didn't work.
Yet to some observers, focusing on campaign minutia misses the bigger picture—that Harris may have been doomed from the start by forces outside of her control. “No incumbent party has ever won with a president with a 40% approval rating or under,” says Axelrod. “No party has won with people's attitudes about the economy what they were.
The outlet also claimed that Harris’ loss could be attributed to forms of misogyny, pointing out that Trump defeated two female candidates.
“It’s hard to ignore that Trump has now won twice against female opponents while losing to an old white man,” the article read.
Trump defeated Harris in a historic win, securing all seven swing states, the electoral vote, and the popular vote. He also won the House and Senate. Harris lost in Democrat-dominated states that the party has traditionally won, such as Rhode Island, where former President Obama secured a 27-point advantage. That advantage shrank to 21 points when Biden was the nominee. During the 2024 race, that number decreased to nine points with Harris on the ballot.