When She Fought, She Lost

For the last several months, I’ve been saying that Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election because too many voters didn’t want as their President a black woman with a Jewish husband.  But a couple of books I’ve been reading make it clear that, while there is truth to that, it’s hardly the whole story.  The Democratic Party blew the 2024 presidential (and congressional) elections largely due to incompetence ineptitude, and infighting, and also for the same reason Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016 - they had no ability to communicate with the voters they needed most.

Perhaps the biggest reason the Democrats were doomed to fail in 2024 was because of President Biden.  It pains me to admit this, after believing otherwise, but he had no chance of winning a second term and he didn’t know what he was doing when he decided to try for one.  It wasn’t only because he was older and had a growing cognitive disorder.  It was also because his economic policies were unpopular.  Maybe the economy was doing well during his single term, but many people did not feel the effects of it. They were dealing too much with inflation, especially at the supermarket at the gas station, and Biden kept talking about with a wonderful economy it was.

Both his unpopularity and his growing cognitive disorder, eventually, left him to give up his bid for a second term - a year and a half too late.  How I wish that President Biden had announced his decision not to stand for a second term at his 2023 State of the Union address.  Bowing out much earlier would have allowed other Democrats start presidential campaigns and compete for the party’s presidential nomination in a fair and open contest.  Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential campaign in July 2024 made Harris the nominee largely by default.  She was next in line and there wasn’t enough time to have a rump primary quickly set up and held for Harris and other presidential possibilities to run in.

Moreover, Harris did not have unanimous support among leading Democrats. One might think that Barack Obama, the nation’s first black President, and Nancy Pelosi, the first female Speaker of the House, would get behind Harris in a heartbeat to see her become the first black female President.  In fact, Obama didn’t think Harris could win, and Pelosi disliked her. The leading proponent for a Harris candidacy, James Clyburn, the black congressman from South Carolina, said that it would be an insult to the black women in the Democratic base not to make her the nominee.  With that statement, Clyburn more or less invited MAGA Republicans to dismiss Harris as a "DEI candidate."

All of this could have been mitigated by the Harris campaign, which unfortunately had problems of its own.  Harris inherited the Biden campaign's apparatus and the Biden campaign's staff, including campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon, a control freak known for making grown men cry and making grown women scream.  Harris felt more or less stuck with her, and she trusted her instincts, which was a problem in and of itself; she should have looked not to O'Malley Dillon's instincts, one of which was to freeze out Harris insiders, but her data, which showed that Harris had a great deal of skepticism toward her presidential bid to overcome. 

The skepticism was rooted in Harris's message, or lack thereof.  Her to-do list read like just that - a list, not a comprehensive and coherent vision for where she wanted to take the country.  Trump, as he had done in 2016, was able to articulate his vision in bold, declarative words, whereas Harris only offered policy positions.  People demanded change, and change was what Trump offered as he did in 2016, but when given the chance to offer on ABC's "The View"  an example of what she would do different as President from Joe Biden, who had told her not to separate herself from the administration and whose staffers dominated the campaign, said she could not think of such an example.

Also, unlike the Trump campaign, the Harris campaign fumbled the ball in pursuing the crucial youth vote, particularly young men.  She did make an earnest effort to appear on Joe Rogan's podcasts but Rogan, based in Austin, Texas, insisted that she appear in his studio in person, not remotely, and her efforts to get on his show failed, particularly when she tried to have a rally in nearby Houston and time it with a possible Rogan appearance on his show.  The result?  Rogan had that particular day off, which he forfeited when Trump, whom Rogan had criticized, offered to come on and mend fences with him - and Rogan couldn't say no to that.  The Harris rally in Houston - a lame cover for her botched effort to talk to Rogan on his show, given that she had no chance of winning Texas - occurred on the same day that Trump appeared on Rogan's show and she didn't, a Friday in October . . . a day when Texans were otherwise occupied with Friday night high-school football.  Too bad - maybe, on Rogan's show, Harris could have explained why she left a Trump ad accusing her of supporting gender-affirming care for transsexual inmates that aired during NFL games go unanswered.

Even if Harris did know whom to reach for their votes, her campaign didn't know how to reach them.  Again - what sort of a presidential campaign tries to win votes in working-class South Philadelphia by sending the worldly and glamorous model Paulina Porizkova to canvass there?  A presidential campaign resembling the clueless DJ who plays Jethro Tull at a hip-hop house party, of course.

In the end, Biden's ego, Jen O'Malley Dillon's self-importance, and Harris's own inability to define herself doomed the Democrats in 2024.  Sure, I and others voted for Harris because Trump represented a threat to democracy.  But by making that a centerpiece (a centerpiece, not the centerpiece) of her campaign, she was preaching to people who were going to vote for her anyway.   She needed to reach out to people who were more concerned with economic security than with the right to vote for President.  Many of those people, perversely, did not vote in 2024 at all. 

And the democracy argument would have had more resonance coming from a party that did not force a sitting President to stop aside and then replace him with a candidate who never competed in any presidential primary, simply because she was next in line.

An earlier Biden exit would have allowed a candidate with an inspiring agenda and a better-than-even chance of defeating Trump.  Maybe Harris, after a grueling primary and caucus season, still could have been such a candidate.  But her aborted 2019 presidential campaign - why was she running then, anyway? - didn't offer any promise of her rising to such a level either.  And when Biden continued to insist he could have won once the election was over, despite all evidence to the contrary, he only cast shade on Harris, a woman he and others once championed.

It is just this sort of backstabbing that ended with Donny Deutsch ridiculing the Democrats on national television and with Chris Matthews scolding them through the same medium two days after the election.  

It's just this sort of party - left in the wilderness once Trump started to bask in his triumph - to end up being lost as to what to do next..

But, as an secessionist who favors breaking up the U.S. into smaller countries, that's none of my business.

Please be sure to read two books on the 2024 presidential election, 'Fight" by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes and "Uncharted" by Chris Whipple.