MacroPolis

As an American expat in Europe, it is a familiar quadrennial exercise to be called upon to explain to friends, colleagues, and even random strangers in shops why America elected who they did as president. The reasons this year are both complex and simple. Complex, because there was a general sense both home and abroad that in 2020, US voters had turned the page on four years of Trump ‘noise’, of his inhabiting every space in their daily lives. America had had enough of the never-ending Trump circus that sucked the oxygen out of all other political discourse. But also, simple because the basic reality of a foreshortened campaign by a candidate who did not so much earn the nomination as stumble into it likely doomed the Democrats from the start.

And so here we are four years on, girding ourselves for another Trump inauguration rife with patriotic kitsch, Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan. The Harris-Walz campaign failed to make a compelling case for returning a Democrat to the White House, as did the Democratic Party as a whole down ballot. After nine years of the endless Trump stand-up insult comic act and less than five years after the storming of the Capitol by an angry mob of MAGA supporters, surely putting Trump back in the White House was like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving and Christmas? What kind of mental gymnastics did American voters undertake to willingly return to office the most divisive public figure in living memory to the most powerful job in the world?

Let’s start with the ‘simple’ bit. It wasn’t misogyny and it wasn’t racism that cost Harris the presidency. People did not vote for her simply because they didn’t know who she was. Prior to becoming Vice President, Harris had only served two full years of her six-year term as a senator from California, during which she did not gain a high public profile. Her prior role as attorney general for California afforded her even fewer opportunities to become a visible public figure. Her failed run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019 ended even before the first primary was held.

The role of vice president is a mixed blessing. Officially the office of the vice president has one of the shortest job descriptions of any employment in the country: stay alive and be prepared to take over should the president become incapacitated. That’s it. There is no policy brief, no political role beyond: Just. Be. Ready. Past vice presidents have, with mixed success, carved out roles for themselves or been handed a role by their boss. Biden was needed by the young, inexperienced Obama to build a bridge to the fractured Democratic caucus, smarting from the bruising primary battle between Obama and Hilary Clinton, by way of his decades of experience in the Senate.  Biden had no such need for Harris other than, arguably, being the visible face of the next generation of Democratic leaders. Indeed, it was widely assumed that Biden would only serve one term before handing over to a younger rising star within the party.

While there were voters looking for an alternative to Trump, in the end they weren’t prepared to vote for an unknown quantity. What they did know about Harris wasn’t necessarily helpful to her cause. Biden delegated to her the poisoned chalice of co-ordinating the administration’s confused border policy, a thankless task, and one which she was viewed to have bungled. Her visibility on reproductive rights was more helpful, but this is an issue that arguably only speaks to half the population.

Let’s face it, Harris was confronted with a monumental task right out of the gate. There were only 107 days between when Biden announced his withdrawal and election day. She may well have been preparing in the background for that moment, but if she was, she had no opportunity to road test her message. Indeed, it took several days for Democrats to coalesce around her candidacy, several days that brought hope to Democrats but likely came across as chaos to the rest of the country. In the mere three months of her campaign, she had to introduce herself to the country, pick a running mate, formulate a policy platform, and sell it to nominal Democrats and undecided voters. This was a big ask of anyone whose public profile was as limited as hers. Furthermore, she was hampered by her past positions on hot button matters such as border security, gun ownership, and the hysteria around the ‘radical left woke agenda’. It was unfortunate that Harris had gone on record during her 2019 run for the nomination in support of several of progressive left policies that she was forced to distance herself from during the campaign. This was an unnecessary distraction.

So-called ‘woke’ identity politics have become completely toxic in US political discourse, whether it is transgender rights and schoolchildren, ‘de-funding’ the police, or the nightly televised scenes of violent pro-Palestinian / anti-Israel demonstrations on America’s most visible university campuses that left Jewish students fearing for their lives and Biden’s hands tied.

Harris had the near impossible task of disowning her past policy statements, articulating a coherent vision for her presidency, while simultaneously not disowning Biden and the administration of which she was still a part. It isn’t surprising she opted for platitudes over substance, being ‘a President for all Americans’ and promising to name Republicans to her cabinet. Such warm and fuzzy statements calling for unity over division still didn’t answer the question amongst undecided voters prepared to vote for someone other than Trump as to who she really was.

Without question, the biggest strategic blunder by Harris was to avoid talking about the economy. Voters wanted to hear how their lives would be better under Harris, and that meant talking about inflation, inflation and inflation. Nothing weighs on the public consciousness more than the price of fuel and groceries, and everyone has a notional sense of what gasoline and milk *should* cost, inflation and rising wages be damned. Unfair though it may be, people blame the Biden administration for the rising cost of living, while simultaneously not giving the administration credit for plummeting unemployment rates and rising wages. Everywhere you turned, there was sticker shock, not least in the housing market. That this was a global problem in the post-pandemic world, not one restricted to the US (where inflation had been handled better than in many western economies) was a fact lost on the mass of voters.

As blindingly obvious as it is that the most important issue to most Americans this election cycle was encapsulated in James Carville’s famous dictum, “IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID,” it’s hard to turn that sentiment against yourself. Harris, as vice president, was part of the problem in voters’ eyes, and pivoting to becoming part of the solution eluded her. If she had the answer to their problems, why hadn’t she and Biden already done something about it?

The second major strategic blunder was to hammer away endlessly about the ‘threat to democracy’ posed by another Trump presidency, that he was a fascist, that he was a divider, not a uniter, a corrupt crook, a conman, a convicted felon, and serial sex offender. For the half of the electorate that have their worldview shaped by Fox News and the proliferating far right-wing internet media echo chamber and not MSNBC, the Washington Post or the New York Times, Trump remains in their eyes a successful businessman (as played by him on The Apprentice), vilified by a ‘weaponised’ Justice Department’s endless witch hunt. Harris was a nobody, Trump a successful former president who literally sent checks to everyone in the country with his giant signature scrawled across the bottom during the pandemic. Academic economists be damned, voters were convinced they’d been better off under Trump. They could live with the crass insults so long as their bank balance was larger.

Harris had the unenviable task of trying to peel away the few truly undecided voters in the middle of the fractious political divide, while simultaneously motivating traditional Democratic constituencies such as youth and Black males to vote for her. Too much hope was placed on a tsunami of women voters overcoming Democratic losses in other demographics, motivated by the increasingly draconian abortion laws being enacted by state legislatures across the country in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs. It was a vote winner in the 2022 midterms, but it wasn’t enough in the general election.

Add to this the simple fact that by the summer of 2024, nearly 90% of Republican voters believed the 2020 election to have been stolen by Democrats and that Biden was an illegitimate president. The tens of thousands of hours of video footage culled from security cameras and cell phones had been selectively edited by Tucker Carlson among others to portray the events of January 6^th as a peaceful protest. Many were convinced the violence was a ‘false flag’ attack intended to distract from Hunter Biden’s legal woes. Many reasonable Republicans – not just MAGA headbangers – thought it was nothing short of hypocrisy to blame protesters venting their anger at such perceived injustice, on the one hand, while blaming the police, on the other, when Black Lives Matter protests had turned into violent riots only a few months earlier.

As intelligent, accomplished, and well-spoken as Harris was, she did not possess the magnetic charisma of a Barack Obama. She was vague in interviews. Her debate performance, lauded by Democrats, was less compelling to Republicans. She was not a celebrity, however many times Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Springsteen, and Cardi B were trotted out at her rallies. Rather than getting Oprah to endorse her, the Democrats would have been better off nominating the famous television host – a wildly popular chat show host with the common touch as well as a fantastically wealthy self-made businesswoman who could have one-upped Trump on every score.

So far what I’ve described can be termed the proximate causes of the Democrats underperformance last week at the polls. But there is one enormous elephant in the room, and its name is: Joe Biden.

Biden should never have run for re-election. He had signalled as much in 2020 that he spoke of being a ‘bridge to the future’ of Democratic politics. But power is hard to walk away from, especially when you have finally, after three attempts and decades in the Senate, achieved your life goal of the presidency. Had he made clear early in 2023 that he wouldn’t run, that would have cleared the way for a full-blown candidate selection process. Prospective nominees would have had over a year to fundraise, develop their message, see what found traction with the public and what didn’t, make a name for themselves, and give the media something positive to talk about other than Biden’s age and Trump’s insults. By the time he announced his withdrawal from the race in July, his mental competence had become a running joke. His performance in the debate against Trump was an unmitigated disaster and likely the last nail in the coffin of Democratic hopes for victory.

Had Biden withdrawn earlier, Democrats would still have faced the disadvantage of an unpopular incumbent, but they would have had a chance to distance themselves from the administration, offer a variant on Bill Clinton’s famous “I feel your pain,” and make their case to the public offering a positive alternative to another Trump administration. It still might not have been enough given the political polarisation gripping America and the national mood, but it would have been vastly preferable to Harris having to go from a standing start and near invisibility to rolling out a fully-developed message and policy programme to the entire country, under the glare of national media scrutiny, in a mere three months. Rather than being a bridge to the future, it was a bridge too far.

The lazy conclusion drawn from this electoral debacle will be that America still isn’t ready to elect a woman to its highest office. On the contrary, I will go so far as to predict here and now that within the next twelve years a woman will be elected president in the US … and she will be a Republican. Harris faced a near impossible task, establishing herself as a credible candidate against a man with universal name recognition and openly back by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. The depth and steadfastness of Trump’s support may have been underestimated, but organising a winning campaign on such short notice was always going to be an uphill battle. And yes, in the end it *was* the economy, stupid. Democrats should get to work recruiting Oprah now.

*Frank de Mita is a former field operative and Federal election legal counsel to a number of Democratic presidential campaign committees, including Clinton-Gore ’92