Media figures making that claim are blaming everyone but the bad candidate herself.
Media figures making that claim are blaming everyone but the bad candidate herself.
K amala Harris lost to Donald Trump for many reasons, but none so significant as Harris herself.
She was a lousy candidate with an even lousier message, if you can call it that. The only thing she had to do was sell herself, and she couldn’t manage even this fundamental task.
Those claiming otherwise, including some especially touched members of the political commentariat, are simply coping.
“Kamala Harris ran basically a flawless campaign,” asserted MSNBC’s Alex Wagner. “But on the most elemental level, being a mixed-race woman from California maybe doomed her campaign from the start.”
Insisted USA Today opinion columnist Michael Stern, “CNN has a story titled ‘where the Harris campaign went wrong.’ Nope, I won’t read it. Harris ran a great campaign. The story should be titled ‘where the American people went wrong.’”
Most incredible of all was MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who offered this commentary:
I think it’s important to say: anyone who has experienced or been in the United States for any period of time and experienced this country’s history and knows it cannot have believed it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color.
Let’s just be clear.
And nothing that was true yesterday about how flawlessly this campaign was run is not true now. I mean, this really was an historic, flawlessly run campaign. She had — Queen Latifah never endorses anyone. She came out and endorsed her. You know, I mean, she had every prominent celebrity voice. She had the Taylor Swift, she had the Swifties, she had the B-hive. You could not have run a better campaign in that short period of time. And I think that’s still true.
Celebrity endorsements are simply not what a “flawless campaign” is made of.
Harris lost because Harris was a bad candidate. It’s as simple as that.
She inherited a campaign already off the ground, complete with a robust get-out-the-vote operation and a massive war chest, which ballooned to an astonishing $1 billion during her short stint as the nominee. (Somehow, she ended the campaign $20 million in debt.) Harris didn’t even have to undergo a bruising primary season, battling against would-be nominees, coalition-building with defeated primary opponents, convincing and courting donors, etc. She was handed a presidential campaign on a silver platter, rested and ready to go, running as an easily recognizable vice president against a historically unpopular Republican opponent.
Yet, rather than reintroduce herself to voters and outline a coherent and exciting vision for America, Harris failed to differentiate herself from her boss, declined to explain her policy positions, and ducked and dodged reporters and media appearances. She bombed in the interviews she finally granted as time was running short, having clearly not prepared for even softball sit-downs. Even worse was her refusal, or inability, to prepare for obvious questions, even after encountering them more than once on the campaign trail.
The only thing that scared Harris more than an unscripted media interview was the appearance of an issue on which she was expected to have an opinion. In the campaign’s waning days, she couldn’t even say whether she supported an anti-crime ballot measure in California that passed last week by 70.6 percent.
Would she have benefited from more time on the trail? Unlikely.
Remember, Harris began the campaign with a healthy bump in the polls. But as the campaign wore on and voters got a good look at what she had to offer (or the lack thereof), she failed to sell herself as a viable and desirable alternative to Donald Trump. Put simply, on the rare occasion that voters heard from her, they didn’t like what they encountered.
There are also all the head-scratcher decisions the campaign made.
That painfully inauthentic and bizarre “white dudes for Harris” push. The decision to skip the Al Smith dinner. The “brat”-themed marketing, whatever that nonsense was. The decision to hold a daytime presser in front of the vice president’s residence twelve days before the election to discuss a gossipy Atlantic article. The decision to wade in on Trump’s visit to Arlington Cemetery and his supposed violation of obscure laws, an episode that ended with Gold Star families telling Harris to go to hell. The decision to pass on the ultra-normal and competent Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro for a bug-eyed buffoon named Tim Walz. And an episode where a YouTuber scuttled a proposed interview with Harris after he and her campaign team failed to settle on even fluff topics (her team suggested talking about bacon as a spice, which the Muslim YouTuber reportedly did not find amusing).
Then, there was the decision to make the Cheney family a campaign centerpiece. Given that Dick Cheney has enjoyed no image rehabilitation since he left office with terrible approval numbers, and given that Liz Cheney was not a star on either side of the aisle before she made anti-Trump resistance the core of her political identity, it’s unclear who, exactly, was supposed to be drawn in by the allure of either Cheney’s endorsement except for people who were already inclined to vote for Harris.
In the 1984 classic Ghostbusters, Dan Aykroyd’s character voices misgivings about starting a business with his friends following their abrupt dismissal from university jobs.
“You don’t know what it’s like out there!” he says. “I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.”
In 2012, when Mitt Romney lost to President Barack Obama, the recriminations among conservatives and Republicans were immediate and fierce. It was not long before campaign aides, volunteers, conservative commentators, and activists publicly cast blame, outlining in excruciating detail the Romney campaign’s many failures and miscalculations.
Few had anything nice to say about the candidate and his running mate, Paul Ryan. Even fewer claimed Romney ran an “incredible” or “flawless” campaign. In their eyes, the GOP nominee had lost a winnable election to a vulnerable incumbent.
In 2016, the next election cycle, the Republican Party nominated Donald Trump for president.
Talk about a course correction.
It’s no surprise that voters who prefer the private sector to the public should expect results from their party. Last Tuesday, at 312 electoral votes, a likely popular-vote victory, at least 53 Senate seats, and a good chance of maintaining control of the House, they got them.
Democrats and their supporters in the press would be wise to ditch this “flawless” business and take serious stock of why voters don’t like them.
Be like the private sector. Demand results.