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    The fatal flaws of a doomed electoral candidacy

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    WASHINGTON – When Kamala Harris appeared on ABC’s “The View” last month, it was supposed to be a friendly forum to introduce herself to Americans unfamiliar with her story.

    Instead, the Democratic presidential nominee struggled to explain what would she do otherwise than President Joe Biden. “It doesn’t cross my mind,” Harris, the acting vice president, told the hosts.

    Following the President-elect Donald Trumphis lopsided electoral victory over Harristhat televised moment underscored a fatal flaw in Harris’s campaign that doomed his bid — an inability to break away from an unpopular president whose approval ratings hovered around 40 percent for most of his four years in office White house.

    David Axelrod, a former longtime adviser to Barack Obama, called the exchange − which became a Trump ad − “disastrous” for Harris like him summarized the results of the elections on CNN early Wednesday morning. “There is no doubt. The question is: what motivated her?”

    In poll after poll, Americans for months have overwhelmingly said they believe the country was headed in the wrong direction.

    Live Election Updates: Final results and instant reaction from Donald Trump’s election triumph

    Harris presented himself as a “new generation of leadership” and the prospective candidate who would work across the aisle and seek solutions, not political warfare, to address America’s concerns with rising housing costs and affordability.

    But given Harris’ status as the sitting vice president, she never fit the mold of a traditional “candidate for change” and remained tied to Biden — remaining loyal to him even when Americans made it clear they disapproved of his handling of inflation and migration at the southern border.

    More: Trump pounces while Harris is reluctant to draw contrasts with Biden

    In the end, the election was not as nail-biting as many expected. It was a resounding victory for Trump and a rejection of Harris and the Democratic Party, including Republicans. gaining control of the US Senate.

    Harris performs poorly among black and Latino voters

    Trump’s victory became all but certain when the former president was the projected winner of the battleground state of Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes. It’s a state Democrats have lost only once since 1988. That came in 2016 with Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton.

    The Harris campaign devoted significant resources to the four Sun Belt battlegrounds — Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina — but seemed unlikely to win any of them. And the Democrats’ so-called “blue wall” collapsed with Harris trailing Trump in Michigan and losing outright in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    Harris and her campaign hoped to win the White House by bringing in moderate Republican and independent voters fed up with nearly a decade of division in the Donald Trump era.

    However, the Democratic candidate lost the election largely because she failed to prevent the division of core Democratic constituencies – black, Latino and young voters.

    Harris performed poorly with black voters — especially Latino voters — but also with black voters in urban centers like Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. Despite holding onto Democrats’ growing strength in college-educated suburbs, it wasn’t enough to overcome Trump’s gains in Democratic strongholds.

    More: Harris will come home to Howard after a bitter election night

    Harris had black voters 86%-12% and Latino voters 53%-45%, according to CNN polls. But in the 2020 election, Biden won black voters by a larger margin of 92 percent to 8 percent over Trump and Latinos by 65 percent to 32 percent.

    Harris, meanwhile, worked to limit the bleeding in heavily Republican rural counties in states like Pennsylvania, but ultimately underperformed Biden in 2020 in those seats, returning to Clinton’s 2016 levels.

    Has Harris focused too much on Trump?

    From the beginning, Harris tried to make the race a referendum on Trump.

    In the final weeks of the campaign, Harris escalated his rhetoric, calling the former president a fascist, warning that he was “disaffected and unstable” and pointing to an assessment of Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, who claimed that Trump did it. past statements of admiration about Adolf Hitler.

    He has increasingly leaned toward framing the election as a fight for democracy, just as Biden did before dropping out of the race in 2024.

    “Kamala Harris lost this election when she focused almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump”, Veteran pollster Frank Luntz said at Xformerly Twitter. “Voters already know everything about Trump — but they still wanted to know more about Harris’ plans for the first hour, first day, first month and first year of his administration.

    “It was a colossal failure for her campaign to put the spotlight on Trump more than Harris’ own ideas,” Luntz said.

    Harris, who has campaigned aggressively to restore access to abortion, won female voters by a sizable 54%-44% margin, according to CNN polls, but it was a smaller margin than Biden’s 57%-42% performance with women in 2020. Trump won male voters over Harris by the same 54%-44% margin that Harris won women.

    The abortion issue ended up not being the galvanizing force it was in 2022, when Democrats exceeded expectations in the midterms.

    Harris’ loss is the second time in three election cycles that Democrats have fielded a female presidential candidate in hopes of making history — only to lose both times to Trump.

    Democrats have a lot to suspect

    Harris was an unproven political commodity outside of California, ending her run in the 2020 Democratic primary before voting began. It secured the Democratic nomination this time without receiving a single vote as Democrats quickly rallied around her after Biden’s exit. She has sought to distance herself from some of the liberal positions she took as a 2020 Democratic primary candidate in an appeal to Republicans and moderates.

    At the same time, polls have consistently shown that Americans today have fonder memories of Trump’s four years in office — especially his leadership on the economy — than they did when he was in the White House. Many Americans have been willing to forgive Trump’s well-documented baggage: four criminal indictments, two impeachments and his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

    A majority of voters, 51 percent, said they favored Trump over Harris to handle the economy, which 31 percent of voters cited as their top issue, according to CNN polls.

    For Democrats, the second-guessing now began: Was Harris the right choice to take on Trump? Should he have looked elsewhere? Or should he have stuck with Biden?

    Reach Joey Garrison on X, formerly Twitter, @joeygarrison.

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