Why Kamala Harris Lost

Being "not Trump" wasn't enough for voters who wanted "not Biden."

Few realistic political observers expected a blowout for Kamala Harris. But Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election was far from guaranteed, either. For most of Harris' relatively brief candidacy, she and Trump appeared to be locked in a very tight race. So Harris' incredibly dismal showing was also somewhat unexpected. She came up short in both the Electoral College and the 
popular vote, lost all seven swing states, and lost ground with most demographic groups. Even in reliably Democratic strongholds such as New Jersey and New York, Harris underperformed.

Some people are chalking Harris' loss up to sexism, misogyny, and racism. And no doubt some small segment of voters were motivated by such things, as some people always are. But one needn't imagine a mass hate wave to explain Trump's victory.

In the weeks leading up to the election, candidate Harris struggled to define herself as polls repeatedly showed little daylight between her and Trump. Often, Trump's flaws seemed to be Harris' main selling point: She was not Trump. But who was she? Even Harris herself seemed scared to say.

Throughout her brief campaign, Harris strenuously avoided laying out detailed plans or positions, outside of pledging to protect abortion access. Shehad an especially hard time articulating how her administration would be different from Biden's not-terribly-popular presidency or how she would turn things like inflation around.

This struggle to differentiate herself from Biden makes sense in light of her career history. Harris is probably best understood as an ambitious vessel for whatever drives Democratic voters in a given era. She represents the Democratic Party establishment through and through.

If Harris has any personal political priorities or animating ideology at her core, they've been buried so deep as to basically be undetectable—entirely subsumed by skilled pandering to the progressive zeitgeist. That's why Harris has a reputation as a flip-flopper. That's why she spent so much of her short 2024 campaign walking back positions she took during the rather different days of 2019 and 2020. And it's why she tried hard not to stake out strong positions on most issues this time around.

Yes, Harris had reproductive rights on her side. But while that's been a huge issue this election, it's only one issue—and not even one where Trump, who says he doesn't want a nationwide abortion ban, totally disagrees.

Though Harris' campaign largely avoided detailed policy proposals, we did get some glimpses of what a President Harris hoped to have in store for us. It included an incoherent "Medicare at Home" benefit, national rent-control policies, tax hikes on businesses, giving $25,000 to first-time homebuyers, giving "1 million loans that are fully forgivable" to "Black entrepreneurs and others" who want to start businesses, and some form of federal price controls for groceries—or, at least, a federal clampdown on price gouging, whatever that would have turned out to mean. And a continuation of Biden-era foreign policy, hostility toward mergers, intrusion into health care (including forcing insurance companies to cover over-the-counter contraception, and perhaps all sorts of over-the-counter products, with no cost sharing), and a weird fixation on so-called junk fees.

A lot of these proposals are promoted as ways to lower prices, increase opportunity, and help economically struggling Americans. But in practice, these policies would shift costs around or even drive them up, while throttling innovation and making everything from housing to condoms less affordable. They also lack a sort of cohesive appeal—a metanarrative or vision that the campaign could easily sell.

In many ways, a Harris presidency promised to be a continuation of the past four years. Harris would have put a glossier and more modern spin on the surface, but underneath it was the same selectively progressive and economically nonsensical schtick. Not a huge departure—but not an old white man (take your pick which) of questionable cognitive functioning.

That seemed to be mostly what the Harris campaign was selling. Voters apparently wanted something different.