If Harris couldn’t win, maybe Democrats should have nominated someone else | News

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign leaders are beginning to acknowledge that the fundamentals of the 2024 White House race have been in President-elect Donald Trump’s favor all along.

The joy and hope were no match for the discontent with the economy, the country’s leadership and governing parties around the world, dooming Democrats earlier this month and paving the way for Trump’s return to the Oval Office.

“The headwinds were too strong for us to overcome, especially in 107 days,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told the Washington Post in a representative post-mortem. “But we came very close to what we expected, both in terms of turnout and support.”

However, they failed to win a single battleground state or popular vote even after replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.

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Harris was undoubtedly dealt a bad hand. She was also an incredibly risk-taking candidate, while her opponent, who faced prison time if he lost, aggressively sought new media opportunities to target infrequent voters. She had no convincing answer for how she would be different from Biden, even though it was a central issue of the campaign, although she served as vice president under an octogenarian who seriously considered serving from 2019 to 2023 only one term. .

Many explanations of the election results that seek to absolve Harris of responsibility for her defeat subtly argue against her candidacy in the first place. As Biden’s vice president, she will have to do more than other Democrats to distance herself from the current administration, if at all possible.

Having 107 days to reintroduce herself to the electorate after she had to deal with low polling numbers as vice president and a previous failed presidential bid that didn’t even make it to the 2020 Democratic primary wasn’t ideal. But she and her team were also clearly hoping to take advantage of the shortened campaign, running out of time with a change of candidates, the Democratic National Convention, the debates and Trump’s verdict before they had to delve too deeply into the details of her political views.

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Harris sought to recreate the anti-Trump coalition that gave Biden 51.4% of the vote in 2020, stretching from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to Liz Cheney. But the pandemic was gone, inflation was raging, the border was overcrowded, Gaza was splintering the coalition, and progressives were restless now that Biden rather than Trump was president.

In the end, it was Trump, not his staunch opponents, who was able to cobble together a national majority from disparate elements.

Biden hasn’t done Harris many favors, although he endorsed her immediately after dropping out and didn’t force Democrats to hold their convention in Chicago in an attempt to remove him by force. But his campaign was largely fueled by denial. “Then we’ll find out, when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign, that the Biden campaign’s own internal polls at the time we were told he was the strongest candidate showed Donald Trump was going to get 400 electoral votes,” Jon Favreau said. former Obama speechwriter and current host of the liberal podcast Pod Save America.

That’s consistent with reports that Biden finally dropped out of the race when his own campaign’s polls showed his reelection prospects were dire. “When the campaign ordered new battleground polls last week, it was the first time it had polled in some key states in more than two months, according to two people familiar with the polls,” Politico reported hours after , as Biden hastily defeated the retreat. “And the numbers were grim, showing Biden not only trailing in all six critical swing states, but also collapsing in places like Virginia and New Mexico, where Democrats had not planned to spend huge resources to win.”

But it does suggest that the Biden campaign assured Democrats that the race was close, based at least in part on polls that actually preceded the disastrous June 27 debate with Trump.

Harris carried Virginia with just 51.8% of the vote and New Mexico with 51.9%. This small difference supports the contention that these states were indeed at risk, and a Biden loss could have been even worse, which could have jeopardized several Democratic Senate candidates who ended up beating Harris just enough to win their seats .

But after a weeklong honeymoon, Harris only restored the status quo of the race before the Biden debate. “On the eve of the election, internal campaign models showed Harris winning by narrow margins in Wisconsin and Michigan and essentially tied with Trump in Pennsylvania, officials said,” writes Dan Baltz of the Washington Post. “These models showed Harris trailing Trump in four other battlegrounds: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.”

That means Harris had the same narrow path to an Electoral College majority as Biden: the “blue wall” Rust Belt states plus Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District. She only won the latter.

Perhaps one or two Rust Belt governors could do better. Few Democrats will say so publicly, although former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) expressed support for an open process before Biden withdrew and lamented its absence after Harris’ defeat.

Now Democrats will spend the next four years debating whether Harris’ $1 billion experiment was really worth it.