Kamala Harris was the absolutely perfect candidate for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 2024. That's a good place to start when understanding why the Democrats lost up and down the ballot.
Harris is selling a book, making the rounds on friendly talk shows, getting back in the spotlight after 10 months of a self-imposed low profile. Indeed, there was no great clamor even among Democrats for her appearance at fundraisers and other events. The party made a collective decision to forget about what happened last November and concentrate on bashing Donald Trump and inciting violence against "Gestapo" ICE agents.
That means Kamala Harris is the worst thing you can be in politics: a loser.
Her book is called 107 Days, as if everyone knows that's how long her campaign was. The title plays a huge role in the book as Harris (according to reviews I've read) constantly refers to the idea that if she only had more time, she could have won!
Sure, anything can happen in politics. But inside the numbers of the 2024 presidential election should have disabused her of any such fantasy.
An analysis by the Democratic firm Blueprint found that voters who were undecided at some point in the race broke for Trump over Kamala Harris by a margin of 52% to 38%.
That's a massive swing in any race, and it would likely have meant that Trump's margin of victory would have grown the longer the race went on.
Semafor notes, "Exit polls from Edison Research and paid for by broadcast networks revealed that among voters who decided in the final week of the 2024 campaign, Trump led by 12 points."
Another huge key that gives the lie to the entire premise of Harris's book.
Harris's book is trying to convince herself that there was a path to victory for someone rabidly espousing identity politics. This is the lie that Harris and the entire Democratic Party keep telling themselves.
The candidate was the culmination of the Democratic Party's fifty-plus years of remaking their normal political party into a gravy train for left-wing women, racial and sexual minorities, and even shadier radicals whose agenda includes bringing down the United States government. The care and feeding of interest groups, NGOs, and the clients of the alphabet soup of government agencies has brought the oldest political party on planet Earth to ruin.
This problem runs so deep that few Democrats will even talk about it.
Insofar as Democrats have grappled with their defeat at all, they have blamed an unfavorable information landscape, sometimes even claiming that voters soured on Biden’s administration due to “misinformation.” On every metric that mattered, they claim, his term in office was a huge success; if ordinary voters do not recognize the merits of “Bidenomics” or the successes of his foreign policy, it is because of the omnipresent propaganda on X, Fox News, and the Joe Rogan show.
The truth is less flattering. The inflation-adjusted income of average Americans fell over the course of Biden’s term in office, as Jason Furman, a Harvard professor who served as Barack Obama’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, has pointed out. The poverty rate rose. Nor was the crisis at the southern border imaginary. In part because Biden’s White House issued a series of executive orders that reduced enforcement, the number of illegal crossings surged in an unprecedented manner between 2020 and 2023.
They're dancing around the reason for their failure because facing the truth would show them how wrong they've been about everything.
Everything.
Economically, most Americans are deeply aspirational. They want their leaders to focus on economic growth and believe in the promise of the market economy. This makes them skeptical of Democrats’ tendency to favor high taxes and introduce onerous regulations. At the same time, most Americans are angry at the ease with which billionaire hedge fund managers and large corporations can evade paying their fair share of tax. They both believe in capitalism and are angry at the privileges enjoyed by self-serving insiders.
If Zohran Mamdani is the "future of the Democratic Party," it will wander in the wilderness for a long while.
How delusional is Harris about her loss?
“Pundits speak about the ‘bro vote’, the ‘frat boy flank’,” she writes. “I don’t think of them in those reductive terms. Instead, I think about these young voters coming of age during Covid, unnaturally isolated, their lives lonely when they should have been at their most social.”
She claims that these under-30 men prioritized “their perceived economic interests” and not “hot-button issues like reproductive rights, Gaza, or climate change."
Somehow, "It's the economy, stupid" never penetrated Harris's addled head.
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