Every media outlet has been attempting to explain why Harris lost so miserably in a wipeout not seen since 1988.
Former President Trump won the presidency with 312 votes from the Electoral College and all seven battleground states. He also won the popular vote, a record unmatched since 2004. Trump helped flip Senate control by four seats, giving the GOP a sizable 53-45 advantage, with Arizona and Nevada races yet to be called. The House is even and will likely stay in GOP control. The majority of state governors and legislatures are now Republican.
Trump's victory is so broad and deep that there's no precedent in recent memory. Considering that he was the target of 94 lawfare cases and two assassination attempts, not to mention the nonstop belittling by the media, the Democrats, and the Never Trumpers - all of whom still think he is worse than Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini combined - his victory is truly historic.
And in truth, it was historic. Only one former President has returned to win non-consecutive terms—Grover Cleveland in 1892. Cleveland won the presidency for the first time in 1884, lost to Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and came back to win it again in 1892. It is unlikely we will ever see this feat repeated in our lifetimes.
Trump's success was also fueled by four significant unforced errors by Kamala Harris and her campaign.
Scripted media appearances insulted the American voter. For someone who was appointed as the Democratic nominee just 107 days before the election, Harris's biggest challenge was to introduce herself to Americans, having played sidekick to a president as all vice presidents do.
The way to do that would have been to freely appear before a hostile press and participate in the so-called Russert Primaries, though there are few objective journalists of Tim Russert's stature anymore. [Tim Russert, the moderator of Meet The Press, made or broke numerous political careers on his Sunday morning NBC News program]. Harris should have held one unscripted news conference each month and faced tough questioning from conservative news media outlets.
Her biggest undoing was hiding behind a Tel-e-Prompter at every public appearance and repeating canned lines from a poll-tested stump speech. Voters saw that she couldn't answer basic questions from friendly interviewers. For the world's most demanding job, she quickly proved herself to be incompetent.
Taking extreme positions and rebranding does not win votes. Unlike Trump when he first ran in 2016, Kamala Harris was a well-known political figure with deeply-stated Socialist positions on which she campaigned for the Democratic nomination in 2020. She believed in Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, a wealth tax to reduce income inequality, eliminating cash bail, defunding the police, eliminating Immigration and Customs Enforcement, universal child care, free college, strict gun control(which included confiscation), no-limits abortion, and a ban on fracking. Culturally, she questioned the traditional Christmas and Columbus Day celebrations, preferring more inclusive alternatives.
During the campaign, she moved to the center on some of these issues (fracking, eliminating ICE) and, in some cases, such as illegal immigration, she tried to rebrand herself as being tough on the border.
There were two problems with her approach. America is a right-of-center country that would not have gifted the presidency to someone who was ranked as the most liberal member of the United States Senate, someone who was to the left of Elizabeth Warren. Second, Americans did not trust that she would keep her word when she appeared to change positions only to be politically expedient.
Excessive focus on abortion rights was political suicide. White college-educated women broke disproportionately for Harris. However, she heavily underperformed Joe Biden among Hispanic and Black women and white women in conservative counties in all the battleground states.
Her extreme positions on reproductive rights were unnecessary and politically ruinous. When the United States Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs that the abortion issue would have to be decided in the states, women in the Blue Wall swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania who deeply cared about abortion were already satisfied by state laws in their respective states. In both these states, abortion is legal up to viability (around 24 weeks of gestation), so it was folly for the Harris campaign to expect women voters here to place abortion as a crucial matter to help other women in other states when to them, bread-and-butter issues were paramount.
Besides, Harris's solution for reproductive rights—codifying Roe vs. Wade protections into federal law—required Congressional approval, including overcoming a possible Senate filibuster. Such a move required that the Senate first pass a filibuster exception to the abortion rule, which was unlikely given that the Senate was about to switch to the GOP anyway.
Excessive focus on Trump was a mistake. The Harris campaign attempted to define Trump, joining an extraordinarily long line of politicians, media, liberals, and elites who had been engaged in this profession nonstop ever since Trump descended the elevator in 2015.
Absent some new story that emerged, Trump had already been vilified in the courts and the press for being a convicted felon who had been fingerprinted and mugshots taken. A court had declared him a sexual aggressor. Trump had been charged with racketeering violations. The Department of Justice charged him with stealing confidential documents and obstructing justice and unleashed a FBI raid on his home. The DOJ indicted him for helping fuel an insurrection on January 6 after a Congressional Committee used taxpayer funds to denigrate Trump for 18 months nonstop. Trump was banned from social media outlets for years. He was also the target of two assassination attempts.
In the campaign, Harris used the following words or phrases to describe Trump: Fascist, unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, out for unchecked power, unfit to serve, dangerous, and petty tyrant. At a public appearance the day after her Fox News interview with Bret Baier, Harris, sounding scary, with her body language ominously in sync, screamed: "[Trump] should never again stand behind the seal of [voice steadily rising] the President of the United States. Never again! Never again!! Never again!!!"
Nothing stuck.
Today, Kamala Harris, who was the leader of the Democratic Party until the polls closed on November 5, will fade into the political abyss, following numerous other Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney, who made it their career to oppose Trump.
Rajkamal Rao is a columnist and a member of the tippinsights editorial board. He is an American entrepreneur and wrote the WorldView column for the Hindu BusinessLine, India's second-largest financial newspaper, on the economy, politics, immigration, foreign affairs, and sports.
