Why Harris Lost and Trump Won

by Rod Williams, Nov. 26/2024 -It has been a little over three weeks since the election and Democrats have been engaging in a lot of Monday-morning-quarterbacking, soul-searching, second-guessing, and finger-pointing, trying to figure out how Kamala Harris lost the election. Other pundits and observers are also trying to explain the election outcome. 

Much of this analysis deals with strategic and tactical decisions of the campaign. I think little of it
matters. Democrats have always believed that the "ground game" and knocking on doors and making the phone calls and the personal postcards is how to win elections. Democrats were better than Republicans at doing that. l am not so sure people want a stranger knocking on their door or another phone call anymore. It appears that big rallies and dominating social media may be the way to win in the modern era. However, I am not convinced that that was a significant factor in the campaign.

If the outcome would have been close, then questions of whether or not Harris should have gone on the Joe Rogan show would matter. She lost by such a large margin, that I don't think it matters. Should Harris have chosen Josh Shapiro over Tim Walz as her VP pick? I don't think it really mattered. I think Shapiro would have been a better choice under normal circumstances. However, the Democratic electorate was not ready for a Jewish VP at a time when pro-Palestinian sentiment was running high in segments of the Democrati Party coalition. Facing down antisemitic Arab Americans and college students would not have been a distraction for the Harris campaign.

One of the opinions that I think does have merit is that Joe Biden should have announced he was not running for reelection much earlier and the Democratic Party should have had a primary. I still think Kamala Harris would have ending up being the nominee. The Democrat Party was not going to pass over a Black female who was the Vice President for someone else. However, a primary would have had the benefit of letting the public get to know Harris better. She would have had longer to come up with a decent answer as to why she flip-flopped on so many issues. She would have had a better chance to define herself and decide what she really believes. I am still not convinced that it would have made a big difference.

One of the most ludicrous conclusions I have heard some Democrats come up with is that President Biden should not have resigned, and the Party should have stuck with him. Granted few people have said that but some have. After the June debate it was clear that Biden was not up for the job.  I think Trumps victory would have been an unprecedented landslide, had Biden not stepped down. If Biden was not president, he would probably be in an assisted living facility. His cognitive decline could not have been hidden from the American people. I think it is almost criminal that his condition was hidden from the American people for as long as it was. His handler could not have kept it hidden throughout the campaign. 

Another conclusion that some Democrats have reached is that the campaign should have gone full-Bernie. Or some have expressed it as the party should have conducted a populist campaign. Maybe. The public does not understand economics, and everybody likes free stuff. As it was, the Trump campaign promises were estimated to add twice as much to the national debt as was Harris' campaign promises. Harris could have been more irresponsible than Trump and promised even more free stuff than Trump. 

Along with promising more free stuff, the campaign could have ginned up resentment of rich people. The campaign could have convinced the poor and the middle class the reason they were bad off is because someone else was better off.  Maybe that campaign would have worked better than Harris' more moderate campaign. I am not sure Americans are ready to have their private insurance taken away from them however, but I think "making the rich pay their fair share," could have resonated. The problem with this approach is that a populist campaign does not mesh well with a campaign of wokeness and identity politics and the more socialist of the Democrats are also the most woke. A populist appeal has to be framed as the people against the powerful. With identify politics there is no people but various slices of the people. I don't think the Democrats could have pulled off a populist appeal. 

One criticism of the Harris campaign is that it was unfocused and never found a theme.  The campaign started out as a campaign of joy and Republicans are just weird. For a while it seemed to be a campaign about abortion rights. It then switched to a campaign of Trump is a fascist and maybe America's next Hitler and this is a campaign to preserve American democracy. I agree the campaigned was unfocused, but I don't know that being focused on any one message would have worked. There are reasons much of the Harris campaign did not resonate. I am not sure improved messaging would have helped.

Another criticism of the campaign that I think has merit is that Harris lacked authenticity. While I think it may have merit. I think given who she is, it would have been hard to fix. If you are inauthentic, it is hard to switch to being authentic.  She never seemed at ease talking to people. There was the issue of her using a different accent depending on her audience. I understand why she did not go on Joe Rogan. Rogan is not a tough interviewer. He does not grill but simply has conversations. I am sure Rogan would have asked her about her about her flip flops on policy issues and she never developed a convincing answer. She could have said things like, “You know, in retrospect, maybe the taxpayers shouldn’t pay for gender-transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners.”  She could have, but would not. She would not have been able to explain why she was wrong on so many issues then and what led her to change her mind. She seemed to me to be unable to be spontaneous and real. It seemed to me like she struggled to keep up a facade of a moderate.

From her 2016 campaign to her 2024 campaign, she went from favoring Medicare for all to a more centrist position. She went from opposing fracking to not opposing it. She was a strong supporter of the Green New Deal and then moved to the center. In 2016 she favored decriminalizing illegal border crossings. She went from that position to supporting the border deal that failed in the Senate, which is considered one of the toughest, bipartisan immigration measures in many years. As a senator, Harris was a co-sponsor of legislation that called for increasing zero-emissions vehicles and ultimately phasing out gas powered vehicles by 2040. 

In the campaign she said that none if those were currently her position. She never said why. She needed to explain what epiphany had occurred to cause her to see the light. She failed to do so. I think that was a factor in her campaign and why many did not like her, but even that, I don't believe was the deciding factor. I think most of the strategic and tactical analysis of why Harris lost is either just wrong or not significant or something that could not be corrected. 

A factor that I think may have been pivotal was Trump getting shot. When he rose from the ground with blood streaming down his face, raised his fist and screamed, "Fight! Fight! Fight!", that may have been the moment Trump won. The picture could have not been more dramatic. I suspect that is the moment some wavering Republicans were brought back into the fold and some young 'bros' became Trump voters. 

I think an important factor in Trump's win was policy and policy favored Trump. The two largest issues were immigration and the economy. On immigration, Biden should never have reopened the border and reversed Trump policies. Eventually he reimposed some of the Trump restrictions and brought down the rate of border crossings, but the country had already been flooded. It was too little, too late. I am not going to elaborate on the complexity of border policy hear and how Trump stopped Congress from passing a good bipartisan border bill. The important thing is that the people wanted illegal immigration brought under control and they believed Trump would do it.

On the economy, people believed the economy was much better under Trump than Biden and it was. Most people are pretty much ignorant of economics, but they care about the price of a gallon of gas and a dozen eggs. By the time of the election, we had a low unemployment rate, and inflation had been brought down to almost the 2% target. It didn't matter. There is a lag time between good news and people feeling it. There is also a lag time between economic policy and the effects of that policy. Often things like employment rates, and the size of the deficit, and inflation are the results of previous policy; not current policy. That is just the way it is, but in this case, it benefited Trump.

One policy issue that was supposed to benefit Democrats was the abortion issue. One would have thought it would have benefited Harris but it did not. In several states where a ballot initiative liberalizing abortion policy was on the ballot, abortion won but so did Trump. Most people are not single-issue voters, and they are not as ideological consistent as are politicians. 

An issue that one would have thought would have favored Harris and overwhelmed all other issues was the threat to democracy. For the first time in our history, we had a candidate who had attempted a coup, and who in his next term said he may suspend the constitution. That did not matter. Why? 

I think there was a foundational reason Trump won, more important than strategy or tactics or policy. I contend the reason Trump won is that Americans are sick and tired of wokeness. I think wokeness is much more than the dictionary definition of "a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality." Wokeness consist of DEI, political correctness, affirmative action, cancel culture, and an attitude of superiority and self-righteousness. 

Tennessee Democrat Party showcases its gender fluidity ideology in every
communication. This is from Jan. 14, 2022

Wokeness is divisive identity politics in which the population is divided into aggrieved groups based on race, gender, or sexual orientation, or other factors and each group is empower by being powerless and playing the victim.  Wokeness judges people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. I think identity politics only plays well to a small but vocal constituency. Many people in those groups do not embrace the identity. People of a Latin American background, as an example, were told they were "Latinx," and they didn't feel it. 

Wokeness is the deliberate conflation of legal immigration and illegal immigration and telling people that if they believe a country has a right to determine who may become a resident of their country that they are a bigot. 

Wokeness is approvingly watching BLM rioters topple statures, burn buildings, spray paint monuments and anything else within reach, burn police cars, and block interstates, and telling those who believe the lawless behavior should be prohibited and punished that they are racist, and we must understand the rage and be supportive of the behavior. 

Wokeness is saying that a child who decides he wants to be of the opposite sex is to be encouraged in his delusion and even advocating he has a right to transition. It is calling genital mutilation and chemical castration, "gender affirming health care."  And, if one disagrees, they are denounced as "transphobic" and a terrible person.

Wokeness is putting ones preferred pronoun following one's name in a communication. Wokeness is hectoring people for using the wrong pronoun. Wokeness is making it a crime or a disciplinary offence to "misgender."

Wokeness is silencing voices that are not attuned to the same insight as the liberal elite. It is labeling opinions with which one disagrees as "hate speech." It is shouting down conservative speakers on college compass. It is ostracizing and marginalizing and denying a platform to people with the "wrong" opinions. It is illiberal attitude toward free speech. 

Wokeness is an arrogance and moral superiority and demonizing those with a different point of view. It is viewing those who are critical of or question climate change as no better than holocaust deniers. It is saying of people you may even know well, that if they voted for Trump then they might as well be a Nazi. 

It is calling people who vote for Trump, “garbage.” It is condescension toward white rural voters and people of religious beliefs or certain moral beliefs.

I did not vote for Trump in this last election. I think he genuinely is a threat to democracy. However, the term "fascist" has been thrown around so much that it has been diluted of all meaning. It doesn't stick. There is a member of our Metro Council who routinely calls people fascist and there are a lot of people like her. I personally know people who called George W. Bush a fascist. They have stripped all power from the word. People do not like being told they are sexist, bigots, fascist and no better than a Nazi. In response, I think their attitude becomes, "I'll show you. I will vote for the guy you detest." 

Tell a people long enough they are "deplorables," "garbage," fascist, sexist, homophobes, xenophobes and bigots and inferior to your enlighten self and they will not take it anymore and strike back.  

I have had people with whom I am close say the reason Harris lost is simply because Americans are sexist and racist. It that is the extent of their analysis and their conclusion, I think Trumpism has a bright future. 

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