The Democratic Party on Wednesday morning began a painful postmortem on Kamala Harris’ campaign, which ended in a bitter defeat to Donald Trump on Election Day.
The Republican president-elect scored a stunning victory despite polls showing an astonishingly close race. Exactly how Trump pulled it off despite his own considerable liabilities as a candidate will doubtless leave many of his opponents asking where they went wrong.
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Some are asking questions of President Joe Biden, who faced intense scrutiny around his mental fitness during his re-election bid. His disastrous performance in his debate against Trump in June triggered a crisis of confidence in his leadership that eventually led to him dropping out of the race—in turn giving Harris just a few months to campaign herself.
“That condensed period of campaigning deprived her, I think, of the long runway that a typical candidate has to really lay out what they see their vision as if they were to win office,” Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker said of Biden’s late exit on Wednesday’s Today show.
“We ran the best campaign we could, considering Joe Biden was president,” one Harris aide told Politico. “Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost tonight.”
“Why did Joe Biden hold on for as long as he did? He should have not concealed his (health) and dropped out a lot sooner,” one unnamed Democratic donor told Reuters. A Democratic National Committee official separately told the news agency they’d received angry messages from party members on Tuesday night after exit poll data showed Trump gaining ground among some demographics Harris was relying on.
“They feel lied to by the campaign,” the official said.
Others questioned Harris’ selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. Before she announced Walz as her VP pick in August, many party insiders thought Josh Shapiro—the governor of Pennsylvania, a crucial battleground state that Trump ultimately won—was the stronger option.
“A lot of people are probably wondering tonight what would have happened had Shapiro been on the ticket,” Lindy Li, a member of Harris’ National Finance Committee, said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday. She added: “I’m not sure how much Tim Walz contributed to the ticket.”
The Harris campaign’s broader failure to find a message that resonated with enough voters has also been blamed for the outcome. “Kamala Harris lost this election when she pivoted to focus almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump,” veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz wrote of Harris’ defeat in an X post.
“Voters already know everything there is about Trump—but they still wanted to know more about Harris’ plans for the first hour, first day, first month and first year of her administration. It was a colossal failure for her campaign to shine the spotlight on Trump more than on Harris’ own ideas.”
There will inevitably be much more Democratic soul-searching to come in the weeks before and after Jan. 6, 2025, when as vice president, Harris will have the unenviable duty of certifying her own defeat.
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