I was not just wrong about Tuesday’s election results. I was spectacularly wrong.
I predicted that not only would Kamala Harris win but that she would exceed expectations—scoring victories both in the popular vote and the electoral college. I also forecast that the final results for the election would be unknown to us for a long time and even then, that Donald Trump would contest them, dragging out the battle much as he did in 2020.
When, watching the results come in, it became clearer and clearer to me that what I anticipated was not going to come to pass. However, my first reaction was not embarrassment or wondering where I went wrong. Those responses, which still nag at me, came later.
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No, at first, I felt deep sadness. It has been hard to shake, to be candid. In my view, not only is Donald Trump a terrible choice to be our president, but that Kamala Harris would have been an exceptionally good leader for America. I had studied her closely, followed her career for many years, written about her performance as Vice President, even got to meet with her in small settings several times. She was more than a gifted politician, she was a compassionate, caring, dedicated, highly effective public servant.
Furthermore, I have always felt passionately that women have not been given the chances to lead in our society that they deserved and that it was high time we had a woman president.
I was an early champion of Harris even when it was an extremely unpopular position to take. I felt she was maligned in her early days as Vice President. I had long hoped that Biden would give her a greater role and when he finally did, entering the last year or two of his term in office, I could see she was ready to lead us in a way that the aging, albeit exceptional effective president, would not be.
I had long hoped he would honor his early statements that he saw himself as a transitional figure who would prepare the way for a new generation of leaders. When he faltered in the June debate, frustrated that he had not done so already, cognizant of the fact that many in his inner most circle of advisors thought that he had already lost a step, I was among those calling for him to step aside.
Her response, the way she stepped into the role of candidate, the way she executed every demanding twist and turn in her truncated campaign, had confirmed my view that I was right about her. Further, evidence was beginning to accumulate that she was succeeding. She improved on Biden’s standing in the polls. She energized the party.
She made a great VP pick. She made good decisions about keeping the campaign staff she inherited from Biden relatively intact. They broke fund-raising records. They attracted record numbers of volunteers. She consistently led in the polls, albeit by varying margins.
Her message was good and got better. She moved to the center and an inclusive view of her presidency that brought in disaffected Republicans who had seen Trump’s failures and abuses as president up close. Voter registrations seem to be trending in her favor. Early vote numbers seemed to be doing so as well. It looked like she would win because she would build on the gender gap that had developed in the wake of the Trump-authored repeal of Roe v. Wade.
She would add to the women who supported her, young voters who were galvanized by her, voters of color, Republicans and Independents. The response to her when she held arena rallies was every bit as electric as that generated by Barack Obama, the man who was previously the most effective campaigner I had seen in my lifetime.
I studied the polling carefully. I was aware of the way polling averages had been skewed by “red wave” pollsters that were part of what appeared to be a disinformation campaign to justify post-election claims the results were rigged by Trump. I knew there were as many as a hundred such polls and I discounted them in my mind. I also discounted the polls that seemed not to take into account the realities of the new coalition she appeared to be putting together—such as the NYT/Siena poll.
The pieces had fallen into place. She was constantly exceeding expectations. It seemed only natural to me that she would do so again on Election Day—especially since the Trump campaign had less money, less energy, a less skilled ground operation, and a candidate who seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness and the bounds of decent public behavior at his rallies.
He was the most profoundly flawed, compromised, dangerous candidate in American history—and every voter in America had had a chance to see that. Surely, they would not make what to me was the unthinkable error of electing him to the presidency for a second time.
After the sadness and the PTSD came anger
The sadness at Kamala Harris' apparent defeat was soon blended with other feelings. One of them was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. I had lived through this same kind of disappointment before with the defeat of another gifted woman candidate, Hillary Clinton. She too had been defeated by Trump who, in 2016, was already apparently a deeply flawed candidate and who was one who, unlike any other candidate in U.S. political history, had zero public service experience.
After the sadness and the PTSD came anger. I was furious that the American people would make such an error. I was angry at those who had normalized Trump when he was, after all, a convicted felon, a man who stole national secrets, twice impeached, an accused sex abuser who had been judged by a jury to have been guilty of the equivalent of rape.
He seemed more loyal to the Kremlin and more drawn to despots worldwide than he was to our own country and allies. He had been judged by historians to be the worst president in our history. His track record as president was abysmal.
He mishandled the COVID epidemic in ways that led experts to believe hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily. His only legislative achievement was a tax cut that benefited the rich and drove inequality in America to even greater extremes. Then, after all that, he led a coup against the United States government and spent the next four years arguing that the election of 2020 had been stolen from him.
He was surrounded by advisors who had advanced plans that should he be reelected could lead to a gutting of our rights and democratic institutions. Further, he would have, thanks to a Supreme Court majority he had engineered, full immunity, the ability to ride roughshod over the law without repercussions. What is more, based on his campaign statements that is precisely what he was considering doing.
How could half the American electorate make the mistake of supporting such a man, especially when pitted against a far superior candidate who hailed from an administration that had literally been the most effective over one term of any in modern history?
Finally, following the sadness and the PTSD and the anger there came disorientation. I felt like I was in an episode of Black Mirror. Suddenly, somehow the country I had gone to bed in on Monday night had been transformed into a completely different one on Tuesday.
All the factors that were to have played to the favor of Harris disappeared. All of the weaknesses of the Trump campaign were wiped away. If you had told me that there had been some op by a foreign government to manipulate election returns it would have actually seemed more plausible than getting so much wrong about so many aspects of the candidates and the race.
But that was crazy talk. I sounded like a MAGA conspiracy theorist. Surely that kind of operation was impossible. Right?
How could I have misread this so completely?
So I was forced to ask: Where did I go wrong? How could I, after decades in Washington, writing about and observing elections and governments in action, have misread this so completely? Maybe I was just letting my hopes influence my analysis. After all, there were plenty of polls that said the race would be close. I had found a way to rationalize them away in my mind. That was clearly a mistake on my part.
Certainly, it seemed possible that some of what seemed possible or even likely did not materialize. Maybe her edge with women would not be so big—although women had repeatedly driven election results since the overturning of Roe. Maybe young voters would not turn out. Maybe Republicans would not be comfortable crossing over to vote for her.
Maybe some of the states in which she held an edge—and she was said to be competitive in every battleground state—would not go her way. But it did not occur to me that all of these factors would be overplayed in my mind and those of many Democratic Party analysts with whom I spoke. Another mistake.
Maybe my East Coast liberal feminism was getting the better of me. Maybe America was still too misogynistic for a woman to be president, too racist for a woman of color to be elected to the presidency. But she had been elected to the second highest office in the land, the first woman or woman of color or person of Asian descent ever to achieve such heights in American politics.
Could it really be so simple? Many of the women and people of color I know and have spoken to since believe that played a great role in the outcome. Further, in the 24 hours since the defeat, I have learned more about real flaws in the Harris campaign, gaps in their attention, failure to heed warnings of things that ultimately came true. That included paying inadequate attention to key groups like Latino voters and perhaps paying too much to Republican cross-over voters who did not materialize as expected.
Had I just not wanted to or been able to get to the truth behind the campaign’s flaws in time to change my prediction? Also a factor in my mistaken analysis.
Further, upon reflection, I’m afraid there is more to it than all of the above reasons for my error. It is clear to me that I simply do not understand the motivations of at least half of the American electorate. I just don’t full grasp their desire for strength or their grievances or their anger at the political establishment in Washington or the world as it looks through the lens of their media sources.
Perhaps that it is because their lives are alien to my own experience. Almost certainly it is because I have not made a sufficient effort to understand them, although I truly believe I have tried. The results suggest however, that I have not done so to a sufficient degree.
I believe Trump and the leaders of MAGA and the GOP and the billionaires who are funding and now increasingly fronting for their movement have cynically tapped into the dissatisfactions of tens of millions of Americans. I don’t believe they truly care about them. There is little evidence to suggest that they do. They certainly have not done much to made the lives of average people or those who are struggling better.
Their appeal to racism and nativism and intolerance and the other dark forces within our society is a page directly out of the authoritarian playbook. But it is also true that what they have done has been politically effective.
Such cynical populism has been a part of American politics for centuries, of course. But to see it for the toxic, corrosive role it plays in our society—as we should—also can lead us to too easily dismiss whatever fundamental human impulses lie behind them. People don’t set out to be evil. They want decent lives and they live in a world in which the system is rigged against them.
As it happens, the very people who they support politically are the ones who are engineering many of the sources of the exploding inequality in our society.
Uncomprehending alienation
But, as I said earlier, what is important and needs to be understood is that it works. We need to understand why it works in order to then understand why it works for so many. And we need to understand that, if we are to find a path to healing the divisions that now threaten America and to build a coalition that can actually put into power governments that can be seen by them to be hearing and addressing the needs of everyone.
The Biden Administration often sought to do this but apparently not often enough and what was achieved was not communicated well. (A great thought-provoking analysis of this can be found in this thread by my friend and colleague, one of the really great experts on American politics, Norm Ornstein.)
I don’t think we need to MAGA-ize the Democratic Party. I don’t think we need populist hucksters and exploitative con men like some of those who achieved victory on Tuesday. But if we are to finally “turn the page” on them as Harris promised her election would do, we do need to understand better than I did the origins of their political success.
That is not to say that Democrats should make winning over MAGA votes our prime objective. Had Kamala Harris won a fraction of the 16 million more people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 that did not vote for her this week, she would have won this race handily. So, better understanding of the needs and aspirations of our own base is where we must begin—and I was deeply surprised at how wrong we apparently got that too.
So perhaps, in recognizing errors like those I made, there is something of value. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned that may help us mount the effective political opposition that is so necessary within our system of government and is so critical at this moment. Perhaps there are insights that can help in future avoid losses like those Democrats have suffered this week.
But for now, I will admit, my deep embarrassment at having been so wrong is still not as an acute source of pain for me as the sadness I feel for the error I believe we have made as a nation. Perhaps that will fade with time.
I hope that the four years ahead are more productive and less divisive and destructive than many of us have feared. But in addition, I also will work hard to never forget this feeling and that to never stop seeking ways to avoid this sense of uncomprehending alienation from my own country from ever happening again.
