There's no question that last week's election was a disaster for both the Democratic party and the country as a whole. In the wake of such a disaster, it's appropriate to look at the causes of it so that we can learn from what went wrong and hopefully avoid making the same mistakes in the future. But the narrative that has settled in around here is that last week's disaster was the fault of... well, anyone or anything except Kamala Harris and the leaders of the Democratic party. The media. The billionaires. And this site's favorite scapegoat, the voters.
Now to be clear, there are major problems with the media in America, billionaires have far too much power and infulence over politics, and there are certainly a lot of racist and/or misogynistic voters out there. But the idea that Harris and the Democratic party ran an excellent campaign and only lost because of factors outside of their control is simply false. Harris and Democratic leaders made very serious mistakes, without which there's a good chance they would have beaten Trump. And pretending otherwise serves no one except those same party leaders who have failed us repeatedly.
To take just one example, the Harris campaign placed a very strong emphasis on trying to win over Republicans and conservative voters. She made several appearances with Liz Cheney in the final two weeks of the campaign. She said she was "honored" to have the endorsement of Liz Cheney and her father (the architect of the Iraq war) and called them "well-respected." Tim Walz said that Republican voters were "trying to find permission to get off the MAGA stuff and move over." The campaign clearly thought they could win over Republican voters and devoted a lot of time and effort to it.
So what was the result?
Harris won just 5% of the Republican vote. In 2020, Biden won 6%, so despite all her efforts, Harris actually got a lower percentage of the Republican vote than Biden did. And she lost support from independents and Democratic turnout fell. If, instead of campaigning with Liz Cheney and praising neocons, Harris had instead devoted that effort to turning out the Democratic base, the outcome might have been different. We'll never know of course, but we do know that this effort failed, and this failure was masterminded by Democratic leaders and no one else.
And then there was this. When asked on national television what she would do differently from Biden, Harris replied "There is not a thing that comes to mind." She later walked this back a little bit in the same interview, but not nearly enough, and one of the few ways she said she would be different was that she would put Republicans in her cabinet, which again goes back to that misguided effort to try to win Republican and conservative voters. It's true that Harris was in a tricky position as Biden's VP, but given that not many people knew much about her when she became the nominee, she had the opportunity to cast herself as an agent of change. And that's what voters wanted. In exit polls, when asked about how things are going in the country, only 25% gave a positive answer ("enthusiastic" or "satisfied"), and 73% gave a negative answer ("dissatisfied" or "angry"). For voters who said that bringing change was the most important thing to them, Trump won those voters 74% to 24%. This has been a consistent problem for Democratic leaders in general—clinging too hard to the status quo when voters are telling them that they want, they need, change.
Now there are other areas I could point to, such as Democratic messaging on the economy and grocery prices, but the point is that no, Harris did not run a flawless campaign. Now of course that doesn't mean she's a bad person or that she should be hated or anything of the sort, and she certainly would have made a better president than Trump. But she is a product of the party leadership she comes from, a leadership that has completely failed to grasp how badly a large majority of America's working-class wants change, and a leadership that has failed time and time again to stop the Republicans from running roughshod over all of us. Remember that it was under the watch of this Democratic leadership that abortion rights were lost in half the country and are now in danger of being lost nationwide.
We cannot afford any more failures from our party leadership, and we cannot afford to continue making excuses for them. It's time for change. And it needs to be real change, not the same corporate-friendly leadership with some new faces on it. Otherwise we may be in the political wilderness for a long time to come.
