What Went Wrong With The Harris Campaign?

Attendants of a rally for Kamala Harris with campaign signs on July 30, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia (The New York Times/Erin Schaff).

By Gavin Stroud ‘28

Going into November 2024, only one thing seemed clear about the outcome of the presidential race: it would not be a landslide. Voters expected a tight race, possibly one of the tightest in the nation’s history. So on the morning of Wednesday, November 6th, when the Associated Press called the race for Trump by a thick margin of 86 electoral votes, millions were left looking for answers. What was shaping up to be a highly contested election had ended in a decisive victory.

Following every presidential election, it is standard for both campaigns to begin their parallel processes of self-examination. Often, breaking down precisely what went wrong is both incredibly difficult and unrewarding work. Key players in the Harris campaign, analysts, and journalists have examined the last 107 days, all seeking to understand the outcome. Generally, there are four main contributors which consistently appear in discussion of where the Harris campaign fell short: the Vice President’s relationship with President Biden, unfortunate timing, concerns about inflation, and outreach to minority voters.

The Biden Question

A unique dilemma facing Harris, both as a public figure and Presidential candidate, was how she should position herself relative to President Biden, the once-incumbent. Strategists for the campaign repeatedly recommended that Harris distance herself from Biden, especially amid a series of unpopular remarks aimed at Trump and his supporters, such as his poorly received October 22nd public call to “lock [Trump] up.” But in the end, Harris maintained a very close public relationship with Biden, even allowing him to make several appearances in assistance of her campaign. 

More cynical voices in the conversation like Doug Sosnik, former Senior Advisor to Bill Clinton’s campaign, argue she didn’t move far enough away. Sosnik said plainly that, if he were running Harris’s campaign, “the last thing [he] would want to do is try to make this campaign about Joe Biden.” Given Biden’s staggering unpopularity while in office, it seems very likely that Harris’s continuing proximity to the current President could have made a serious impact on some voters’ decisions. However, due to the binary nature of elections, there’s only one chance and one trial to study. It’s impossible to say for certain that a sharp movement away from Biden wouldn’t have appeared to some voters as a backtrack on the stances that Harris held as Vice President, a position for which the public hasn’t forgotten her responsibility. 

Timing and the Primaries 

Concern about time has persisted since the day Harris announced her candidacy. Due to the unique circumstances of an incumbent leaving the race late (July 21, 2024), the time available to run a campaign was cut short to just about 107 days. This runs drastically shorter than the typical presidential campaign, which can often take in excess of two years. Though the campaign was still able to raise a record-breaking amount in excess of $1.4 billion, many key players ultimately conceded that time was not on their side. David Plough, a senior advisor to the Harris campaign, admitted in a radio interview that there was “a price to be paid” for the abbreviated time frame. His comments reflect the prevailing sentiment among campaign officials: it may simply not have been possible to accomplish all that was necessary in a thin fraction of the typical time. 

Some also point to both the circumstances in which Harris came into the running. Due to the late withdrawal of Biden from the race, the Vice President did not run in primary elections, which many argue could have seriously hindered her. Former advisor to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 and 2016 campaigns Howard Wolfson cynically describes the election as “not even a close call,” citing Harris’s absence from primary races as a critical weakness. He argues that she was deprived of the significant opportunity to improve as a candidate through active competition, particularly in the fight for vital “blue-collar votes in the blue wall states.” 

Facing Inflation

As at many other points in history, American voters across the aisle were concerned about inflation going into the 2024 election. Though CPI inflation fell dramatically from its soaring levels in the summer of 2022, the topic was still heavy on America’s mind. A Pew Center report found that 62% of Americans viewed inflation as “a very big problem for the country,” and also that while 37% of self-identified Democrats felt the economy was in an “excellent or good” place, only 10% of Republicans would say the same. Clearly, the way that each campaign addressed inflation was a matter of high stakes. 

The economy is an area in which, as a recent Reuters poll concluded, Trump has maintained a substantial “polling edge.” The data showed that a 38% higher proportion of the voters sampled from seven swing states felt that Trump had “a better plan, policy or approach” to addressing inflation than Harris. This gap is something that many argue she did not recover, unable to outrun the alarmingly high inflation rates of 2022, which occurred when she was serving as Vice President. In spite of the fact that addressing inflation is largely the domain of the Federal Reserve, voters tend to look to the Presidential candidates for answers. Though Harris tried to assuage voters’ concerns—notably with her promises to address consumer good prices and high housing costs—inflation was an issue on which she simply never got a firm grasp. 

Minority Voters

Recent insights have also revealed some weaknesses in Harris’s approach to Black and Latino voters, particularly in key battleground cities like Philadelphia. A New York Times article details how a small group of campaign staff members broke off into their own smaller operation, hoping to directly address the voters they felt were being overlooked. They were frustrated by the campaign’s repeated instructions for staffers to “spend most of their days phoning the same small pool of volunteers,” which they felt reduced them to “glorified telemarketers,” when instead their time could have been spent actively engaging voters in communities where outreach may have been more important. 

There were deep questions about messaging raised as well. Senior advisor to the campaign Kellan White went on to publicly rebuke the argument that they had neglected minority voters, saying that they “did more in Philadelphia to reach Black and Latino voters than any campaign has done in a long time.” However, he suggests that their underlying message “didn’t resonate with enough voters,” potentially posing deeper concerns for the Democratic Party moving forward. Though there’s a substantial body of internal disagreement around how the campaign could have improved its approach to minority voters, one thing became clear from the results in Philadelphia, where Harris won some 35,000 fewer votes than Biden in 2020: their strategy was flawed. 

Implications

Harris’s loss reflects many of the Democratic party’s long-running struggles, particularly with regards to addressing the economic concerns of many voters, but it also exists in some very unique circumstances, among them a troublesome entanglement with an unpopular incumbent. Democrats also lost control of both the House and Senate, marking a truly seismic Republican movement. The Democratic Party will need to learn all that this year’s defeat has to teach, should it seek a comeback in midterm season.