Burdened by what had been: Kamala Harris couldn’t convince voters

WASHINGTON ? Vice President Kamala Harris took a deep breath.

Her voice cracked. She closed her eyes and grimaced while she relived her call with Donald Trump.

“I know folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now. I get it,” she stressed in a concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday. “But we must accept the results of this election.”

Harris had spent the final days of her campaign excoriating Trump. She called him a fascist, a petty tyrant and mentally unstable. None of it worked.

Trump was on track to wallop her in every battleground state in the nation, in spite of Harris’ surrogate operation, vigorous campaign schedule and a massive cash advantage.

Finger-pointing and second-guessing abounded. Should President Joe Biden have stepped aside earlier? Had she done enough to reach base Democrats? Was her short-lived presidential bid doomed from the start?

Harris had not been expecting to run for president until 2028. And suddenly the task fell to her to deliver a victory against Trump. She had less than three months to put together a winning coalition, and she did not intend to rely on the white working-class men who helped put Biden in office.

Instead, as she was on the precipice of making history, she looked to a new coalition of suburban women, Black voters and anti-Trump Republicans to help her make up the deficit.

She chased undecided voters in the counties immediately surrounding Democratic-strongholds. She campaigned in the final weeks of the race with the Obamas and unlikely surrogates such as former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, instead of Biden, and emphasized issues such as women’s health, Trump’s fitness for office and the protection of American democracy.

Harris thought her work as vice president would give her an advantage.

Yet suburban women, independents, African-American men, Hispanic voters, moderate Republicans, Asian Americans, blue-collar workers and Gen Zers did not turn out for her with the intensity she needed to win. The so-called blue wall had faltered. The Sun Belt had snapped.

“All the ‘secret Kamala’ voters – there were secret Trump voters,” Angelo Greco, a progressive strategist, lamented after Harris’ remarks at Howard.

Harris brought the same closed-offness to the campaign that afflicted her vice presidency, briefly showing what she could be like, unburdened by what had been, only to retreat back into herself.

Her allies argued she was not entirely to blame. She inherited the campaign apparatus that Biden left her, including a fractured leadership structure and senior aides who did not know how to organize in communities of color.

Democrats knew the election would be tight. And Harris acknowledged from the get-go that she was behind.

“Biden was tanking, she stepped in, we rallied, we did everything we possibly could in effectively three months," Reproductive Freedom for All president Mini Timmaraju said the morning after the election.

The party must take a hard look at why Americans responded the way they did to Harris, she said. “And I don't think that's all on her.”

Harris had known that her political fate would be intertwined with Biden’s whether he won or lost, and she had spent the past 2? years working to make sure that did not happen.

But then the president made the most important decision of her career for her. And she wasn’t even the last person in the room.

Biden decision has big implications for Harris

It started out as a normal weekend for the vice president. After a fundraiser for Biden in Provincetown, Massachusetts, she settled into an evening at home with her niece, Meena, and her two great-nieces.

Biden’s political career was hanging on by a thread after a calamitous debate. Harris had been loyal. Her inner circle had been advised not to speculate on what was to come.

He called the next morning. It was over. Harris dialed her husband, Doug Emhoff. Her closest advisers sprang into action.

They’d been quietly preparing for a Harris 2028 presidential bid since 2022 and were building lists of every person who had interacted with her in a photo line, on a rope line, at a roundtable, introduced her at an event or attended a gathering at her residence.

“After the debate, there were definitely a lot of people in our ears saying we needed to be ready,” one person who was part of the discussions said.

“We kept that all warm, so that if we needed to turn it on, we could,” the person said. “And we did that day.”

Harris would not announce her candidacy publicly for several hours after Biden said she was running. She was careful, and deliberative, and wrote several drafts. She wanted to be respectful to Biden, whom Harris’ team felt had been mistreated by his so-called friends.

The switch to Harris brought energy and hope said Jason Vaughn, 50, a nurse practitioner from Greensboro, North Carolina, in an interview in October.

Biden said he would not drop from the ticket, insisting he was the Democrats’ best chance at beating the former president. Left unsaid: Biden did not think Harris, who some Democrats had suggested kicking off the ticket a year earlier, could win the election.

“If Biden dropped out earlier, there would have been chaos in the Democratic Party, because there would have been too many people who would have wanted to have some sort of brokered convention,” civil rights leader and Biden and Harris ally Marc Morial said in an interview before the votes were counted.

Democratic voters disagreed. Had the president never run for reelection, said Democratic voter Nikole Dobrovalski, 52, at Harris’ rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Harris would have had longer to campaign.

“People had their minds made up in most cases,” Dobrovalski said.

Biden had elevated Harris nationally. Now he was her albatross. Harris faced immense pressure during the campaign to distinguish herself from her boss. She resisted.

Her refusal to be critical of Biden hurt her in the race, polling by the Democratic firm Blueprint showed in the weeks leading up to the campaign. All that Harris had to do was make minor adjustments to her language to put some distance between herself and Biden on the economy, the Middle East and immigration, the group’s data showed.

Harris did not distance herself from Biden until he referred to her opponent’s supporters as “garbage” a week before the election over a racist joke about Puerto Rico a comedian told at a Trump rally.

Harris was frustrated that the incident overshadowed her speech at the Ellipse in Washington but did not want to speak out against her friend, a person familiar with the incident said.

Biden campaigned separately from Harris, and she reinforced she’d bring generational and societal change by hitting the trail with entertainers Cardi B and Beyonce. As she drew her sharpest contrast with Trump, rallying her supporters on the Ellipse, the sitting president was locked up, politically, in the White House.

A turning point for Harris’ vice presidency

The work to redeem Harris began in 2022 after party insiders used anonymous reports to assail the sitting vice president.

She shook up her staff and launched a rehabilitation campaign with an intentional schedule that included visits to early primary, battleground and delegate-rich states during the midterms to talk about progressive issues. She visited more than two dozen college campuses.

Her team thought her strength would hinge on women, who cared about abortion rights, and young voters, to whom the president did not appeal.

“We knew we had to stake the claim on those two constituencies,” a person involved in the planning said, “and show that we could move the needle with those two constituencies to shut, frankly, the insiders up.”

They stopped the bleeding. But they had to hustle to introduce her to much of the country once she became the nominee.

The campaign brought celebrities to the battlegrounds who had known Harris for years, such as actress Kerry Washington.

“She’s doing everything in her power to be in as many places and be as accessible as she possibly can,” Washington told USA TODAY in October.

Harris’ friends and longtime aides say there’s a down-to-earth quality that shines through when the former prosecutor, who served as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, is in smaller and more intimate settings.

“She is used to talking to people in distress and one on one, and that's a side of her that I don't think a lot of people see,” said Kristine Lucius, the vice president’s domestic policy adviser and her final chief of staff in the U.S. Senate, in an interview in October.

Harris zeros in on moderate Republicans and suburban women

That was the Harris that Republican strategist Sarah Longwell met with her wife and two children backstage at an event in a suburb of Philadelphia.

Longwell, who publishes “The Bulwark,” had met Harris a few weeks before. The campaign asked her to moderate a conversation with Cheney and undecided voters. As they had done on Harris’ rehabilitation tour, the VP’s aides hand-selected who received questions.

Longwell knew from the focus groups she conducts that undecided voters felt they did not know Harris well. She asked the vice president to explain what would be different if she were elected.

“Mine will not be a continuation of the Biden administration. I bring to it my own ideas, my own experiences,” Harris responded.

Harris’ team  zeroed in on right-leaning independents and moderate Republicans who had voted for Nikki Haley in the GOP primary to pad their margins.

They held events in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan with Cheney. They also targeted Arizona, which the late U.S. Sen. John McCain had represented. His son Jim endorsed Harris.

Harris’ campaign believed those voters would switch their allegiance.

It banked on women coming out in strong numbers – including silent Harris voters: women who they believed would pull the lever privately for the VP and keep it a secret from their husbands.

Harris had a double-digit advantage in polling with women across the country, and in the swing states, and it thought it could use reproductive rights to drive up turnout from young, independent and Republican-leaning women, who live in the suburbs.

The vice president had followed her “gut” two years earlier, the person familiar with the campaign said, when she zeroed in on abortion rights, after making it one of her signature issues on the Judiciary Committee in the U.S. Senate. And she did so again as a presidential candidate, even as polling data showed the economy outranked abortion for most voters.

She labeled state-passed restrictions “Trump abortion bans” and said the Republican would sign a federal law if he were presented with one. She amped up voters in the last week of her campaign with comments he made about protecting women “whether they like it or not.”

Allied groups had already built the infrastructure in Michigan, where an abortion rights ballot measure passed in 2022, and Wisconsin, where Democrats flipped control of the state Supreme Court on the issue in 2023. They agreed with her approach.

The strategy was a bust. In crucial suburban counties in both states, plus Pennsylvania, she was unable to match or significantly improve on Biden’s performance four years earlier. Exit polling showed her winning about the same percentage of Republicans as Biden had.

White working-class men hold steady; Hispanic men swing to Trump

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a member of Harris’ national advisory board, was hopeful in a late-October interview.

He had come from Chicago to Kenosha and Waukesha. In his remarks at a canvass, Pritzker made an unprompted admission that saving democracy may not be an effective closing message.

“I think the motivator, ultimately, for people is, you know, what's in it for my family, my community, you know, am I going to do better with this person?” he said afterward, in the interview.

Surveys were showing a wide gender gap and Harris lagging with male voters at the time. Blue-collar voters had been Biden’s area of expertise. Harris sent her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, across the Midwest to bring them back into the fold.

In the end, Harris was able to minimize her losses with white men. Exit polling showed her performing roughly as well with the group as Biden. 

The concerns drove Harris to focus on Pittsburgh and neglect the Philadelphia area and its eastern suburbs for much of her short-lived campaign.

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman said the weekend before the election, as Harris prepared to make multiple stops in the state, that the VP understood what needed to be done.

“I'm not mansplaining the vice president,” he said. “It's her campaign, and she has absolutely been putting in her time in Pennsylvania.”

But Harris had ignored Allentown, which has a large Hispanic and Puerto Rican population, until the Monday before the election. She performed worse than Biden. Nearby counties flipped to Trump.

Democrats believed they could acquire new voters by reminding them of the Trump rally speaker’s remark about the U.S. territory the week prior. Reggaeton singer Nicky Jam withdrew his Trump endorsement.

Yet, reflecting on the results, Stephanie Valencia, an outside adviser to the Harris campaign on Latino outreach, said Wednesday: “That moment of contrast, might have been too late.”

Harris suffered deep losses with Latino men all over the map. Trump won the demographic with 54% of the vote nationally, exit polling showed, in a stunning reversal from when Biden won 59% of those votes.

“There is great, great alarm as it relates to Latino voters,” said Valencia, a co-founder of Equis, which does research and polling on the demographic group.

The outcome in battleground states among Latinos was not surprising. It was in line with the polling about Latino voters’ high economic anxieties dating back to the beginning of Biden’s presidency, she said.

Trump’s appeal to their “machismo” was viewed by Democrats as a primary factor in his increased support from Hispanic men. He went after the “bro vote” and appeared on Joe Rogan’s and Logan Paul’s podcasts as he made his closing argument.

His campaign proactively courted young Hispanic men dating back to 2021,  when it was clear Trump was intending to run again, said Fernand Amandi, whose firm polled Latinos in the 2008 and 2012 general elections for former President Barack Obama.

He went to UFC championship fights and broke into the gaming community, he said, subcultures that over-index with not only young men but young Hispanic men.

Trump’s team was able to build “a cultural kinship with them,” Amandi said.

Real talk in Michigan with Black men

Harris knew long before she became the party’s nominee Democrats were losing support from Black men.

She held listening sessions and launched a tour emphasizing entrepreneurship in Atlanta, Charlotte and Detroit. She followed up in October by releasing an economic agenda for Black men.

But the campaign made crucial missteps.

It did not put enough emphasis on talking directly to Black voters, NAACP President Derrick Johnson said Wednesday. “It is assumed they're going to vote a certain way, and there is no persuasion.”

“She stepped into a scenario where everyone was quickly putting together a campaign around her using an old model that has been flawed for a number of years,” Johnson said.

The vice president’s coalitions director, Chris Scott, described a dysfunctional structure in which Biden’s campaign team never fully merged with Harris’ and projects to reach out to and activate Black men were delayed or shelved.

“I do not ever believe that the leadership on that side fully understood her, and that was reflected in how department execution happened, even after the switch. It was still too reactionary, and it wasn't proactive,” he said.

Scott said that a request for a Caribbean American fact sheet that emphasized her Jamaican American heritage was not prioritized. The agenda she already had been working on for Black men? Released too late.

There was a “disconnect, but also a disrespect of who she was in general” that Scott said was felt by Black staffers.

“There's little things that came off to a lot of folks as microaggressions on, why do we keep under prioritizing this, even though we say we need this to turn out, and we're over prioritizing reaching out, converting Republican voters.”

At a barbershop in Michigan two weekends before the election, Morial, the civil rights leader, showed up ready to receive some tough love. Democrats had neglected to do enough organizing in Black communities, and it was beginning to show.

Working through the National Urban League’s Civic Engagement Fund, Morial paired up with Win with Black Men, an organization founded by Obama alums to help engage the community. Scott, a Detroit native, came too.

The real talk that took place hit on a touchy issue. Black men in attendance said they’d had conversations with friends who did not want to vote for Harris because she was a woman.

Obama had warned Harris’ campaign about the issue when he met with them to discuss Black outreach, a person familiar said.

The percentage of Black men who cast a ballot for Harris nationally remained on par with Biden four years before, but she trailed Biden by double digits in swing states such as Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Both fell to Trump.

She also lost Georgia to Trump by roughly 2 percentage points as more voters cast ballots there than four years earlier for both her and Trump.

Timmaraju said the results showed a longer conversation about the Democratic Party and the way it approaches campaigning.

“We invest in our base the least. We invest in pursuing independent voters, white men, white women, the most. White men and white women have failed us,” she said. “It is impossible to go forward at this point as a party and not dig into that after 2016 and now after this.”

Arab American community tanks Harris in Michigan; Gen Z does not pan out

Harris’ standout moment a year prior had come in Dubai, as she spoke out further than any Biden administration official had before on the Israel-Hamas war. She tread lightly as a candidate but was explicit about her willingness to supply arms to Israel.

Groups such as the Uncommitted Movement declined to endorse Harris and encouraged activists in the state to vote for third-party candidates

Outside Harris' rally in Kalamazoo, more than a dozen pro-Palestinian protesters held signs and joined together in chants like, “Kamala you can’t hide, you’re committing genocide.”

Inside her events the number of protests increased, too. Her early response was to swat back. As time went on, she began to tell them they would make their voices heard in the election.

In Michigan, the VP fell short after Jill Stein pulled in nearly 1% of the vote. Trump won the city of Dearborn, which has a majority Arab population.

After Uncommitted leaders said the vice president suggested openness during a brief interaction to having a conversation with them about an arms embargo on Israel, her White House national security adviser Phil Gordon shut it down with a tweet.

“She turned around and she started courting people like Liz and Dick Cheney,” said Lexi Zeidan, 32, a co-founder of the Uncommitted Movement. “It ended up leaving her stranded on an island, and it created a void that Donald Trump was able to swoop in on.”

Zeidan, who lives in Detroit said the election results speak for themselves. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian American, swept her Michigan district.

Harris' rally in East Lansing was one of multiple events in the final stretch where she made an explicit appeal to Gen Z, whom her campaign had tried to motivate with TikTok, memes and its vibes campaign.

But as it turned out, vibes don't vote.

In an interview before the results were tabulated, Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Harris surrogate who campaigned for her on college campuses, said the vice president was personally invested to a degree he had not seen in previous presidential campaigns.

Frost was an organizer with March for Our Lives before he was elected, becoming the youngest member of Congress. He credited Harris with making changes needed on the ground that helped her to regain support from groups where she’d be experiencing attrition, including Black men.

“The top thing she asked me about that she was very interested in, was, what are young people saying? What are they thinking? And she asked this of all surrogates she sees, because she wants to make sure that the campaign is nimble,” said Frost, 27.

A wake-up call for the Democratic Party

The Sunday evening before the election, Bernice King, noted on a Win With Black Women call that the presidential inauguration on Jan. 20 was taking place at an auspicious time.

If the vice president won the election, King pointed out, she’d be taking the oath of office on the holiday that honors the contribution of her father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to the civil rights movement. King could not envision a scenario where Trump was inaugurated on her father’s birthday.

“If he’s inaugurated, that’s a wake-up call,” King said.

Trump won handily. And the Democratic Party is now in soul-searching mode. Biden had promised to be a transitional president. And in the end he was. Just not in the way, Harris, and many in her party, had hoped.

“This election was the most important election of our lifetimes, which was set to answer a question about who we are as a country and who we are as a people,” Amandi said Wednesday. “And the answer is beyond what the Kamala Harris campaign did, or even for that matter, anything the Democrats did.”

Harris’ term in office will end on the same day Trump’s begins. She said in a Wednesday concession that the fight will carry on.

But what role she will play, she’ll have to decide.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kamala Harris' shotgun 2024 campaign: why it fell short