This is probably the most significant “Why did Harris lose?” article out there right now. Not because it comes to the right conclusions, but because the Brookings Institution is respected by party leaders. Politicians listen to them, and believe them, and consider them a credible, unbiased, outside perspective.
That makes it all the more troubling for the Trans community that on their shortlist of reasons Harris lost was Harris was that she was too supportive of trans people:
Second: The Trump campaign decided that Harris’ stance on transgender issues was the Willie Horton of 2024 and invested heavily in negative advertising that dominated the airwaves throughout the South.Anecdotal evidence suggests that this campaign helped weaken Harris’ effort to portray herself as a common-sense center-left candidate rather than an emissary from San Francisco.
I’m not American or I live there, but I see the same pattern in the USA as in my country and almost all Europe.
The right is answering questions to the majority of the population, by populism in most of the cases. They are giving “answers” to all their problems: money, insecurity, immigration, jobs, etc. While the left is doing the same just to a minority of people: lgbt rights, race, trans, etc. Both of the parties are dehumanizing the other one, the left is trying to make the white, heterosexual, cis, men the enemy. Their problems don’t matter, they don’t matter. Men can be laughed at. Christians can be mocked. The right is trying to downplay the lgbt, non-white, trans, women problems.
What I see in my country is that the left is more focus on these “left” problems, and when questioned about “right” problems, they don’t give an answer or the say there is no problem. I think they’ve just survive these last elections because “we need to stop the far right”. But I see day by day how all my friends and people I know are either voting to these right or far right parties or not voting.
The left is dying and the only thing that is keeping them alive is fear to the far right. It shouldn’t be like this, they should have competent leaders, a plan, should listen to “their” people.
The right is glowing, it doesn’t matter how inept they can be, at least they are listening to what most of their people want to say.
If there was, in my country, a leftist party that are not hypocrites and gave a shit about what people is worried about, a lot of people like me would vote them. But leftists parties can’t be normal.
That’s why Trump and all right parties win, left parties are awful these days, everywhere.
Because people were unwilling to vote for a black woman president. It’s that simple.
- There are estimates of as many as 15 million former Biden voters who opted to sit this election out, knowing full well that doing so is a de-facto vote for Trump.
- Latino men, and men in general, voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
- Abortion issues fared better than Harris in virtually every state where it was on the ballot.
- Harris underperformed almost universally across the country, to the point where New York, New Jersey, and California were all much closer than they should have been.
This tells me that it wasn’t the policies. People just didn’t want Kamala Harris. Maybe because she’s black. Or Indian. Or a woman. Or a former prosecutor. Or some combination of the above. But whatever the reason was, people felt so strongly about saying “Not Kamala Harris” that they stayed home knowing full well they were de-facto voting for Trump in the process.
Trump didn’t “win” this election, in that he got virtually the same votes he got last time. Kamala Harris lost this election because Democrats sent a very clear message that they are so against Kamala Harris that they were willing to hand the Presidency and the entirety of Congress instead of voting for her. This wasn’t just a loss. This was a “Fuck YOU, in particular” sent right at Harris.
I firmly believe it was a combination of her race and male voters’ unwillingness to vote for a woman under any circumstances.
We have so short memories we forget Biden’ rode in preaching accountability and on the heels of George Floyd’s murder. And then for at least some of us failed to deliver.
If you were listening, she gave plenty of reasons to send a message back right out of her own mouth.
Condemning a genocide would have been an easy win for one, but it’s one of a dozen. She ran a campaign to hug the center, she got all the voters that will get you because 70/240 million possible Americans aren’t persuadable. But it’s all she tried. Gun control, health care, labor rights, dropping death penalty reform from the platform, a campaign run to save us from Republicans… With a bipartisan panel involving Republicans.
I’m not for an instant insinuating there isn’t a problem with both race and sex in America, but the problem is the people fighting it from the top are idiots who can’t do basic math. There were plenty of votes to win among the 80-110 million people who are eligible, but didn’t.
No I don’t think they’re going to be better off, but the blame is not giving them the thing they want to vote for. They outnumber you. They would have beaten Trump.
Harris went from polling 3.7 points higher than Trump in August to losing by 3.4 points in November. Do you think it took people that long to realize she was a woman of color, or do you think her actions in the interim changed peoples’ perception of her?
That’s just because polling was off. This major poll right before the election had Harris up by 4 points.
This was a “Fuck YOU, in particular” sent right at Harris.
hmm… I think a “fuck you” would be if people went to the polls and wrote in someone else. This was more of a “meh” sent right at Harris… they couldn’t even be bothered to vote.
I firmly believe it was a combination of her race and male voters’ unwillingness to vote for a woman under any circumstances.
I suspect that this played a large part, but the tricky thing is: how do we confirm this? We can’t just poll people, bc they’ll rarely admit it. We can’t compare the performance of congressional candidates because people likely hold the presidency to a different standard. To make things even more complicated, Harris is mixed-race - and Americans are notoriously bad at studying that. And what do we do with the results of these studies? Clearly we still want to nominate qualified people regardless of gender or race.
Lemme guess. Media illiteracy and propaganda aren’t on the list.
If they’re not going to account for the thumbs on the scale, what the fuck is the point? I get that there are other issues, but to what extent do these factors influence people’s decisions?
Media sets the stage. Without it, there is no narrative - or rather, the narrative is based in whatever your physical social connections are.
The latter has collapsed for a lot of people. Because the former has overtaken it in almost every measure.
When that media “stage” is fundamentally corrupt, We get what we get.
15 million voters, a good chunk has to be Democrats, had their “economic anxiety” moment and choose to let a white convicted felon, realize, racist take the presidency, Senate, and house.
Similarly, by refusing to explain why she had abandoned the progressive positions on crime, immigration, health care, and climate change, she blurred the public’s perception of her and opened the door to the Trump campaign’s charge that she was a closet radical. Thinking back to the successful campaign of Bill Clinton in 1992, some Democrats were hoping Harris would have a “Sister Souljah” moment in which she broke with some party orthodoxy in order to show her independence, but this did not happen.
So Galston recognizes that abandoning progressive positions weakened the public’s perception of her, but he thinks the solution should have been to double down and attack progressives more?
Political scientists and historians will spend years analyzing the causes and significance of this election. My focus is more immediate. Although the data are imperfect and incomplete, I will offer preliminary answers…
To his credit, the writer explicitly warns us that this is a hot take and is almost certainly wrong.
