The bomb threats set the ominous tone for what would turn out to be a very bad night for Kamala Harris. In Georgia, a crucial swing state, they were targeted at heavily Democratic counties. By mid-afternoon LaTosha Brown, the cofounder of Black Voters Matter, was aware of at least 19 threats sent to polling sites and Democratic campaign offices; Brown also forwarded me the audio of a truly vile, racist phone message left for a Democratic county chair.
Similar threats would soon surface in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Some accounts attributed them to Russian email domains. Thankfully, no bombs were discovered. The hoaxes, though, were enough to prompt evacuations and delay counts. Yet the logistics turned out to be less significant than how they fit with the campaign atmosphere: Harris, a conventional candidate in many ways, was up against a ruthless opponent running to stay out of jail who promised ruthless policies, such as mass deportations, and stoked racism, sexism, and rage. Harris may have brought joy to the campaign trail, but she and her team didn’t have an answer to Donald Trump’s dark furies.
“My heart is full today, full of gratitude for the trust you have placed in me, full of love for our country, and full of resolve,” Harris told supporters Wednesday afternoon at Howard University, her alma mater and the place she had intended to deliver a victory speech. “The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for. But hear me when I say, hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up, and as long as we keep fighting.”
Harris added that she was “so proud of the race we ran and the way we ran it.” While Harris touted her campaign’s efforts, the recriminations have already begun.
President Joe Biden’s stubbornness in staying on the ticket until late July is at the top of many lists. Another major problem lurked throughout the fall, as the polling consensus showed a razor-thin margin in most of the seven swing states. “We really struggle to get enough Trump people in our sample because their refusal rate is so much higher,” a senior Harris adviser told me in late October. “The $3 billion question is: Is the polling as broken as it was registering Trump support in 2020 and 2016? The gap between the polling averages and his performance in the battleground states last time was pretty striking.” It was again last night. Trump steadily improved across the board, adding 2 or 3% in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin counties, until he won each state.
Harris’s campaign team also made strategic choices that didn’t work. The vice president couldn’t or wouldn’t separate herself from Biden, most glaringly during an appearance on The View in which Harris said she couldn’t think of any examples where she differed from her boss. Given that Biden’s most recent job approval percentages were in the dismal mid-to-high 30s, this was a serious problem. And it was intimately related to voter anger over the economy.
The president, when he was still the Democratic nominee, spent tens of millions of dollars in campaign cash trying and failing to sell “Bidenomics.” Harris’s team added what it hoped would be some enticing policy ideas aimed at middle-class voters, including grants for first-time homeowners and an expansion of Medicare to cover in-home costs for seniors. “She is trying to run as the change candidate, which is really hard and counterintuitive when you’re the sitting vice president,” a Democratic strategist told me.
Straddling them didn’t pan out. Harris couldn’t make any more of a dent with voters on the economy than Biden had, even as unemployment shrunk to 4% and the stock market climbed. Many voters, struggling to pay bills, were still angry over postpandemic inflation, and they took it out on the incumbent vice president. “[Trump is] a symptom of something,” Jon Stewart told me last week. “A system that seems to not responsibly answer to the needs of a lot of its people.” That’s true. What’s delusional is thinking Trump can deliver—or that he even cares about delivering—a more equitable economy.
Another high-stakes strategic bet was that Harris needed to run to the ideological middle in order to sway independents and moderate Republicans. Partly this was to inoculate Harris from attacks that Trump lodged based on her 2019 bid for the Democratic nomination, when she had scrambled to the left. But Trump still damaged Harris with an ad using a video clip in which she’d endorsed gender-affirming surgery for prison inmates, an attack that Harris never effectively rebutted.
Instead, her campaign heavily promoted the support of conservative former Congresswoman Liz Cheney. Not only did the alliance fail to woo enough swing-state moderates, it also contributed to alienating a meaningful number of Democratic base voters—where Harris was already weak, another legacy of her role in the Biden Administration, particularly when it came to dismay over American support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza. One example: Trump, with the help of Green Party candidate Jill Stein, beat Harris by six points in Dearborn, Michigan, where there is an Arab American majority. compared to Biden, she also lost ground with younger voters. Rachel Janfaza, a journalist and consultant who specializes in youth voting, had flagged a gender fault line in advance. “If she wins, it will be in large part due to the help of young women who feel their rights and their bodies are on the line,” Janfaza told me. “There’s an element of fear associated with it that is not present for young men.” In addition to bringing in younger male voters, Trump also made inroads with Black and Latino men.
As the painful trends piled up on election night, Harris’s campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware went largely silent for several hours. At almost 11 p.m. on Tuesday, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon sent a memo to the staff, which was quickly leaked, attempting to describe a remaining narrow path to victory through the blue-wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. By the time the sun came up Wednesday morning, the wall had completely crumbled. Trump, who has promised to build a very different wall, had won again. Harris and her team worked exhaustively during a 107-day sprint, only to be left to wonder whether the next president will try to prosecute them.
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