My One Post-Mortem About the 2024 Election

Pssst.... Kamala Harris isn't really to blame for Donald Trump's victory.

Photo by Derick McKinney on Unsplash

Before the hard-working staff at Drezner’s World starts looking forward into the abyss, there is the matter of explaining the GOP’s 2024 election victory. On social media I have seen a geyser of takes. As near as I can figure, according to most instant analyses Kamala Harris lost because:

1. She ran as a centrist who palled around with Liz Cheney OR she ran too far to the left;

2. She failed to criticize Israel about its brutal treatment of Palestinians in Gaza OR she criticized Israel too much about its brutal treatment of Palestinians in Gaza;

3. She refused to criticize the Biden administration OR she distanced herself too much from Joe Biden;

4. She ran on vibes and did not put forward any serious policies OR she focused too much on rolling out policy details.

The postmortems have already triggered sniping between the Biden and Harris camps, a condition that will likely persist for a while.

The implicit assumption behind all of these debates is that Kamala Harris had significant agency and made the wrong strategic and tactical choices which lead to her defeat. But any analysis of the 2024 election has to acknowledge that her agency was, in fact, severely limited by factors way beyond her control.

Earlier this week The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch pointed this out in an excellent column demonstrating that the Year of Elections turned out to be a Year of Hating on Incumbents:

The economic and geopolitical conditions of the past year or two have created arguably the most hostile environment in history for incumbent parties and politicians across the developed world.

From America’s Democrats to Britain’s Tories, Emmanuel’s Macron’s Ensemble coalition to Japan’s Liberal Democrats, even to Narendra Modi’s erstwhile dominant BJP, governing parties and leaders have undergone an unprecedented series of reversals this year.

The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.

Ultimately voters don’t distinguish between unpleasant things that their leaders and governments have direct control over, and those that are international phenomena resulting from supply-side disruptions caused by a global pandemic or the warmongering of an ageing autocrat halfway across the world.

Voters don’t like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit…..

That different politicians, different parties, different policies and different rhetoric deployed in different countries have all met similar fortunes suggests that a large part of Tuesday’s American result was locked in regardless of the messenger or the message. The wide variety of places and people who swung towards Trump also suggests an outcome that was more inevitable than contingent.

Murdoch’s data reveals that, compared to other incumbent parties, the Democrats actually suffered less of a pasting. That is not surprising, given that the U.S. economy has rebounded far more robustly than other developed economies from the pandemic. But the same systemic shock that affected other incumbent parties also hit the Democrats. Pollster Sarah Longwell, who conducted focus groups of undecided voters throughout the campaign, concluded, “the focus groups laid all this out pretty clearly. When we asked people how they thought things were going in the country they said, almost universally, ‘not good.’ Inflation and cost of living was the top concern.”

Critics of Harris might argue that she should have pushed her economic message harder. But Harris focused a lot on so-called household issues like the price of groceries and lowering the costs of health care. Whatever one thinks of Harris’ policy proposals in this area, she did push them out.

Furthermore, in the swing states where the Trump and Harris campaigns focused their firepower, her message did have some effect. The Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman noted that “across the seven battleground states, the '20-'24 swing towards Trump was ~3.1 pts. Across the other 43 states (+DC), it was ~6.7 pts.” In other words, the shift towards Trump was more than twice as large in the areas where neither candidate was terribly active. Wasserman’s bottom line? “The Harris campaign swam impressively against some very strong underlying currents.”

That is the best way to think of Harris’ campaign: as doing a very good job in poor conditions that were largely not of its making. Even though economic conditions have improved dramatically, Seth Masket correctly notes that, “fundamentals have a lag to them.” In thinking about whether Harris could have run a better campaign, Dave Karpf goes even further:

There’s something unserious about that instinct. We can’t run history twice. Donald J. Trump just ran the worst campaign I have seen in my lifetime. Harris, from my standpoint, assembled and executed quite an impressive campaign. Given that Trump emerged with a victory in the actual contest we just witnessed, I’m not certain any alternate candidate or granular campaign choice would have arrived at a different outcome.

So is there room for any other explanation? Well, Blueprint’s recent polling report concluded, “The top reasons voters gave for not supporting Harris were that inflation was too high (+24), too many immigrants crossed the border (+23), and that Harris was too focused on cultural issues rather than helping the middle class (+17).”¹

What is interesting is the “too focused on cultural issues rather than helping the middle class” question, because, again, Harris seemed pretty focused on helping the middle class! What could ““too focused on cultural issues” mean?

There are three possibilities. First, Harris also campaigned a lot on abortion — maybe that was unpopular? Except that it wasn’t, since abortion referendums did quite well in the polls.

Second, maybe Harris focused too much on democracy being at stake? That is possible. Longwell apparently told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘what’s an authoritarian?’” If you don’t know what an authoritarian is, then campaigning on Trump being one probably won’t attract a lot of votes.

Third, maybe “cultural issues” is code for “Kamala Harris is a woman of color and we’re uncomfortable with her being president because of that.” That may be possible! But I don’t think it explains the across-the-board shift to Trump. Nor does it explain Harris polling better than white guy Joe Biden once she entered the race.

The last problem is the state of media consumption — or lack thereof. Ipsos ran a poll in October and found a direct correlation between voting preference and voting knowledge: “Americans who answer questions about inflation, crime, and immigration incorrectly are more likely to opt for Trump, while Americans who answer those questions correctly prefer Harris.” For folks like TNR’s Michael Tomasky, that is a problem of right-wing media outlets being more powerful than legacy media outlets.²

Maybe Democrats need a more effective set of media channels to get accurate information to voters — but, again, that was not a Kamala Harris problem but a deeper issue that was never going to be fixed in the hundred days that Harris had to campaign.

To sum up: Kamala Harris lost but she is not a loser. She was campaigning against gale-force winds and did the best she could. Americans, like other voters across the world this year, decided to throw the bums out.

1. Also interesting in that Blueprint poll: concerns were that Harris wasn’t similar enough to Biden, was too conservative, or was too pro-Israel were non-factors.

2. See Talking Point Memo’s Kate Riga on this as well.