Four Myths About Kamala Harris’s Loss

By
Branko Marcetic

In assessing Donald Trump’s victory, pundits have claimed the country turned right, the Harris campaign was too far left and woke, Biden’s presidency was robustly populist, and racism and sexism made the result inevitable. Those claims are all wrong.

Vice President Kamala Harris pauses while speaking on stage as she concedes the election, at Howard University on November 6, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

In the aftermath of any election, as people try to figure out what just happened and why, we are forced to wade through a bog of misleading and flat-out untrue talking points.

Confusion and missing information often prevails in the wake of elections. But some of this confusion is due to the spin and self-interest of powerful and influential people. The 2024 election is no different, with an army of pundits, operatives, and officials wasting no time in trying to ensure all the wrong lessons are learned from the Democratic defeat.

Here are four of the most common talking points about the election and why they are wrong.

1. The Country Turned Right

Most people vote for a candidate or party because after weighing it up, they decide that one, on balance, is the better option. Very few consider their vote an across-the-board endorsement of every part of a politician’s platform, rhetoric, or behavior. This is why Democratic voters voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates this election, despite being vehemently against their party’s support for the Gaza genocide.

But this is not how political pundits think, which is why we’ve heard a variety of commentators saying that voters “rejected progressive ideas,” that “America, after its long journey through the 2010s and ’20s, is becoming more conservative again,” and that “the U. S. has revealed itself to be distinctly more conservative than many had thought.” Trump gave voters “an opportunity to reject the perceived leftward shift of progressivism and to stake a claim for conservative culture,” charged one MSNBC analyst. But this claim is hard to square with the data.

It’s true that solidly blue California saw one of the most dramatic shifts toward the GOP, while also casting a number of conservative ballot-measure votes. (Though voters there also repealed a ban on marriage equality). But the picture looks very different outside California. Across the country, often in red states, voters passed measures putting in place a $15 minimum wage and paid sick leave, enshrining abortion rights in their state constitutions, rejecting school privatization, and advancing the right to unionize.

Meanwhile, many Democrats downballot, including progressives, outperformed Harris, including in the key battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada, casting doubt that the result was an across-the-board shift toward conservatism. And union leader Dan Osborn, who ran an independent, left-populist campaign for a Nebraska Senate seat — the kind the Left has been urging in red states — not only outran Harris but outperformed the Republican incumbent’s previous Democratic challengers.

Victorious Democrats downballot included members of the left-wing Squad. Rep. Ilhan Omar outperformed Harris in two of the three counties that make up her district, including winning by 21 points a county that Harris lost by 4, and coming away with the best margin of victory out of the state’s seven House incumbents. (In the third county, their margins were roughly the same).

Rep. Rashida Tlaib similarly outran the Democratic candidate in her Michigan district, including in the populous Wayne County that that one expert said “covered the lion’s share of Trump’s margin,” and nearly doubled Harris’s share in the heavily Arab and Muslim American Dearborn. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez more or less held her voter share in her district even as it swung sharply toward Trump.

As Ocasio-Cortez’s own voters told her directly, the reason her constituents split the ticket between her and Trump wasn’t because they were drawn to Trump’s right-wing policies or his ugly rhetoric. It was because they wanted change, because they viewed both Trump and her as fighting for the working-class and bucking the establishment, because of disgust with the Gaza genocide.

As one twenty-year-old college student who supports Trump told the Associated Press, he was “not very fond of President Trump because of his rhetoric in 2016 but I look aside from that and how we were living in 2018, 2019, I just felt that we lived a good life.” It’s a familiar refrain from many Trump supporters: that they back or even voted for the former president in spite of, not because of, his worst qualities.

2. The Harris Campaign Was Too Far Left and Woke

“The Democrats must recognise that we are a centrist country and that, as a party, they have moved far too aggressively to the Left,” warned Alan Dershowitz, friend and personal lawyer of the late billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

“There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world,” AIPAC-funded congressman Ritchie Torres declared after Harris’ loss, echoing others.

“It turns out running on these extraordinarily niche issues like gender fluidity or defunding the police, or any number of things that people in places where I live get extremely excited about don’t actually matter — or frankly, feel profoundly out of touch — to ordinary Americans,” Bari Weiss told Fox News.

We shouldn’t be surprised to hear this: it’s the same excuse the Democratic establishment uses every time it fails, and the same thing conservative commentators offer up to shift political discourse rightward. And while it’s always been dubious, in this case it’s completely untenable.

As the New York Times itself put it, Harris had a “Wall Street–approved economic pitch,” one where “the advice of her allies and donors from Wall Street and Silicon Valley . . . was driving her messaging on the economy,” and was explicitly aimed at winning over business owners. Even the Biden White House was disturbed at her abandonment of populist, anti-corporate rhetoric. One of her top campaign surrogates was billionaire Mark Cuban, who repeatedly told audiences Harris was being disingenuous about one of her more populist policies, a potential tax on unrealized capital gains.

She did not run on a lefty platform — in fact, she went out of her way to publicly disavow numerous progressive stances she had cynically adopted five years earlier, adopt a Trump-lite immigration policy right down to vowing to build his border wall, and in both public appearances and millions of dollars worth of ad buys played up her experience as a prosecutor going after criminals. The $15 minimum wage, a major and popular left-wing measure urged by the Left and which Bernie Sanders had run on, was completely absent from Harris’s campaign. On foreign policy, she refused to break from Joe Biden’s Gaza policy, ran on a broad platform of interventionism and military supremacy, and attacked Trump for the few instances where he had favored diplomacy — so much so that Trump ended up cynically running to her left.

Harris’s centrism can be explained by the fact that her campaign was consciously geared toward winning over anti-Trump Republicans, particularly conservative women. This is why she campaigned with Liz Cheney more than any other ally, to no tangible benefit. As Axios put it, her campaign staked “its claim to symbols of conservative identity,” with Harris bragging about being a gun owner who would shoot intruders, framing the election as one of a prosecutor versus a felon, and wrapping herself in patriotism at the party convention, where she gave Republicans plum speaking slots (and, in a slap in the face to the Left, denied a Palestinian Democrat a speaking slot). When asked on The View the pivotal question of how her presidency would be different from Biden’s unpopular term, the only thing she would offer is that she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet, a promise that became a regular part of her stump speech in the closing weeks.

That Harris was rejecting the Left, disappointing progressives, and running a centrist campaign was widely understood, reported, and commented on — until November 6, when it became clear this had been a losing strategy.

In fact, the winning Biden 2020 campaign was well to the left of Harris’s failed effort. Its platform was full of ambitious progressive proposals that Harris dropped, and which were devised in consultation with the Bernie Sanders campaign. It was more noninterventionist on foreign policy and centered on ending “forever wars.” Biden actually brought up the $15 minimum wage — once, at a presidential debate, but still — and even mentioned a public health insurance option.

It was also far more “woke” than Harris’s effort. That year memorably featured Biden and other top Democrats donning kente cloth and, multiple times, taking a knee, a nod to former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest against police brutality that became a lightning rod for right-wing anger. The 2020 Democratic convention was all about paeans to diversity, whether in terms of race or sexual orientation, gave more air time to women than men, and “embrace[d] Black Lives Matter,” as the Washington Post put it, showing footage of the George Floyd protests, including a moment of silence for the murdered Minnesotan and other victims, and featuring a virtual conversation about criminal justice reform between Biden and activists and officials of color. Asked at one point how many genders there were, Biden replied “at least three,” a comment that had no impact on the electoral result.

This is not to say that Biden and the Democrats’ embrace of this kind of symbolism is what led to their victory that year. But it’s absurd to say Harris’s 2024 run was more “woke” than Biden’s.

3. Biden Ran a Populist Presidency That Gave the Left What It Wanted

The fact that Harris ran to the right of Biden has been used to feed another common talking point.

“I don’t understand how leftists expect us not to notice that Joe Biden ran a very left-populist administration on economics,” commented Matt Yglesias in the wake of the result.

“If there is one single lesson of the last election, and really, the last four years, it’s that DELIVERING MATERIAL BENEFITS TO WORKERS WILL NOT HELP YOU ELECTORALLY,” blared Will Stancil, an influential Twitter pundit best known for insisting the economy that just lost Democrats the election was doing well.

The takeaway is simple: if Biden delivered the goods and Democrats still lost, there’s no point in pursuing a populist, working-class-focused agenda next time.

But Biden did not deliver, which was a large part of the reason for Trump’s win. Biden’s legislative accomplishments weren’t nothing: the American Rescue Plan led to a stronger and quicker economic recovery than Barack Obama’s smaller stimulus had, and the infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and his administration’s broader industrial policy will reap economic benefits for Americans — just indirectly, and in many cases, after a sizable delay.

When it came to policies advocated by the Left that would have given Americans a direct financial shot in the arm, it was a different story. Biden rejected pleas from progressives (and congressional leadership) not to split his massive infrastructure bill in two for the sake of getting Republican sign-on, dooming the pro-worker centerpiece of his agenda. He came into office nickel-and-diming voters on the promise of $2,000 stimulus checks that had given him his barely existent Senate majority, then punted on raising the minimum wage to $15, both to howls from the Left. His public option promise vanished after December 2020. He personally backed ending extended unemployment benefits in the close of his first year, dismissing pleas from progressives and left-leaning think tanks.

When the Supreme Court struck down the eviction ban, he had to be pushed into trying to keep it alive, reportedly taken by surprise at the outcry over his inaction. He picked a flawed legal rationale for his student loan forgiveness that ensured it was struck down and delayed until after his first term, while dragging his feet on a fair housing rule he had promised in 2020 so he could recycle it for his 2024 run. As the cost-of-living crisis surged, Biden happily went along with the disappearance of the COVID-19 welfare state that saw economic hardship rise and never brought up his stalled agenda again, turning his focus instead to, as he put it, “wars around the world” and telling voters to endure higher prices for them.

He was absent in disasters and used the bully pulpit less than just about any president in modern history. As people repeatedly expressed their dissatisfaction with the economy, he ignored it, instead running a campaign about democracy and Trump’s character that Harris eventually inherited, and touting a booming stock market, the very thing he had criticized Trump for in 2020. The two major legislative standoffs he entered into in his final year didn’t concern bread and butter issues but were about passing harsh immigration restrictions and sending $100 billion more for wars abroad. Even his industrial policy was handed to a Wall Street marionette who used it to dole out favors to big business. That’s not even to get into the stubborn, deeply unpopular backing of Israel’s genocide that ultimately destroyed his presidency.

Biden was clearly not the leader or the type of president that the Left had wanted — nor did he deliver in a tangible way for working people’s economic security, or even seem to view it as a priority the longer he was in office.

4. Racism and Sexism Made the Result Inevitable

Donald Trump ran one of the nastiest, most scurrilous presidential campaigns in modern memory, one that rested on slandering and demonizing immigrants in lieu of real solutions to people’s problems. Some share of his supporters enjoy, and are even motivated by, his misogynistic, racist, and otherwise bigoted rhetoric.

It’s possible to acknowledge this is true, and to also understand that it was not the US electorate’s supposedly overwhelming racism and misogyny that determined why the election result didn’t go Harris’s and the Democrats’ way. Yet that’s not what we’re hearing from pundits.

“There was a lot of gender bias in this,” Al Sharpton said on MSNBC. “There was a lot of race bias in this, and I think that we thought a lot of voters were more progressive in those areas than they were.” Harris had a “flawlessly run” campaign, but it was not going to be “easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color” in the United States, Joy Reid said on the network. “There’s this sense that whiteness is under threat,” Princeton professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr told a different MSNBC panel.

It’s another set of claims that don’t square with the data. Just look at the results of a survey of male voters the Democratic-aligned polling firm Blueprint carried out during the election. Among other things, it found that young men — a group that swung sharply to Trump this election, and which we have been told has been hopelessly brainwashed by right-wing propaganda — support at vastly higher rates than older men a whole range of run-of-the-mill socially liberal, even “woke,” views.

By large margins, men aged eighteen to twenty-nine agree that “black and African-American people face systemic disadvantages in America,” that the country’s “systems of power are built on the marginalization of minorities,” that the history of US discrimination “is worse than most countries,” and that everyone is a little bit prejudiced even if they don’t admit it. By contrast, a majority of men older than fifty disagree with all of those statements. Younger men are also more likely to support workplace sexual-harassment trainings, Barack Obama’s election, same-sex marriage, and the #MeToo movement.

There are other things that are hard to square with the bigotry explanation. Trump’s historic gains with black, Latino, Asian, and Native American voters, for instance, who pointed to the economy to explain their vote. Or the voter ticket-splitting between Trump and young, left-wing women of color in Congress. Or the fact that Harris underperformed with women voters.

An electorate supposedly riven with bigotry also delivered major milestones in diversity, electing for the first time two black women to the Senate, as well as a host of other firsts: the first Korean American elected to the Senate (and the first Asian American senator from New Jersey, at the same time it shifted hard toward the GOP), the first woman to represent North Dakota in the House (a Republican), and Ohio’s first Latino senator (also a Republican), to name a few.

Michigan delivered Harris a loss but put a woman into the Senate and voted for a female-led state supreme court, including the first black woman elected to the body. Hundreds of historically diverse LGBTQ candidates won races in at least forty different states, including the first transgender member of the House, which will have a record amount of representation by LGBTQ members. Wisconsin reelected to the Senate Tammy Baldwin, a gay woman, at the same time that it voted down Harris for president.

In fact, if we’re just talking about people’s individual, personal views, the United States today is a far less prejudiced society than it was in decades past. Support for interracial marriage is at an all-time high of 94 percent, after languishing below 50 percent as recently as 1995, and has climbed in support since as recently as 2010. The percentage of Americans who say they’re willing to vote for a woman for president is at an all-time high of over 90 percent, compared to only 66 percent in the early 1970s. A majority of Americans think the country has not gone far enough on gender equality, and by the 2020s, satisfaction with women’s treatment in society was far lower than it had been at the start of the millennium, among both men and women.

For all the anti-trans ads Republicans ran this cycle, Americans’ attitudes toward gays and lesbians has completely transformed over the past four decades, even if their acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people lag behind. Yet even here, a supermajority of Americans approve of these groups being able to live as they wish, and a large plurality of 50 percent believe being transgender is real — instead, where Americans are divided is over the more specific questions about trans athletes competing in sports and trans kids being given gender-affirming care. At the same time, all the data suggests the GOP’s avalanche of anti-trans ads didn’t impact many voters’ decisions.

The conundrum posed by Trump’s win, then, is a much more complex one than a rabidly bigoted electorate: How is it that a historically enlightened, tolerant US society produced Trump and what he stands for? And what does it say about his opposition?

A Lucrative Failure

There is a common thread connecting these false arguments. Whether those making them know it or not, these talking points happen to support a premeditated push by parts of the Democratic establishment to use the election result to steer the party rightward.

Accepting them will mean misunderstanding why the Democratic Party lost, all the wrong lessons being learned from Trump’s win, and history repeating in four or even eight years time. That would likely be just fine for the consultants, influencers, and other profit-seeking moochers who just made a bonanza off this billion-dollar failure. It’s unlikely to go down quite as well with ordinary Democratic voters.