After the election, the air was quiet and somber here in Washington, D.C. But as I talked to my coworkers and professors who have lived in this city for years, it became clear that it wasn’t the same quiet as 2016, when folks were shocked at Donald Trump’s victory.
Vice President Kamala Harris lost in a blowout. She lost every one of the seven swing states, and for the first time, ceded former President Donald Trump the popular vote by nearly five million. But this outcome was not inevitable. Harris lost because she abandoned the Democratic Party’s base, and overestimated the importance of moderate voters. The blame for this election lies squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic National Committee and Harris’s campaign.
A quick analysis of turnout numbers makes this evident rather quickly. Trump didn’t radically increase the number of votes he got in 2020: that year, Trump won about 74 million votes, and this year, he won about the same number. The Democratic turnout shows the clear problem.
Americans did not become more conservative. It’s simply that millions of Democrats decided to stay home. At the time of publication, a small percentage of votes from California and Arizona are yet to be counted, but it looks as if Harris lost about ten million votes from Biden’s 2020 coalition. Exit polling reported on by Reuters showed that, for the first time in recent history, more Independent and Republican voters showed up to vote than Democrats. While Trump made gains in rural areas, voter turnout in blue counties and cities dropped. This pattern repeats from New York to Texas and in cities like Philadelphia and Detroit.
Why didn’t reliable Democratic voters turn out this year? There are a number of reasons, but the problem can largely be reduced to the Democratic Party neglecting its base. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explained the party’s prioritization of former Republicans. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” he said at a Washington Post forum in 2016.
With this perspective in mind, the odd choices of the Harris campaign start to make sense. Why did Harris run on building Trump’s border wall and cracking down on vulnerable immigrants? Why did Harris boast about being a gun owner just days after a Georgia school shooting reignited nationwide calls for gun reform? Because, as NPR reports , she wanted to win over moderate Republicans.
Well, she didn’t. According to exit polls, Harris won the exact same percentage of Republicans as Biden did in 2020. Everything she promised moderates, including appointing a Republican to her cabinet, building a “lethal” military and protecting cryptocurrency assets failed to make a positive difference. Turns out the “secret Harris voter” we heard so much about in the days leading up to the election is much more rare than expected.
Instead of giving “permission” for Republicans to vote blue, the only thing the Harris team did in courting the center was give a reason for Democrats to abandon the top of the ticket. Down-ballot Democrats, such as Senators and House members, outperformed the presidential hopeful, which is evidence to the fact that it wasn’t Democrats across the board that voters rejected but the Biden administration.
Harris’s refusal to distance herself from the status quo at a time when polls show most Americans desperately want change hurt her badly. Her disastrous answer on The View, where she said there’s “not a thing that comes to mind” that she would have done differently from Biden, was immediately seized upon by the Trump campaign.
Harris inherited President Joe Biden’s low approval of the economy. Abandoning progressive messaging cost her the voters Bernie Sanders performed best among in the 2019 primaries: Latinos, young men, and the working class. Her refusal to condition arms to Israel despite multiple polls showing that it would help her win over desperately needed voters in swing states was not just a moral failing, but a strategic one as well.
We’re already seeing Democrats try to assign blame for this loss, but the responsibility is pretty obvious. I believe that Trump’s second term will be a disaster, and it is because of the Democratic Party’s arrogance that it is coming.
Editor-in-Chief: Jordan Premmer, Chief Copy Editor: Sophia McCrackin, Managing Editor: Jordan DelFiugo, Opinion Editor: Dakota Duran, Scene Editor: Elina Graham
