Trump Has Made a Stunning Political Comeback. Where Did Harris Go Wrong?

Her failure to disassociate herself from Biden's policies became the proverbial albatross around her neck.

Palm Beach: Supporters of Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump hold banners as they take part in Trumps Election Night Watch Party, at Palm Beach, Florida.

(Photo: PTI)

Donald Trump has managed to make a stunning political comeback, winning the presidency for a second time after losing to Joe Biden in 2020. Not since President Grover Cleveland, who was elected after the American Civil War, has any president accomplished this feat.

A host of errors on the part of the Democrats in general, and the Harris campaign in particular, helped propel him back into office. 

At the outset, President Biden, who had promised to serve as a bridge between generations, overstayed his welcome. Only after his disastrous debate performance in July did he reluctantly bow out of the presidential race.

That left the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, with inadequate time to gear up for a vigorous campaign against Trump. This alone, put her at a significant disadvantage. 

Even as she started her campaign, she made several unforced errors. The most important of these was her failure to distance herself from any of the policies of the Biden administration.

With inflation remaining stubbornly high during the initial part of her campaign, she dwelt on the putative price gouging of corporations for the persistence of the problem. However, at no point did she suggest that any of the Biden administration’s policies had contributed to the high prices of items ranging from groceries to petrol. Therefore, her failure to disassociate herself from the policies of the Biden administration became the proverbial albatross around her neck.

She also, to some degree, took Black and Hispanic men for granted. For decades, both these two demographics had been staunch supporters of the Democratic Party. Consequently, the party, to some degree, had assumed that their votes were all but in the bag. 

Harris, with the assistance of former President Barack Obama, had tried to reach out to Black men. Unfortunately, Obama’s speech had come across as hectoring. Consequently, instead of wooing them back to the party, it may well have backfired.

No similar effort had been made to reach out to Hispanic men. Some within the Hispanic male community are somewhat politically conservative, especially on social issues such as transgender rights and abortion. The campaign, however, made no effort to assuage these concerns.

Instead, in the thrall of the left wing of the Democratic Party, it failed to downplay these matters. Trump, to his credit, managed to wean away a segment of this group despite his inflammatory statements about Hispanic illegal immigration into the United States throughout much of the campaign.

It is also possible that Harris made a mistake in her choice of a running mate. She turned to the former governor of Minnesota, Timothy Walz, a liberal Midwesterner, in the hope that she would be able to attract much of the white, male middle-class vote.

This, probably, was not a complete miscalculation. Walz’s solid record as a governor, his folksy manner, and his own middle-class background should have appealed to a segment of the electorate.

However, it may have made more sense, as many political pundits had argued, to have chosen another popular governor of a swing state, Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro may have been able to deliver his home state which has a significant number of electoral college votes.

It is also evident that Harris, owing to her close association with the Biden administration’s policies toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, lost a crucial segment of the Arab American vote, especially in the pivotal state of Michigan.

For example, in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, the home of a very substantial Arab American community, according to reporting in the Detroit Free Press, Jill Stein, a third-party candidate, managed to siphon off as much as 18 percent of the vote. In effect, Stein, who had no hope of making any dent in the national political scene, acted as a spoiler for Harris.

Finally, Harris failed to shake off the allegation by the Trump campaign that she had served as the immigration “czar” during Biden's tenure, even as they made a series of false claims about a tide of illegal immigrants entering the United States.

She did try to highlight that Trump had torpedoed a bipartisan immigration bill. Nevertheless, she failed to prevent the Trump campaign from unfairly tarring and feathering her with accusations of being central to a failed border control policy.

A number of these lapses on the part of the Harris campaign were contingent events. However, the Democratic Party may also be facing some potentially structural and seismic shifts in American politics.

Traditional Democratic strongholds, such as parts of the Black and Hispanic communities, may no longer be as reliable as they were in the past. Given the drubbing that the Democratic Party has faced in this presidential election, it may have to reexamine its sources of support and tweak its policies to ensure that it can secure its future in American politics.

(Sumit Ganguly is a Senior Fellow and directs the Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)