Why Kamala lost

“Sounds like misogyny.”

That was the gist of some responses I got to my pre-election claim — carefully drafted, by the way — that the vice president was “mostly incompetent.”¹

And honestly, it’s been deeply hurtful to hear this from women I love.

I’m not a misogynist. I love women. I love all people. Even when they’re unkind.

Am I, at the very least, sexist? My answer might not be what you expect: of course I am, to some extent. It’s impossible to grow up as a boy in America — and as I did until age 9, India — without getting at least some gender prejudice programmed into you. This is precisely how unconscious bias works: you’re not always aware of it.

To minimize the possibility of implicit bias, I’ve kept my critique of the vice president very explicit, specific, and, in fact, singular: in focus group², after focus group³, after focus group⁴, undecided voters in the swing states told us that they simply didn’t know enough about her positions to cast a ballot in her favor. They were exhausted by Trump, and find him morally distasteful, but they still had no idea who Harris is.

For example, here’s one discussion between two then-undecided swing state voters (emphasis mine):

“With Harris, she just to date hasn’t given me a reason to vote for her. Every time she gets asked a question, it gets right to the stump speech or goes off on a tangent or doesn’t answer the question directly. So while I find Trump enraging, I find that she’s almost insulting my intelligence, thinking that I’m not gonna see through that.” — Jaimie, then-undecided male Nevada voter, Sept. 16, 2024.

“I can’t agree more with you. I feel insulted by her in some ways. I feel like this is her election to lose because I do think there are a lot of people who are over Trump and frustrated, and his just, as you said, he’s just dividing the country. But, at the same time, I feel like, especially at the debate, I feel like Kamala went and did the same thing that he’s been doing, and it is insulting, I think, to voters who don’t know what to do, and she’s not saying or making us feel any more confident in her. And it’s very frustrating.” — Kim, then-undecided female Pennsylvania voter, Sept. 16, 2024.

I believe that these voters, and hundreds of thousands like them, were looking for reasons to move past Trump and gave the VP a real chance. But Harris came across like a cipher⁵, and they stuck with the devil they know rather than the one they do not.

Unlike partisans, undecided/persuadable voters want to vote for someone, not just against.

I find Harris’s candidacy lacked competence because, as many independent/swing voters will tell you, she did not answer their most basic question:

Why are you running for president?⁶

“I’m not Donald Trump and I’m not Joe Biden” is not an answer.⁷

And it’s political malpractice not to give voters more to go on that that — especially when Harris changed her position on several major policy issues of the last 5 years, without explanation.⁸

As a consequence of her silence, voters didn’t know who she was. So Trump had carte blanche to fill in the details with her 2019 wokeness.⁹ That was Harris’s colossal mistake — strategic ambiguity that proved unstrategic.

Finally, Harris effectively ended her campaign around noon, Tuesday, October 8th, on the The View. When asked what she would do differently than a president with an approval rating of 38% her answer was: “there is not a thing that comes to mind.”¹⁰

I knew by Labor Day that Trump was going to win the Electoral College. After I watched Kamala on The View, I began to wonder if he might even win the popular vote.

Yes, Harris was hurt by sexism and racism. No, she wouldn't have won if she were a white man.

Why Kamala lost requires one word to explain, and it’s not sexist or racist to use it:

incompetence.

—

I know Democratic women are hurting right now. I hear you. And I know you may not agree with what I’m about to say, but I gotta say it: this election was NOT a rebuke of women or abortion rights. It was a rebuke of one woman: Kamala Harris.¹¹ A better Democratic female candidate would have won.

For example, here are two excellent female candidates who, as I predicted alongside Trump’s victory, got elected United States senators in swing states Trump won. I take great solace as a pro-choice feminist in that:

Candidate quality matters.

And yes, if you’re a woman or a minority running for president of the United States, being a quality candidate matters even more.

This time Democrats just didn’t have one.