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FOUR MYTHS ABOUT KAMALA HARRIS’S LOSS  
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Branko Marcetic
November 14, 2024
Jacobin
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_ 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

 

n 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
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against
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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
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that
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“America, after its long journey through the 2010s and ’20s, is
becoming more conservative again,” and that
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“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
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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
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toward the GOP, while also casting
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a number of conservative ballot-measure votes. (Though voters there
also repealed
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a ban on marriage equality). But the picture looks very different
outside California. Across the country, often in red states, voters
passed
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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
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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
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campaign for a Nebraska Senate seat — the kind the Left has been
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urging
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red states — not only outran Harris but outperformed the Republican
incumbent’s previous
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Democratic challengers
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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
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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
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“covered the lion’s share of Trump’s margin,” and nearly
doubled
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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
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As Ocasio-Cortez’s own voters told her directly
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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.

AOC asked her followers who split their ballots either for Trump/her
or Trump/downballot Dem to explain why and posted the replies:
pic.twitter.com/LuTcD29szt [[link removed]]

— aaron from queens 🇵🇸 (@aaronnarraph) November 11, 2024
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As one twenty-year-old college student who supports Trump told
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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
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refrain
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from
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many [[link removed]] Trump supporters
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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
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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
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Harris’ loss, echoing others
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“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
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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
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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
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at winning over business owners. Even the Biden White House was
disturbed
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at her abandonment of populist, anti-corporate rhetoric. One of her
top campaign surrogates was billionaire Mark Cuban, who repeatedly
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audiences Harris was being disingenuous about one of her more populist
policies, a potential tax on unrealized capital gains.

.@mcuban [[link removed]] said this
weekend that @VP [[link removed]] would
not tax unrealized capital gains, and if she does, he would campaign
against her. "I can pick out probably 10 things where you would say,
yeah I'd campaign against her. So what do you like?" about Harris,
asks @JoeSquawk [[link removed]]:
pic.twitter.com/VCv5p2pvcd [[link removed]]

— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) October 21, 2024
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She did not run on a lefty platform — in fact, she went out of her
way to publicly disavow
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numerous progressive stances she had cynically adopted five years
earlier, adopt
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a Trump-lite immigration policy right down to vowing
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to build his border wall, and in both public appearances and millions
of dollars
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worth of ad buys played up
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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
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from Harris’s campaign. On foreign policy, she refused
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break from Joe Biden’s Gaza policy, ran on a broad platform of
interventionism
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and military supremacy
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and attacked
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Trump for the few instances where he had favored diplomacy — so much
so that Trump ended up cynically running to her left
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Harris’s centrism can be explained by the fact that her campaign was
consciously
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geared
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toward winning over anti-Trump Republicans, particularly conservative
women
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This is why she campaigned with Liz Cheney more than
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any other ally, to no tangible benefit
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As _Axios_ put it
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her campaign staked “its claim to symbols of conservative
identity,” with Harris bragging about being a gun owner who would
shoot intruders, framing
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the election as one of a prosecutor
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versus a felon, and wrapping
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herself in patriotism at the party convention, where she gave
Republicans [[link removed]] plum
speaking slots (and, in a slap in the face to the Left, denied
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a Palestinian Democrat a speaking slot). When asked on _The View_ the
pivotal
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question of how her presidency would be different from Biden’s
unpopular term, the only thing she would offer
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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.

Kamala Harris on “The View”: “I plan on having a Republican in
my cabinet. You ask me what's the biggest difference between Joe Biden
and me, that would be one of the differences.“
pic.twitter.com/dCM8A5gVbe [[link removed]]

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) October 8, 2024
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That Harris was rejecting
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the Left, disappointing
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progressives
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and running
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a centrist
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campaign
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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
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was full of ambitious progressive proposals that Harris dropped, and
which were devised
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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
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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
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and, multiple
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times
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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
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or sexual orientation
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gave more air time to women
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than men, and “embrace[d] Black Lives Matter,” as the _Washington
Post_ put it
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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
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“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 [[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] Will Stancil, an
influential Twitter pundit best known for insisting
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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
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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
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(and congressional leadership
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not to split his massive infrastructure bill in two for the sake of
getting Republican sign-on, dooming
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the pro-worker centerpiece of his agenda. He came into office
nickel-and-diming
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voters on the promise of $2,000 stimulus checks that had given him his
barely existent Senate majority, then punted
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raising the minimum wage to $15, both to howls from the Left. His
public option promise vanished
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after December 2020. He personally backed ending extended unemployment
benefits in the close of his first year, dismissing
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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
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taken by surprise at the outcry over his inaction. He picked
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a flawed legal rationale for his student loan forgiveness that ensured
it was struck down and delayed
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until after his first term, while dragging his feet
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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
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of the COVID-19 welfare state that saw economic hardship rise and
never brought up
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his stalled agenda again
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focus instead to, as he put it
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“wars around the world” and telling
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voters to endure higher prices for them.

He was absent
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in disasters and used
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the bully pulpit less
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than just about any president in modern history. As people repeatedly
expressed their dissatisfaction with the economy, he ignored it,
instead running
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a campaign about democracy and Trump’s character that Harris
eventually inherited, and touting
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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
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favors to big business. That’s not even to get into the stubborn,
deeply unpopular backing of Israel’s genocide
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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
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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
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on the network. “There’s this sense that whiteness is under
threat,” Princeton professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr told
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MSNBC panel.

Joy Reid says Kamala Harris ran a "flawless" campaign.

"Queen Latifah never endorses anyone, and she came out and endorsed
her. She had every prominent celebrity voice. She had the Swifties.
She had the BeyHive. You could not have run a better campaign."
pic.twitter.com/MvehepdPpd [[link removed]]

— America 2100 (@America_2100) November 9, 2024
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It’s another set of claims that don’t square with the data. Just
look at the results of a survey
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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 [[link removed]]
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
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and Native American
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voters, for instance, who pointed to
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the economy to explain
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their vote. Or the voter ticket-splitting between Trump and young,
left-wing women of color in Congress. Or the fact that Harris
underperformed
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with women voters.

An electorate supposedly riven with bigotry also delivered major
milestones
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in diversity
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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
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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
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state supreme court, including the first black woman
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elected to the body. Hundreds of historically diverse LGBTQ candidates
won races
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in at least forty different states, including the first transgender
member of the House, which will have a record amount
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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
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of 94 percent, after languishing below 50 percent as recently as 1995,
and has climbed in support since as recently as 2010
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The percentage of Americans who say they’re willing to vote for a
woman for president is at an all-time high
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of over 90 percent, compared to only 66 percent in the early 1970s. A
majority of Americans think
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the country has not gone far _enough_ on gender equality, and by the
2020s, satisfaction with women’s treatment in society was far lower
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than it had been at the start of the millennium, among both men and
women.

For all the anti-trans ads
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Republicans ran this cycle, Americans’ attitudes toward gays and
lesbians has completely transformed
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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
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believe being transgender is real — instead, where Americans are
divided
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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
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the GOP’s avalanche of anti-trans ads didn’t impact
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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
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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
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off this billion-dollar failure. It’s unlikely to go down quite as
well with ordinary Democratic voters.

===

Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of
Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

* Democratic Party; Donald Trump; Kamala Harris; 2024 Election
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