his year’s presidential election hinged on a few hundred thousand voters across a handful of key swing states, and no one can claim to have known the outcome in advance. Yet the tectonic shift of working-class voters away from Democrats was all too predictable. In fact, the Harris campaign seemed deliberately designed to accelerate trends in working-class dealignment.
The vice president’s bid was premised on the risky bet that catering to moderate, college-educated voters would win more support than it would lose in working-class defections. That gamble backfired massively. Instead of expanding the Democratic coalition to bring in a larger share of the working-class vote in critical swing states where working-class voters make up a large majority of the electorate, Kamala Harris saw her only gains among college-educated white voters, and for the first time, Democrats received a higher share of votes from high- compared to low-income Americans.
Battle lines have already been drawn between factions of the Democratic coalition to explain Harris’s loss. On the one hand, some have admonished Democrats for failing to connect with the real economic anxieties and sense of cultural alienation from the Democratic Party felt by many working-class voters. This was forcefully expressed by Bernie Sanders, who railed that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
Similar critiques were proffered by Thomas Frank, Senator Chris Murphy, and even New York Times columnist David Brooks, who conceded that
I’m a moderate who really did not like the policies that Bernie Sanders proposes. And yet . . . it could be that in order to win working-class votes in an era of high distrust, the Democrats have to do a lot of things that Bernie Sanders said they should do.
On the other side, a consensus among mainstream Democrats seems to be emerging that Harris ran the most effective campaign possible, but that obstacles out of her control — such as sexism and racism — were ultimately too great to overcome. Democratic strategist David Axelrod, for instance, argued “there is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country. Anybody who thinks that that did not in any way impact on the outcome of this race is wrong.” For his part, progressive journalist Aaron Rupar chalked up Trump’s victory to “the desire to dominate and inflict cruelty on outgroups.” Since Harris talked very little about her identity as a black woman on the campaign trail, and went out of her way to avoid contentious cultural issues, the argument goes, there is simply nothing more she could have done to improve her odds with working-class voters alienated by the excesses of progressive “woke” branding and suspicious of a black, female candidate. Jon Stewart, for instance, argued that, far from doing “the woke thing,” Democrats in fact “acted like Republicans for the last four months.”
And, many Harris apologists would ask, is it fair to say she was not campaigning as an economic populist? After all, an analysis of Harris’s media spending by Politico found that “the economy has been by far the largest theme in the Harris campaign’s paid media campaign.” Further, as the Washington Post’s Dan Balz has noted, Harris made up significant ground with voters on the economy relative to Trump after rolling out her economic policy agenda in early September. According to reporter Jeff Stein, Harris’s agenda was a “nod to the party’s populist mood . . . [calling] for a ban on price-gouging in the food and grocery sectors, a prohibition on corporate landlords using rent-setting algorithms and a $25,000 federal subsidy for first-time home buyers.” Nor is it difficult to find excellent ads made by or on behalf of the campaign that focused on corporate greed or featured relatable testimonials from working-class voters about Donald Trump being a spoiled rich kid who wants to hurt working people.
So who’s right here? Was Harris a populist or not? To determine whether Harris’s critics have a point or are blowing things out of proportion, we took a look at everything Harris actually said on the campaign trail, how it stacked up with other recent presidential candidates, and how it changed over time.
What Did the Harris Campaign Actually Focus On?
Jacobin looked at hundreds of speeches, rallies, press gaggles, and interview transcripts to trace Harris’s messaging over the course of the campaign and the relative emphasis she placed on a variety of issues and policies. We looked at how frequently Harris used certain phrases in campaign messaging as a proxy for her emphasis on various issue areas or policy sets. Our analysis reveals that the Harris campaign pivoted away from the economy starting around mid-September, de-emphasizing policies that she had previously advocated and moving away from an adversarial stance toward elites. This parallels investigative reporting, which finds that the last weeks of the campaign were increasingly directed by the very same corporate interests that she abstained from criticizing.
Over the course of the whole campaign, Harris spoke less about economic issues and progressive economic policy priorities than Joe Biden had in 2020, and far less than Sanders had in the Democratic primaries that year. In this cycle, Trump addressed perhaps the most important issue for voters — prices and the cost of living — more than twice as often as Harris.
But at the outset of the campaign — during and immediately after the Democratic National Convention (DNC) — Harris appeared to be heading in the right direction. Progressive Democrats were pushing Harris to emphasize a bold economic vision, and as the campaign began to take shape, Harris chose her “issues”: cracking down on price gouging, an expanded child tax credit, and subsidies for homebuyers and small business owners. In August, Harris even hinted at support for price controls, a wealth tax, and higher taxes on corporations and capital gains. In these early weeks, Harris was able to give something to everyone, without committing herself to concrete policies.
But after the initial euphoria surrounding the DNC had faded by mid-September, the national Democratic Party took a back seat to the group of advisors who had gathered around Harris’s campaign. The looming fear of a second Trump presidency prompted party members to get in line and focus on their roles as surrogates and in get-out-the-vote efforts — keeping any criticisms of the campaign to themselves and giving Harris’s team more freedom to act independently. According to reports from the New York Times and Sludge, this team was built around a core group of former Uber executives and corporate PR managers.
Typical left-wing economic agenda items like “living wage,” “affordable housing,” “paid family leave,” or “union jobs” dropped out of Harris’s vocabulary in the weeks after Labor Day. Tracking the use of more neutral terms relating to the economy — like “wages,” “jobs,” and “workers” — we see a trend line that slopes upward into early September before declining over the following weeks. By October, Harris was spending less of her time campaigning with Shawn Fain and Bernie Sanders than she was with Republican Liz Cheney and billionaire Mark Cuban, unlikely candidates to push any kind of progressive economic message, let alone a populist one. Cuban was gleeful enough to declare that the “progressive principles . . . of the Democratic Party . . . are gone. It’s Kamala Harris’s party now.”
This pivot wasn’t merely rhetorical: donors, consultants, and business-connected campaign staff pushed Harris to “clarify” or de-emphasize previous statements indicating support for a slate of popular policies on price controls; capital gains, corporate, and wealth taxes; and a host of other issues. Harris’s vague suggestions that she would engage in price controls to bring down inflation were watered down into a policy that already exists in most states that prevents businesses from profiteering on natural disasters. Her gestures toward taxing the wealthy became a capital gains tax proposal of 28 percent, far lower than the Biden administration’s proposed 40 percent; and she never took a position on Biden’s proposal to tax unrealized capital gains. And as time went on, the candidate spoke less and less frequently about her watered-down price-gouging proposal or her commitment to taxing the rich.
Harris even de-emphasized supposedly central elements of her platform like the child tax credit and small business deduction. The only centerpiece economic policy that Harris continued to emphasize down the stretch was her plan to subsidize first-time homebuyers.
Some of Harris’s defenders point to the campaign’s paid media and advertising strategy as evidence that she was actually pushing a disciplined, economics-focused campaign message. This side of the campaign was run primarily by Harris’s super PAC, Future Forward, which tested “thousands of messages, social media posts and ads in the 2024 race, ranking them in order of effectiveness.” The “wonkish Obama campaign veterans” running Future Forward found that the top-performing messages combined a focus on pocketbook issues with a critique of the economic elites that rigged the system against ordinary people.
Though the Future Forward folks were hardly left-wing radicals, by mid-October even they were frustrated with the campaign’s messaging. In a tellingly exasperated internal memo, the group complained that the campaign was not spending enough money on their top performing ads. A spot that acknowledged that the “cost of rent, groceries, and utilities is too high” and promised to “crack down on landlords” and “go after price gougers” was the “most effective” of the ads Future Forward tested but received barely any backing from the Harris team. Perhaps criticism of landlords and price gougers proved uncomfortable for Harris’s big-money backers and top advisors, like her brother-in-law Tony West or former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, who have occupied roles as Uber’s senior vice president of policy and chief legal counsel, respectively.
And consistent with the Harris campaign’s cozy relationship to many of the billionaires and plutocrats insurgent Democrats like Bernie Sanders have railed against for years, the vice president also increasingly shied away from populist jabs at economic elites and establishment forces as the campaign wore on.
If Harris’s rhetoric wasn’t focused on the economy, a specific economic policy platform, or an anti-elite message, what was she talking about in the campaign’s final weeks? As the race drew to a close, Harris highlighted her stance on abortion and her rightward-moving immigration policy. But the campaign’s closing message centered more than anything on one of the few issues that posed no threat to her donor base: the defense of democracy and the danger Trump posed to it.
Would Economic Populism Have Mattered Anyway?
Sadly, there is little evidence that Harris’s rhetorical pivot to defending democracy was wise from an electoral perspective — however much it may have pleased her relieved corporate advisors. Indeed, a preelection poll of Pennsylvania voters conducted by the Center for Working-Class Politics and Jacobin found that voters were much more favorable toward Harris when they were shown hypothetical sound bites where she focused on economic populism compared to messaging that centered Trump as a threat to democracy.
By contrast, the poll found that the most effective messaging was the same economic populist appeal that Future Forward unsuccessfully urged the campaign to prioritize in October. The fact that the Harris team decided to take the exact opposite approach in the homestretch of the campaign — ramping down its focus on economic elites and leaning into Trump as a threat to democracy — suggests that they failed to take advantage of a potentially critical tool for stopping a second Trump presidency.
“Fine,” Harris’s defenders might concede, “the candidate could have talked more about economic populism and spent less time harping on Trump as a threat to democracy, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway — the headwinds were just too strong.” Summarizing his postelection interviews with Harris campaign staff, Dan Balz writes that “senior officials with Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign say her defeat stemmed primarily from dissatisfaction among voters about the overall direction of the country and discontent over inflation and the economy. . . . In the end, Harris was unsuccessful in overcoming the kind of public sentiment that has knocked incumbent parties out of power elsewhere in the world.”
We don’t doubt that the Harris campaign was seriously constrained by these and other factors — including her ties to an unpopular incumbent. But it’s also true that all Democratic candidates in tight races were tainted by voters’ dissatisfaction with the status quo, yet many of them substantially outperformed Harris, especially those like Gabe Vasquez (New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District) and Marcy Kaptur (Ohio’s 9th Congressional District) who doubled down on economic populism during the campaign.
Ultimately, Harris was a candidate appointed without a primary, whose main pitch to voters was that unless they were comfortable with saying goodbye to democracy, they had no choice but to vote for her. She cast herself as a defender of — rather than an antagonist to — the establishment and status quo. Her policy platform felt like a throwback to Clintonism; she gestured toward “opportunity,” but without a robust policy platform or set of ideological commitments, she couldn’t articulate to voters what she would do for them, here and now. If the Harris campaign really was the avatar of “democracy,” it’s not surprising that voters rejected it at the ballot box.
We need a real alternative if we’re ever going to stop right-wing populism. We don’t know if Bernie would’ve won in 2016 and 2020, but after 2024 it seems increasingly likely that only someone like him can break the MAGA spell.
Milan Loewer is a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics and lives in New York City.
Jared Abbott is a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics and a contributor to Jacobin and Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.
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