Kamala Harris was a Good Candidate...But Not the Right One For 2024

What this means for 2028

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

Editor’s note: This will be the first of a series of posts that will continue through the rest of the calendar year on what went wrong for Democrats, how to fix it, what the new state of play is in Trump’s America, etc. My analysis will probably be slower than most takes you’ll get, for the simple reason that right now people are spitballing based on incomplete and often conflicting data. The best example is people claiming something nefarious happened because Kamala Harris got so many fewer votes than Joe Biden…which actually stems from millions of votes not being counted yet.

If you want a preview of what those columns might look like: two will probably be titled: “Is it 1968 or 2004 for Democrats” and “Democrats Need to Move Left on Economics and Right on Culture.” There is also a column I want to write from a subscriber question on the lure of authoritarianism for a lot of Americans. But I want to make sure I have a better picture of what actually happened before drawing sweeping conclusions.

One other note: during the last months of the campaign, I tried to keep my columns largely free and unpaywalled. I thought it was important for my work to be accessible regardless of one’s means. Now that the election has passed, however, I will probably start paywalling a good chunk of my content again. I recognize people are asked to pay for lots of subscriptions these days, and I try to keep my content highly affordable (only $36 per year), but without paid subscriptions, it’s hard for me to continue producing content. I greatly appreciate your support and I’m always pondering ways to give subscribers more content.

Now onto our regularly scheduled program:

Many people on the right will tell you that Kamala Harris was a horrendous candidate — vapid, incapable of giving good answers in interviews, prone to “word salads,” etc. They’re wrong, and unfair in their judgment. Harris was much improved since her 2019 primary campaign, a better speaker, more charismatic, more disciplined and on message. She inspired millions of Americans to work for her candidacy and gave a lot of them something to vote for, not just something to vote against.

That’s especially true when we consider that she didn’t have the usual two plus years of debates, campaign events, and time to formulate an agenda, road test messages, and figure out the best way to connect with voters.

Yet, a post on X caught my attention on Friday from an anonymous anti-Trump centrist who never "felt heard or represented by Kamala Harris.” This person’s critique begged Democrats to listen to Americans who “do not trust the Machine.” He/she observed “Young, educated professionals are far to the left of the average American,” yet institutions treat their views “as natural and everyone else as aberrant.”

Now some of this critique is about the intolerance of the left, and the tendency to unhelpfully brand people who disagree with well intentioned, but debatable (and sometimes misguided) ideas. That creates a chilling effect and comes off as condescending. It’s clearly a problem, and one that Democrats need to rectify. As CNN reported on Sunday, in a focus group in Western Pennsylvania in September of Trump 2016-Biden 2020 voters, when asked to pick one word to describe the two candidates, one woman chose “crazy” for Trump and “preachy” for Harris. When asked to pick between the two, she said crazy, “Because ‘crazy’ doesn’t look down on me,” whereas preachy did.

I’ll delve more into this topic down the line, but for now I want to focus on another element of the critique.

The Twitter poster wrote about how when asked how she’d be different than Joe Biden, Harris responded “I'm not him, and I'm not Trump.” Then when asked about how she had abandoned many of her positions from the 2019 Democratic primary, she said “Well, it's not 2019 anymore, is it?”

It struck me that contained within this critique and the frustration animating the description of Harris’s answers is one of the keys to Donald Trump’s success: to many Americans, he’s real. There is some perverse irony involved, given Trump’s background in reality television and his showmanship. A large measure of what comes out of his mouth is bullshit. But Trump says so many bonkers things, so many things that no political consultant or staffer would advise him to say, so many things far afield from typical political topics, that to a lot of Americans he feels authentic. In one late campaign speech, he took a veiled shot at how his aides privately tried to manage him, saying, “I’m allowed to do that, aren’t I, Susan Wiles?”’

Americans are tired of buttoned down, on message candidates who speak in platitudes and focused group messages, stick relentlessly to the topic at hand, never admit to mistakes, and really come from the political consultant handbook for ideal candidates. Ninety percent of politicians are polite, vanilla, anodyne, and inoffensive. Their goal is to say nothing that might create a news cycle in a bad way or offend a potential constituency.

Harris epitomized this style, whereas Trump is the antithesis of it. She was on message, she laid out proposals, she used hopeful rhetoric, and her speeches were good, crisp, and uplifting. But as the poster on Twitter observed, she never really gave voters insight into her decision making. Her answers on Biden and her past positions seemed to sidestep questions with rhetoric, rather than being honest and real with voters.

In the past, that would’ve drawn a positive contrast between the candidates — the radical, cruel, rambling, at times incoherent, gaffe machine in Trump vs. the capable, on message, disciplined Harris. I remember reading, I believe in Peter Baker’s book on George W. Bush’s presidency, about how Bush was much more personable and real in private, because he understood that a president’s every utterance can make markets move, cause wars, etc.

And it’s true — and one reason why, in my opinion, Trump is such a dangerous president. But he savvily grasped that voters are tired of that measured, careful speaking style. Now, some of this is sophistry/the art of politics. Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan were usually on message, but they were personable enough and good enough on their feet that they didn’t sound that way. Instead, people thought “gee, I’d like to have a beer with that guy.” The folksy Bush, at times, had the same charm.

But politicians ranging from Michael Dukakis to Al Gore to Barack Obama to Mitt Romney to Mitch McConnell were and are ruthlessly on script. Maybe the most famous episode in which that hurt a politician was Dukakis giving a wonky policy based answer on the death penalty when CNN’s Bernard Shaw asked him in a 1988 presidential debate whether he’d support the death penalty if someone raped and murdered his wife. Americans expected to hear emotion. They wanted Dukakis to say, “damn right I would. I’d shoot the bastard myself.” Instead they got a technocratic policy answer, and said, “my God, “what’s wrong with this guy?”

But in 2024 that style is even more problematic. Americans crave authenticity (or in the case of Trump faux authenticity).

There is a lesson in this for Democrats. No, Harris wasn’t a bad candidate. But heading toward 2028, they need to find a candidate who comes off as a real person to average Americans — someone who can talk about day-to-day life, who can connect with people, and who sounds like one of them. That person should be someone who can admit mistakes and spin such admissions into a positive, truth-telling reputation.

That will be key to minimizing the amount of time Democrats spend in the wilderness. The more their next nominee sounds like he came from the political consultant’s lab, the more likely they are to lose.