The pundits, psephologists and political strategists, accompanied by any number of media outlets, were all emphatic: the 2024 US Presidential elections were set to be the tightest on record. According to The Global and Mail, polls showed ‘a lockstep march between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’, thereby giving ‘new meaning to ‘nail-biter.’
The Virginian Daily Press remarked that polls on the last day of the campaign ‘showed one of the closest presidential elections in the history of American politics’ even going as far as to say that there had ‘never been a race where the final polls showed such a close contest.’ The good people of the Bipartisan Policy Center, in also calling the contest a ‘nailbiter’, warned that election results would not be conclusive on the day itself.
Within a matter of hours, commentators and election watchers were seeing the ghost of Hillary Clinton’s past make a reappearance. There was nail biting, but only from those on networks baffled that Trump was galloping away in counties across the battleground states. Within twenty-four hours, it was clear that Trump had won such vital states as Michigan and Pennsylvania, won more than the requisite 270 Electoral College votes and, much to the horror of his detractors, secured the popular vote.
In 2016, Clinton was seen as the logical, establishment candidate by the Democratic Party machinery, despite facing a bruising primary race with the far more progressive Vermont Senator, Bernie Sanders. This time around, it was Harris, whose pathway to the Democratic Party nomination was unmarked and unblemished by primaries and challengers.
This was one of a number of mistakes made by the Democrats. In terms of planning, the continued, stubborn presence of President Joe Biden as an automatic contender left little room for any fresh candidates. Biden insisted he was the only one qualified to defeat Trump. The denials and concealments of his declining faculties by the party machinery, a fact so cruelly unmasked in his June 27 debate with Trump, left little to no time in staging a competitive process.
Harris, unremarkable as a Vice President, and even more unremarkable as a campaigner, given her lamentable performance in the lead-up to the 2020 race, became a poor choice. Drawn from the liberal state of California, a point that blunted her appeal with the voters of middle-America, she was always going to struggle. That struggle became even more pronounced with her selection of the barely known Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota.
None of this seemed to concern the pundit and party classes. It did not bother the Democrat donors who coughed up scandalously large sums (US$1 billion over three months) to back Harris. Celebrities aplenty crowed with delight that good sense had prevailed with Biden withdrawing from the race in favour of someone who ticked all the appropriate identity markers: woman, colour, professional.
'The Democrats, in treating Trump as epiphenomenal, a passing fad that could be extinguished through prosecution, litigation and denigration, failed to understand the local mood and anxieties in poorer, rural and suburban communities. Harris, like Clinton, merely presumed that Hispanic and Black voters would surge to her via a motley coalition of independents, women, and disaffected Republicans of the Nikki Haley-Liz Cheney variety. How dangerous, and how costly that proved to be.'
The campaign itself was simple and simplistic. Trump was demonised on various fronts. Idiotic statements from him or his supporters (comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s ‘floating island of garbage’ remark on Puerto Rico stood out) were pounced on as self-evident instances of disqualification. His Madison Square Garden performance suggested to the Harris campaign a Nuremberg rally from 1939, the yearnings of an inner fascist.
Accordingly, he was attacked constantly as a danger to democracy, a point that merely served to double his exposure. (When your opponent cannot stop mentioning your name, half the battle on publicity has been won.)
He was attacked for being a convicted felon, a point true enough till you realise it made no difference to broader voter considerations, adding, if anything, some appeal to the outlaw, anti-hero theme that runs so strongly in the narrative of American folklore. Ditto being a twice-impeached president, a misogynist, and a sexual predator.
The Harris campaign failed to carve out a distinct message. There was nothing to suggest that any administration with her at the helm would be too different from that of Biden. This was particularly crucial on such issues as inflation and border security. The indifference shown by Harris to the former, in particular, was encouraged by a mantra that the US economy was purring and humming to the tune of growth. This did little to comfort the weekly shopper alarmed by the sharp rise of prices on food, rent and fuel during the Biden administration. To the question ‘Are you better now than you were four years ago?’, there came no reliable answer.
Damaging to the Harris campaign, a point revealing in showing how little the Democrats had understood their defeat in 2016, was its slight against voters for gravitating towards Trump in the first place. It suggested a feeble mind and moral defectiveness. An astonishing error of judgment by Clinton then was to call Trump supporters a ‘basket of deplorables’. In September this year, Clinton remained unchastened and untutored, writing in The Washington Post that ‘deplorable is too kind a word for the hate and violent extremism we’ve seen from some Trump supporters.’ Such language is fatal to the endeavour of persuasion.
How, then, were things so misread? Because political analysis of the sort seen in 2024, just as it was in 2016, had everything to do with an echo chamber of self-affirming believers and little to do with what voters were saying. Hard as it is for those in the politics information industry to understand, most voters are simply not inclined to think in broad political terms. Trump’s preternatural understanding for voter behaviour is that it is instinctive and unworldly, not cerebral and rarified. Home budgets, the cost of living, groceries, fuel and housing are earthly matters.
Nothing illustrated this better than the remarkably localised campaigns run by the GOP, typified by the work of conservative activist Scott Presler. His Early Vote Action effort encouraged voter registration and an increase in absentee and early voting. In the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania, Presler proved adept at mobilising the Amish vote for Trump, capitalising on disgruntlement caused by a Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture raid on a local raw milk farm in Hand in January. The raid on Amos Miller’s farm was motivated by health reasons; Amish supporters for Miller saw it as an aggressive overreach of governmental bureaucracy.
The Democrats, in treating Trump as epiphenomenal, a passing fad that could be extinguished through prosecution, litigation and denigration, failed to understand the local mood and anxieties in poorer, rural and suburban communities. Harris, like Clinton, merely presumed that Hispanic and Black voters would surge to her via a motley coalition of independents, women, and disaffected Republicans of the Nikki Haley-Liz Cheney variety. How dangerous, and how costly that proved to be. Trump, and Trumpism, is here to stay.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University.
Main image: Following Vice President And Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris Delivers Concession Speech At Howard University. (Getty Images)