Member Newsletter
Running for president is a “no excuses” endeavor. If you win you become the most powerful person in the world and if you lose you become a dumping ground for disappointment, ridicule, blame, recrimination. And that’s just from your friends. It’s an enterprise both binary and brutal.
Democrats have much bigger challenges ahead than worrying about Kamala Harris’ feelings or future reputation. That’s not my concern here. But it’s important for every aspect of what Democrats have to do going forward to understand as well as they can what happened, why it happened and more. You know my opinion. I wrote the day before the election that I thought she ran a near-flawless campaign. I wanted to commit that to virtual paper in advance of the result because we inevitably judge campaigns by reading back from the result.
My judgment is of course subjective. There’s no science of what amounts to a good campaign. But it turns out we do have what I think is some pretty probative evidence about the quality of her campaign, which Kate Riga also mentioned Thursday afternoon in a slightly different context. And that goes from paid media to Harris as a candidate on the hustings to the nuts and bolts of the ground operation in the swing states. In the seven swing states, the swing to Trump from 2020 to 2024 was 3.1 percentage points. In the other 43 states and Washington, DC the swing was 6.7 points. That’s a big, big difference. Like a huge difference, frankly.
The precise percentage might shift a smidgen since there’s still counting going on. But I think this is probably the most probative evidence we’re likely to get. Obviously it’s not like the campaign is hermitically sealed into those seven states. If you’re in California or Texas you probably heard there was a campaign going on. But those states are where the ads ran. That’s where the candidates appeared. That’s where both campaigns did everything they could to turn out their supporters. That roughly three and half percentage point difference is Harris and her campaign.
And even though it’s obvious, it bears stating explicitly: it’s not just Harris and Harris’ campaign. It’s Trump.
Yes, you could make some arguments about how this stacks up as a proper test. Perhaps you could say that these seven states are somehow distinct — in some way other than being pretty evenly divided politically — that made them somehow intrinsically more immune to the political winds of the last four years. But any argument along those lines I can think of strikes me as pretty strained. Those swing state numbers are not a perfect measure. But I think they’re about the best we’re likely to get. And it’s far more grounded than everyone’s subjective takes which, in the aftermath of such a devastating defeat, are almost all going to be shot through with agendas both unintended and malign.
I was prompted to write this post when I saw this article by Adam Nagourney in the Times.
Here’s the lede …
After President Biden stepped aside and Vice President Kamala Harris entered the race in late July, I wrote about Democrats’ hopes that the short time-frame of her presidential campaign — just 15 weeks — would be a good thing. They thought it would allow a relatively inexperienced candidate to ride a burst of enthusiasm past the pitfalls of a long campaign and into the White House.
But now, it looks like that short campaign was one of the key factors behind her decisive loss to former President Donald Trump.
And you can add that to the list of things that Democrats are blaming Biden for during this season of second-guessing and recriminations.
So now the rush campaign, far from being a fortuitous advantage, may have led to her undoing. But Nagourney lets us in on where this is going by referring to the big switch as a way to “allow a relatively inexperienced candidate” to win the election.
Wait, what?
This was, frankly, never my understanding of why people thought the three-month dash might unexpectedly and fortuitously be an advantage. Every person I heard making this argument spoke rather of two things: 1) It gave the Republican media apparatus far less time to build a series of “q-u-e-s-t-i-o-n-s” about Harris and personal attack storylines and 2) it also wildly wrong-footed the Trump campaign, forcing them to run against a different campaign and very different person after eighteen months building a campaign to run against Joe Biden. Now the theory is being reformulated as a short window that would reduce the amount of time in which Harris could make mistakes since she wasn’t a good candidate.
As Nagourney goes on to explain, a longer, normal-length campaign and primary process would have allowed Harris to gain experience and become a better candidate. And if she couldn’t learn how to be a better candidate, another contender would have beaten her. Either way you’d have a better candidate and a better chance of winning the campaign. And surprise, surprise! Who gets quoted? Well, you’ve got James Carville, David Axelrod, among others. In other words, what you really seem to have here is a kind of neo-Thunderdomism, or perhaps a Thunderdomism-manque. Not sure what the best metaphor would be, but it amounts to, give us another chance to say that Kamala Harris is a mess and not the person we wanted.
Perhaps things would have been different if Biden had stepped aside in January 2023, coming off the relatively good performance in the midterms. That’s totally possible. I’m not sure how we can access that question in any rigorous way. And that judgment will rest on Joe Biden’s shoulders. But it’s the core assumption behind this neo-Thunderdomist argument that I’m focused on here. The idea that Harris simply wasn’t a good candidate. “Inexperienced” means not good, or not good enough. I simply don’t think there’s much evidence of that. And I should note that the Nagourney article makes no reference to this statistical evidence I noted, which is one of the few controls on the natural desire of basically everyone to come forward and say, “well, we lost because of the thing I thought all along.” There’s no rigorous evidence beyond the same argument from pretty much the same people, which was: Harris isn’t a good candidate.
Let me finish on another point I spent time writing about before the election: ground game. We had a running question whether Republicans really were going to have a ground game in the swing states. Then there’s a secondary question some people have always asked which is, how much does the door knocking and hassling people to the polls really matter? Campaigns and campaign professionals must think it makes a difference, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. That whole analysis may now seem misguided and wrong. I don’t think that’s true.
My sense is, based on a vast quantity of observational reports, as well as other campaign reporting, that the Republicans, largely in the guise of Elon Musk’s America PAC, simply didn’t do much. It’s opaque and we may simply never learn where that money went. Who cares really? I suspect a lot of GOP vendors and consultants saw Elon’s operation as a vast shimmering heap of dumb money and acted accordingly. Whatever the truth of that, the operation was a bust. But obviously tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands, canvassed and phone banked for Harris and did all that stuff. It didn’t work. She didn’t win. And it’s impossible to know which parts of that 3.5 percentage point spread was Harris, her ads, her events, her army of supporters. But I think all that work did make a difference. It comes down to, though, what we talked about repeatedly in the lead up to Election Day. Your ground game only comes into play as a deciding factor if the race is really close, probably within a point or maybe a touch more. This wasn’t that race. Those numbers I referenced above are equally probative. Just shy of a seven point swing outside of the swing states isn’t a close race, not something you’re going to overcome with a well-oiled ground game and hundreds of thousands of motivated volunteers.
Elon’s operation was a bust. Harris’ operation and the volunteers who were its ground troops were probably just as good and effective as they looked. The headwinds were just much stronger than expected. That I think is the story.