What went wrong in their short, 107-day campaign

When Vice President Kamala Harris formally secured the support of enough Democratic delegates to secure her party's presidential nomination on August 6, she had little time to convince skeptical voters that she, not Donald Trump, was the candidate of change.

A Gallup poll conducted this month found that only 25% of voters were satisfied with “the way things are going in the United States right now,” while 73% said they were dissatisfied.

While Harris' entry into the race sent a jolt of energy through a Democratic Party that had been despondent since President Biden's much-criticized debate performance in late June that effectively ended his candidacy, breaking away from the president many Americans blame for high inflation and a surge Accounting for the number of undocumented immigrants remained a major task.

I can't think of anything

At the beginning of October it became clear that Harris was having difficulty distancing himself from Biden. An ABC/Ipsos poll found that 74-22% of voters in both parties said they would like to see Harris “go in a new direction as president rather than continuing the policies of the Biden administration.” The same poll found that 65% of voters believed Harris would continue Biden's policies, while 33% said she would take a different path.

It was against this background that Harris appeared The viewwhere she was asked if she would have done anything differently than President Biden over the last four years.

“There's nothing that comes to mind,” Harris replied, gifting Trump a phrase he might use in campaign ads, “in terms of most of the decisions that had an impact, I was there.”

Harris quickly recognized that her response was inadequate, adding that, unlike Biden, she would appoint a Republican to a Cabinet post if elected.

inflation

While inflation was a global concern in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, voters in the United States blamed the Biden-Harris administration for its impact in the United States. Although inflation had fallen significantly since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, Republicans had relentlessly threatened Biden and Harris over its steep rise shortly after Biden took office. Harris once again found himself in the unenviable position of having to distance himself from the president.

“The costs are still too high,” Harris said in an August campaign speech in North Carolina, “and at a deeper level, it’s so hard for too many people, no matter how hard they work, to just get ahead.”

When Harris discussed inflation at her CNN town hall in October, she focused on her plan to lower housing costs by building millions of new homes but became measured in her criticism of Biden.

“Frankly, for too long both administrations, both administrations and both parties, Democrats and Republicans, have not done enough to address the housing issue. We need a new approach,” she said.

When asked by host Anderson Cooper how her plan to crack down on price gouging would help people seeking help because of high food costs, Harris explained that price gouging is real and ongoing in states like Georgia and North Carolina that tried it Problem was recovering from Hurricane Helene. “I looked into this issue because it affects a lot of people,” she said.

immigration

A week before she became the Democratic nominee, Harris signaled that she understood Trump and his Republican surrogates would come after her on immigration. At her first major campaign rally in Atlanta, Harris tried to flip the script, declaring that she herself on immigration would “proudly compare my record to his any day of the week.”

A month later, in an interview with CNN, Harris reiterated her promise to enact the bipartisan border security bill that Trump defeated in February. But her promise did nothing to distinguish her from Biden, who had already expressed his desire to sign the compromise that continued funding one of Trump's signature policies, building a wall on the U.S. southern border with Mexico would have.

Moreover, Republicans had already portrayed Harris for years as a “border czar” who presided over record numbers of undocumented migrant crossings. While Harris could counter that Biden had not given her such a title, there was no hiding the fact that he had appointed her in March 2021 to lead his administration's efforts to address the “root causes” of migration from Central America.

During her CNN roundtable in late October, Harris again struggled to explain why the administration's executive actions signed in early June, which had significantly reduced the number of migrant crossings, had not been implemented sooner.

“Because we worked with Congress and hoped that we could actually solve the problem in the long term, not the short term,” Harris responded, adding, “Ultimately, this problem will be solved through congressional action.”

The Biden handover

Ultimately, despite Harris' efforts to run her own campaign, there was no escaping the unprecedented manner in which she became her party's nominee. As much as Biden's sluggish performance at the June 27 debate cast doubt on his ability to defeat Trump, it also raised questions about why those around him, including Harris, had supported his intention to seek a second term.

“The presidency has been taken away from Joe Biden, and I am not a Biden fan,” Trump said at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago after Harris secured the nomination. “From a constitutional standpoint, they stripped him of the presidency, and people are saying he lost after the debate and can’t win.”

With the nomination, Harris inherited the baggage of a president whose approval rating was down 17 points on July 21, when Biden announced his exit from the race. Historically, no incumbent had ever won re-election with such a low approval rating as Biden. As she eventually discovered, this latter association proved difficult to get rid of.