Why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump

Nearly a month ago, Kamala Harris appeared on ABC's “The View” in what was expected to be a friendly interview aimed at introducing herself to Americans who wanted to know more about her.

But the session was quickly overshadowed by her response when asked what she would have done differently than incumbent President Joe Biden: “I can’t think of anything.”

Harris' response – which became a Republican attack ad – underscored the political headwinds her launch campaign failed to overcome in her decisive defeat to Donald Trump on Tuesday.

She publicly gave up on the race late Wednesday afternoon and urged fans “not to despair.”

But it will likely take longer to reflect on where she went wrong and what else she could have done, as Democrats begin pointing fingers and asking questions about the future of the party.

Harris campaign officials remained silent early Wednesday, while some aides expressed tearful disappointment that they believed the race would be much closer.

“Losing is incredibly painful. It’s hard,” Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in an email to staff on Wednesday. “It will take a long time to process.”

As sitting vice president, Harris was unable to break away from an unpopular president and convince voters that she could offer the change they sought amid widespread economic fears.

After Biden dropped out of the race following a disastrous performance in the debate, Harris was anointed at the top of the ticket, bypassing the scrutiny of a primary without a single vote being cast.

She launched her 100-day campaign promising a “new generation of leadership,” mobilized women around abortion rights and pledged to win back working-class voters by focusing on economic issues like rising housing costs and affordability.

With just three months until Election Day, it sparked an initial wave of momentum that included a flood of memes on social media, a star-studded list of supporters that included Taylor Swift, and a record-breaking fundraising total. But Harris couldn't shake the anti-Biden sentiment that permeated much of the electorate.

The president's approval rating has consistently hovered in the low 40s during his four years in office, while some two thirds of the voters say they believe the US is on the wrong path.

Some allies have privately questioned whether Harris has remained too loyal to Biden in their attempt to replace him. But Jamal Simmons, the vice president's former communications director, called it a “trap” and argued any distance would have only given Republicans another line of attack for their disloyalty.

“You can’t really run away from the president who elects you,” he said.

Harris tried to walk the fine line of addressing the administration's record without throwing shade at her boss. She appeared hesitant to break with Biden's guidelines, but did not make them known to the outside world during the election campaign.

But then she failed to make a convincing case for why she should lead the country and how she would deal with economic frustrations as well as widespread concerns about immigration.

About three in 10 voters said their family's financial situation was behind, up from about two in 10 before, according to data from AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 U.S. voters conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago four years.

Nine out of ten voters were very or somewhat concerned about food prices.

The same poll found that 4 in 10 voters said immigrants living in the U.S. illegally should be deported to their country of origin, while in 2020 only about 3 in 10 voters said the same.

And although Harris tried to spend the home stretch of her campaign emphasizing that her administration would not be a continuation of Biden's, she failed to clearly state her own policies and often skirted around issues rather than directly addressing perceived failures.

The Harris campaign had hoped to reunify the voter base that drove Biden's victory in 2020 by winning over Democrats' core constituencies of Black, Latino and young voters and making further gains among college-educated suburban voters.

However, it performed worse among these key voting blocs. She lost 13 points among Latino voters, two points among black voters and six points among voters under 30, according to exit polls that are subject to change as votes are counted but are considered representative of trends.

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who lost the 2016 Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton and the 2020 primary to Biden, said in a statement that it was “not a big surprise” that working-class voters had left the party.

“First it was the white working class, and now it's also Latinos and black workers. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change,” he said. “And they’re right.”

While women largely supported Harris over Trump, the vice president's lead did not exceed the margins her campaign had hoped her historic candidacy would achieve. And she failed to realize her ambitions of winning over Republican suburban women, losing 53% of white women.

In the first presidential election since the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion, Democrats had hoped their focus on fighting for reproductive rights would deliver a decisive victory.

While about 54% of female voters voted for Harris, they fell short of the 57% who supported Biden in 2020, according to polling data.

Even before she was catapulted to the top of the list, Harris had tried to portray the race as a referendum on Trump, not Biden.

The former California prosecutor relied on her criminal record to prosecute the case against the former president.

But her nascent campaign chose to abandon Biden's core argument that Trump posed an existential threat to democracy and prioritize a forward-looking “joyful” message about protecting personal freedoms and preserving the middle class.

In the end, however, Harris made the tactical decision to re-emphasize the dangers of a second Trump presidency by calling the president a “fascist” and campaigning with disaffected Republicans fed up with his rhetoric.

After Trump's former White House chief of staff John Kelly told the New York Times that Trump had spoken favorably about Adolf Hitler, Harris delivered remarks outside her official residence in which he called the president “unsettled and unstable.”

“Kamala Harris lost this election when she focused almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump,” said veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz said on Tuesday evening.

“Voters already know everything about Trump — but they still wanted to know more about Harris’ plans for the first hour, first day, first month and first year of her term.”

“It was a colossal failure for her campaign to spotlight Trump more than Harris' own ideas,” he added.

Ultimately, the winning coalition Harris needed to beat Trump never materialized, and voters' clear rejection of the Democrats showed the party has a deeper problem than just an unpopular president.