What Went Wrong for Kamala Harris?
In the end, it wasn't even a close-won race. Did the Harris campaign get it wrong—or did the Trump side spot something the Democrats didn't?
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The morning after Election Day in 2016, I got a call at 4 a.m.
It was my colleague at the London newspaper where I worked. She was already in a taxi on her way to the office, and she was panicking. “It’s all going Trump’s way,” she said. “We need you at work. Now.”
On my phone, I scrolled through the incoming results from the swing states. My colleagues and I had prepared numerous essays about the historic moment in which America would vote in its first female president. Clearly our essays wouldn’t be seeing the light of day.
I raced into the office, and by the time the sun rose, I’d written a much darker, sadder piece. Hours later, when Hillary Clinton made her concession speech, everyone in the newsroom gathered around the TVs, silent and rapt.
Back then, we despaired primarily for what we’d lost: proof that a woman could lead the free world—that her country trusted, and wanted, her to do it. The polls had given us optimism that was outrageously misplaced.
The polls failed us again this week.
What went wrong for Kamala Harris? That’s what everyone wants to know.
My phone started buzzing at midnight on Tuesday, and it didn’t stop. I had an onslaught of texts from across the Atlantic by breakfast time, all demanding that I explain what had happened. Because things hadn’t just gone wrong; they had gone wrong wrong.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote against Donald Trump. As of this writing, Harris is several million votes short of her challenger.
In 2020, swing states that broke for Biden, with much celebration—Pennsylvania chief among them—this time broke for Trump. And despite reports that women were turning up to the polls in huge numbers to protest the overturning of Roe v. Wade, just 54% of women actually voted for Harris: a majority, sure, but slim. And of those women, a majority of white women—somewhere between 52% and 59%, depending on which specific exit polls you follow—pulled the lever for the Trump ticket, despite myriad reasons to go the other way.
Examine the Exit Polls
In the very early days post-election, we have to rely on data from disparate exit polls to paint a picture, but the clues are here.
For one thing, rural voters—not suburban, but truly rural—appear to have been captured by Republicans in a way they weren’t in the two previous presidential elections. These rural voters live in areas where emergency services are staffed with volunteers and schools are tiny and underfunded. They are areas where home-schooling is popular, and on the rise. They are areas where promises of more school vouchers, rather than federal funding for education, may have high appeal.
Meanwhile, big cities like Miami and even NYC (that supposed bastion of liberal values) saw voters move away from the Democrats in surprising numbers. That left urban areas still coming out on top for Harris, but not in the numbers one might expect for the Democratic Party—explaining, in part, some of the gains for Trump in the popular vote.
Trump also saw significant gains among Latino men and Black men, and while areas with fewer college graduates voted Republican more reliably, even swing state college towns appear to have given the Trump-Vance ticket some modest gains (mostly among young men).
As for Trump’s sustained racist rhetoric, it didn’t seem to be a dealbreaker. He courted the male vote—from Silicon Valley tech bros to Joe Rogan-loving midwesterners to disaffected, anti-woke, chronically online members of the “left behind” contingent in small towns in overlooked states—and he won it. What some might find more baffling is how he managed to win over so many women at the same time.
Listen to Voters
In an October piece for The Persistent, I looked at what was motivating women planning to vote for Trump. Two issues came up over and over: illegal immigration and the economy. What should have rung alarm bells for the Harris-Walz campaign is how those women—who often implied they weren’t fans of Trump personally, or at least his behavior and his coarse way of speaking—were being won over by the comparatively articulate and polished Vance. He smoothed the edges of his running mate in a way that played very well, despite his much-purported “weirdness.”
And what of abortion, the issue that was supposed to decide the election? One of the most shocking outcomes of this election cycle occurred in Florida, where 57% of women voted to enshrine abortion rights—but the legislation failed, because of a state requirement of 60% to pass. The fact that a majority made their opinion on reproductive rights clear, but still had those rights taken away is infuriating. It was a big victory for Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida. And Florida overall still voted Republican, with half of all women—and about 56% of white women—turning up for Trump.
It’s hard to point the finger at white women when overall only a slim majority voted for Trump, compared with a larger share of men.
Still, it remains a serious problem for the Democrats that white women continued to “hold their nose and vote” for a candidate who seemed so counter to women’s interests. He has been accused of sexual assault; he had helped overturn Roe; his position on women’s rights was, in his own words, being your “protector,” whether you “like it or not.” Many of these women turned up to rallies where “Say No to the Hoe” [sic] T-shirts were being sold outside and still they cast their vote for Trump.
The recent, tragic case of 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain, a pregnant woman who died of septic shock while miscarrying when doctors failed to treat her in Texas, keeps coming back to me. According to most reports, Crain and her mother felt abortion was morally wrong. But her mother—who is now legally pursuing the hospitals Crain visited, where she was repeatedly turned away—was shocked when doctors failed to treat her daughter, where they focused instead on multiple ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” while Crain bled and writhed in pain.
Crain’s case reminded me of a couple in Texas I interviewed in 2020. The couple was forced to travel across state lines for abortion care after their much-wanted twins were found to be incompatible with life. Life-long Republican voters, they couldn’t believe that they were unable to access that care in their own state. They were Republicans because they were libertarian-minded; they didn’t like government oversight. They said they believed Trump must have been led astray. They told me that they thought the government had no business involving itself in women’s medical care.
I reached out to them a couple of years later to check in. When they told me they were voting Republican again, I didn’t know what to say.
Holly Baxter
Emma Haslett
Naomi Cahn
