In the end, it was not. Harris did perform reasonably strongly with the affluent, highly educated voters who have increasingly become a core component of her party’s coalition. And women, including young women, showed up to vote for her in impressive numbers. At the same time, however, Trump overperformed among constituencies not previously within his tent. Where previously his strength was concentrated among white voters, especially those without college degrees, this time he expanded his reach deeper into other ethnic groups. Most strikingly, he won a majority of Hispanic men, though that was just the most impressive example of a wider trend. He also reaped big gains in support further down the age-curve than he had managed before, with young men in particular providing a new column of support. Combined with running up the score even higher than before in rural strongholds, these significant bites into previously Democratic-leaning demographics gave Trump a big boost toward an overall majority of the national electorate.
Harris, meanwhile, though she by no means oversaw a collapse in the Biden coalition, stagnated at best among those groups from whom she would have needed to attract far greater margins of victory to compensate for losses to Trump elsewhere. Sometimes she underperformed Biden’s margin slightly, even among these slices of the electorate.
The aftermath of defeat is always a time when accusations fly among the defeated, and undoubtedly Harris will attract personal blame for having failed to bring victory home. Her lack of facility in extemporaneous interviews, critics will note, cost her opportunities to introduce herself favourably to undecided voters. She shied away from the media for too long at the beginning of her campaign, then when she finally did step up gave several sub-par performances. On policy, she never produced a deft answer to the question of why her positions had changed on many issues since her previous run for president in 2019, or in what areas of substance she was different from President Biden. Her choice of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as running mate was a safe ‘do no harm’ pick designed to keep all party factions on board, but given a Republican-leaning environment perhaps a bolder choice was merited.
These are not unreasonable complaints, particularly the charge that she was not adept at articulating issue positions convincingly when deprived of a script and faced with follow-up questions. In mitigation, defenders might note that Harris was thrust into being the candidate far later in the electoral cycle than usual, only after Biden’s forced withdrawal following a catastrophic June debate performance. After that she executed a good launch, convention speech, and debate performance, she fundraised well, and her team organized what was, by all accounts, a strong ‘ground game’ to get the vote out. Given all this, she surely deserves a measure of credit for doing the most essential things to a high standard under difficult circumstances. Certainly, it would be churlish to deny that she performed better than Biden could have, had he been allowed to stick it out.
In the end, though, it was simply not enough. Trump, having done a flamboyantly terrible job in performing the same tasks, proved that none of that need be fatal if you have caught the electorate at a moment when they are predisposed to buy what you are selling.
