By Danny R. Johnson – Political News Editor
WASHINGTON, DC—The Democratic Party began a painful postmortem on Kamala Harris’s campaign, which ended in a bitter defeat to Donald Trump on Election Day. The Republican president-elect scored a stunning victory despite polls showing an astonishingly close race.
Exactly how Trump pulled it off despite his considerable liabilities as a candidate will doubtless leave many of his opponents asking where they went wrong. Some are asking questions of President Joe Biden, who faced intense scrutiny around his mental fitness during his re-election bid. His disastrous performance in his debate against Trump in June triggered a crisis of confidence in his leadership that eventually led to him dropping out of the race, giving Harris just a few months to campaign herself.
“That condensed period of campaigning deprived her, I think, of the long runway that a typical candidate has to lay out what they see their vision as if they were to win office,” Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker said of Biden’s late exit on Wednesday’s “Today” show.
“We ran the best campaign we could, considering Joe Biden was president,” one Harris aide told Politico. “Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost tonight.” The Biden aides blamed former president Obama’s advisers for Harris’s missteps, ultimately costing her any hopes of the White House.
“There is no singular reason why we lost, but a big reason is that the Obama advisers publicly encouraged Democratic infighting to push Joe Biden out, didn’t even want Kamala Harris as the nominee, and then signed up as the saviors of the campaign only to run outdated Obama-era playbooks for a candidate that wasn’t Obama,” a former Biden staffer told Playbook.
Trump emerged triumphant after improving on his 2020 performance with most demographics to win back key battlegrounds that he lost to Biden in 2020, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia.
The breadth of Trump’s improvement over 2020 is astonishing. In the previous two elections, we saw narrow demographic shifts—for example, non-college-educated white people moved toward Trump in 2016, and high-income suburban voters raced toward Biden in 2020. However, Tuesday night’s election apparently featured a more uniform shift toward Trump, according to a county-by-county analysis by Thomas Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University. The “straightforward story,” he said, “is that secular dissatisfaction with Biden’s economic stewardship affected most demographic groups in a fairly homogeneous way.”
Harris’ defeat comes as exit polls show shifts in support for Trump among three demographic groups that had propelled Biden to victory four years ago: Black, Hispanic/Latino, and younger voters. Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidency to Donald Trump after failing to improve on President Joe Biden’s 2020 performance with three key voting blocs. After winning battleground Wisconsin early on Wednesday morning, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the White House.
Black Voters
Black voters have long been a loyal voting bloc for Democrats. According to the Pew Research Center, they were crucial to Biden’s victory in 2020, when 92 percent voted for him and just 8 percent backed Trump.
However, exit polling suggests Harris performed slightly worse with Black voters than Biden did four years ago. She won the support of 86 percent of Black voters, while Trump got 12 percent, according to exit polling conducted by Edison Research.
According to exit polling, Black women overwhelmingly supported Harris over Trump this year, 92 percent to 7 percent. Black women had supported Biden in 2020 by a similar margin, 95 percent to 5 percent.
Hispanic/Latino Voters
According to exit polling, Harris won a majority of Hispanic/Latino voters nationally, 53 percent to Trump’s 45 percent. But she did significantly worse than Biden, who carried Latino/Hispanic voters by a double-digit margin—59 percent to Trump’s 38 percent—in 2020.
Hispanic/Latino men broke for Trump in more significant numbers this year (54 percent to Harris’ 44 percent) than in 2020, when Biden secured the support of 57 percent and Trump got 40 percent. However, exit polling suggests Harris had the same backing of Hispanic/Latino women (61 percent to 37 percent) as Biden did in 2020.
Younger Voters
Voters aged 18 to 29 supported Harris over Trump by about 13 percentage points. According to exit polling, she got the support of 55 percent of voters in this age group, while Trump got 42 percent.
However, her performance with the age group slipped from Biden’s four years ago. He won the age group by 24 percentage points in 2020 when 59 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 backed him, and 35 percent voted for Trump.
Harris, however, performed better with voters 65 and older than Biden did in 2020. She and Trump got roughly half the votes each from that age group this year, while Trump had won voters aged 65 and over by a four-point margin, 52 percent to Biden’s 48 percent, in 2020.
There will inevitably be much more Democratic soul-searching in the weeks before and after January 6, 2025, when Harris will have the unenviable duty of certifying her own defeat as vice president.
