How did Donald Trump win? Kamala Harris couldn’t keep Dems’ car from going off cliff | Opinion
Four years ago, Joe Biden said only he could beat Donald Trump.
Maybe he was right.
Trump is America’s past and future president, and nobody should be surprised.
Biden handed Vice President Kamala Harris the steering wheel too late. The Democratic Party was already going off the cliff.
By running a hard campaign, even while she was still teaching voters how to pronounce her name, Harris saved Democrats from a much worse meltdown.
But two truisms won out:
Celebrities are popular.
And populists are popular.
The average Republicans I talked with this fall couldn’t think of anything bad to say about Trump’s campaign, other than he’s crude and uses bad language and does as much damage to the party as he helps.
So much for that. America has put its faith in him to lead the Republican Party back into power.
Now, he has a chance to take a sledgehammer to government for two years before a midterm election that traditionally goes against the party in the White House.
If you’re a Texas Democrat who’s looking for something to grab onto in rough waters, that means a Democrat might have a good chance to win some statewide office in 2026.
But Democrats have to hope that Trump chops enough benefits, or cuts services so much, or angers so many Texans that they turn away from Republicans.
When Biden beat Trump in 2020, Biden was a far better candidate. He had the foreign policy background and Senate experience to be a convincing leader. In 2024, Harris’ limited experience was unconvincing.
It wasn’t totally about gender, although that hurt Harris with some traditional Democratic voter blocs.
If Nikki Haley had been the Republican nominee, she would have won.
When the prices of food, housing and insurance are higher than anyone ever imagined, voters are going to want change, no matter how well their 401(k) is doing.
And Harris didn’t play to her strengths.
She’s a prosecutor. Yet she didn’t make law and order or cracking down on crime an issue.
Instead, she went all-in arguing abortion law. But that didn’t show up in polls as a decisive issue for voters, and by Election Day voters were worried more about the state of the country.
Biden was no help to her campaign at all, and failed to give her enough runway for takeoff.
Yes, she had the support of a few Republicans like Rep. Liz Cheney.
But Harris and Cheney’s father, Dick, were two of the least popular vice presidents in recent memory. Neither was in position to rally voters against a former president who rose defiantly shaking his fist from a near-fatal assassination attempt.
By the campaign’s end, Harris had gained a following. She argued her case with strength and spirit, hard enough to push Trump up to the very last day of a lightning-fast presidential campaign.
Make no mistake: There are plenty of Republicans who don’t like Donald Trump.
But they really don’t like Democrats.
This story was originally published November 6, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
