Vice President Kamala Harris cannot be blamed entirely for her 2024 election loss to President Donald Trump. She had to build a national campaign in just three months, although that might also be regarded as an advantage because she did not become more attractive as a candidate over time. She was also to some extent responsible for the fact that when she ousted President Joe Biden, two-thirds of the country already believed the country was on the wrong track, and an equal percentage disapproved of Biden’s handling of the economy. That is a difficult electoral challenge to overcome.
Harris received relentlessly glowing press from a fantastically left-biased news media that ignored or minimized her obvious shortcomings. She was not, as noted, entirely blameless for the Biden administration’s unpopularity. She had pushed to make the administration’s policies even worse, with, for example, a larger COVID spending bill that Biden asked for, which would have made inflation even worse. Her positions on border security were also to the left, which is to say even more irresponsible, that Biden ended up implementing. A Harris presidency would have been worse than Biden’s, perhaps much worse.
But the biggest failure of Harris and her campaign was the strategic decision to turn her into a generic vessel for the Democratic Party blob. Within hours of Harris securing the endorsement, anonymous aides started walking back some of her more radical positions from the 2019 primary. Harris, reportedly, no longer supported fracking bans. She no longer supported decriminalizing illegal border crossings. She no longer supported tax-payer funded surgeries for transgender criminals. The list went on.
It was weeks before Harris sat for any kind of interview that would have tested her on any of these issues, and then when she finally did profer some answers, they were unsatisfying to everyone. “My values have not changed,” she said in one early CNN interview, a line she repeated many times despite the fact that it explains little.
There were many issues Harris simply refused to take any position on. Should “Dreamers” be given a path to citizenship through executive action? Should the sale of gas-powered cars be banned by 2035? Should private prisons be closed? Should the federal death penalty be ended? Harris dodged all these questions on matters that had shown in the past how radical she really is.
Underlying all these issues is the simple fact that the mostly female, all college-educated, elites that control the Democratic Party have true and honest beliefs that are far to the left of most voters. Harris took all those radical positions in 2019 not only because she believes in them but also because a plurality of Democratic Party presidential primary voters do too.
Unfortunately for the Democratic Party, not only is their far-left agenda wildly unpopular in both purple and red states, but voters are fleeing Democratic control in blue states too. California is a mess of high housing prices, high energy prices, homelessness, and crime. Illinois is a fiscal disaster on the verge of a financial meltdown while crime runs rampant in Chicago. New York is losing population as businesses and families escape to states that don’t tolerate high crime and promote high taxes.
Harris’s defeat means there will, mercifully, be no fourth term for former President Barack Obama. It was he who set the pattern of running for office as a centrist and governing as a radical. He did much to stoke racial division, not because he was black but because he was a career activist. He had his instincts and he gave them rein after holding them in check when seeking votes. Biden followed the pattern, and Harris, the empty pantsuit, could be counted on to have done the same.
Voters deserve a credible left-of-center option on the national stage. The Democratic Party as a whole needs a leader to emerge who is capabale and willing to repudiate the extremism that now consumes it. It needs to stop being a vehicle for radical egalitarianism, incompetent government, and woke absurdities. In other words, it needs to change the way it thinks and acts and ally itself with the interests of ordinary people. When it does that, offering the country a sober left-of-center alternative government, then it would deserve to be considered seriously as a party of national government. At present, it does not deserve that honor.
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There already are some impressive candidates that fit this mold: Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY), and Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC). These are all well-run purple to red states where Democratic leaders have proven they know how to earn independent and even Republican votes and govern effectively in partnership with Republican legislators.
If the Democratic Party can move away from trying to deliver narrow policy victories for ideologues and politically favored demographics and instead focus on an agenda that delivers security, opportunity, and prosperity for all regardless of their race or sex, it will win big elections again. Its members may even find out they agree with Republicans on a lot of things.