Donald Trump’s victory has blown apart the Democratic coalition. The non-college majority—a good proxy for the working class—sided decisively with Trump in the Rust Belt. Kamala Harris’s disappointing showing in the Sun Belt, meanwhile, leaves no doubt that progressive strategists greatly overestimated the strength of a coalition that combined progressive younger urban voters and affluent suburbanites repulsed by Donald Trump’s character and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. For stalwart Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans, and the grassroots left, America’s remission from MAGA is over.
There will be plenty of acrimony in the months ahead over what could have been done differently. At more than $1 billion, Harris had an unprecedented war chest, yet stories are already rolling in that her team botched vital get-out-the-vote opportunities. There is also the matter of whether her campaign came together too late. Even before his disastrous debate performance in June, President Biden was the clear underdog, with a very narrow path to 270 Electoral College votes. Had he stepped aside sooner, it is conceivable Harris’s team could have developed a stronger ground game or honed a more compelling economic message.
Still, any frank autopsy must reckon with the trajectory of her three-month campaign. In August, Harris briefly soared, buoyed by the sheer sense of relief among Democrats at the more favorable contrast she offered to Trump. During those heady weeks before and immediately after the Democratic National Convention, she managed to reintroduce herself to the public and demonstrate she was a competent and, at times, inspiring leader; beyond a few media flashbacks, this appeared to eclipse earlier worries that she was a uniquely unpopular veep, whose aborted 2020 presidential campaign exemplified the worst excesses of the brahmin left. Indeed, though Harris’s record of policy achievements was negligible, there was a widespread sense that the political gods had gifted her a chance to rebuild Biden’s electoral coalition.
That opportunity faded for four reasons.