Why Donald Trump won and Kamala Harris lost: An early analysis of the results
Why Donald Trump won and Kamala Harris lost: An early analysis of the results
Brookings Senior Fellow William Galston breaks down the results of the 2024 presidential election and the implications for both parties.
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Because people were unwilling to vote for a black woman president. It's that simple.
- There are estimates of as many as 15 million former Biden voters who opted to sit this election out, knowing full well that doing so is a de-facto vote for Trump.
- Latino men, and men in general, voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
- Abortion issues fared better than Harris in virtually every state where it was on the ballot.
- Harris underperformed almost universally across the country, to the point where New York, New Jersey, and California were all much closer than they should have been.
This tells me that it wasn't the policies. People just didn't want Kamala Harris. Maybe because she's black. Or Indian. Or a woman. Or a former prosecutor. Or some combination of the above. But whatever the reason was, people felt so strongly about saying "Not Kamala Harris" that they stayed home knowing full well they were de-facto voting for Trump in the process.
Trump didn't "win" this election, in that he got virtually the same votes he got last time. Kamala Harris lost this election because Democrats sent a very clear message that they are so against Kamala Harris that they were willing to hand the Presidency and the entirety of Congress instead of voting for her. This wasn't just a loss. This was a "Fuck YOU, in particular" sent right at Harris.
I firmly believe it was a combination of her race and male voters' unwillingness to vote for a woman under any circumstances.
Harris went from polling 3.7 points higher than Trump in August to losing by 3.4 points in November. Do you think it took people that long to realize she was a woman of color, or do you think her actions in the interim changed peoples’ perception of her?
That’s just because polling was off. This major poll right before the election had Harris up by 4 points.
We have so short memories we forget Biden' rode in preaching accountability and on the heels of George Floyd's murder. And then for at least some of us failed to deliver.
If you were listening, she gave plenty of reasons to send a message back right out of her own mouth.
Condemning a genocide would have been an easy win for one, but it's one of a dozen. She ran a campaign to hug the center, she got all the voters that will get you because 70/240 million possible Americans aren't persuadable. But it's all she tried. Gun control, health care, labor rights, dropping death penalty reform from the platform, a campaign run to save us from Republicans... With a bipartisan panel involving Republicans.
I'm not for an instant insinuating there isn't a problem with both race and sex in America, but the problem is the people fighting it from the top are idiots who can't do basic math. There were plenty of votes to win among the 80-110 million people who are eligible, but didn't.
No I don't think they're going to be better off, but the blame is not giving them the thing they want to vote for. They outnumber you. They would have beaten Trump.
This was a "Fuck YOU, in particular" sent right at Harris.
hmm.... I think a "fuck you" would be if people went to the polls and wrote in someone else. This was more of a "meh" sent right at Harris... they couldn't even be bothered to vote.
I firmly believe it was a combination of her race and male voters' unwillingness to vote for a woman under any circumstances.
I suspect that this played a large part, but the tricky thing is: how do we confirm this? We can't just poll people, bc they'll rarely admit it. We can't compare the performance of congressional candidates because people likely hold the presidency to a different standard. To make things even more complicated, Harris is mixed-race - and Americans are notoriously bad at studying that. And what do we do with the results of these studies? Clearly we still want to nominate qualified people regardless of gender or race.