Kamala Harris’s Policy Agenda Kneecapped Her Chances

So, how did Kamala Harris lose to a surly opponent who had been found guilty of 34 felonies and liable for broad business fraud and sexual abuse? While she had to shoulder the burden of President Joe Biden’s dismal performance numbers, her skills as a campaigner were clearly up to the task. She also had all the money she needed, and in a 50-50 country, she was always within striking distance of winning.

Ultimately, her heaviest burden was being nominated without a normal primary process that would have allowed her to hone a winning agenda. In a closely fought election, it’s incumbent on the lesser-known candidate to offer a compelling policy agenda, especially for weak partisans and independents.

But the Harris campaign never came to grips with the three issues that voters cared about most—the continuing pain of inflation, the disappointment of voters without college degrees about their narrowing prospects, and the anxieties Americans feel about immigrants crossing the border without a legal right to do so. According to polls and surveys, substantial majorities expected and demanded that the candidates address those three concerns meaningfully.

That’s how democracy works. Yet, the strategists who Harris inherited from Joe Biden’s campaign—which was faltering even before his unfortunate debate performance—tried to convince voters to focus on abortion rights and threats to democracy. They didn’t appreciate how downplaying the voters’ most pressing concerns could align Harris with the status quo. Worse, Harris’s team didn’t fully appreciate how the context for the issues they considered more important had changed.

It’s hard to convince voters who aren’t committed partisans that American democracy is at stake when they’re about to participate in a free, nationwide election. (And it’s a tougher sell from the first major party nominee since 1968 to win their party’s nod without going before a single primary voter.) Harris’s strategists also didn’t understand how the debate over abortion rights has shifted since 2022. The Dobbs decision came four months before the 2022 midterm, and it was a winning issue then and often since in referenda. Two years later, however, most voters lived in states that had maintained or strengthened voting rights. Those restorative measures coming out of state capitols in places like Lansing, Michigan, Madison, Wisconsin, and Phoenix, Arizona, didn’t end anxiety over reproductive rights, but they did change the facts on the ground.

In this environment, Trump’s position that he had shifted authority over those rights to the states insulated him to the point that a quarter of pro-choice women voted for him, according to exit polls. Yet, the Harris campaign didn’t acknowledge the significant new protections for abortion access in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and that the 2024 elections in Arizona and Nevada included referenda to extend access there, too. So, virtually all the pro-choice voters who could be personally affected by the nationwide guarantee to restore Roe v Wade that Harris talked about signing again and again vote in reliably red states that were always out of her reach.

By making abortion access the touchstone of her closing argument, Harris also may have sent a message to persuadable voters that their frustrations about the economy and immigration were secondary.

More importantly, in the end, the Harris campaign didn’t make a persuasive case that she had the ideas and strength to address voters’ real concerns, given her difficulty separating herself from an administration that voters believed hadn’t done enough about those concerns.

Biden handed off the problem of inflation to the bankers at the Federal Reserve, who raised interest rates, as expected, 11 times. It was the right course economically, but temporarily worsened voters’ finances. Harris promised to stop price gouging, but it rang a little hollow since the administration hadn’t done so. Its robust antitrust agenda could lower prices in the long run, such as food processing, but not in time for November.

To convince voters of her commitment to lower prices, she might have followed the example of John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter by calling the CEOs of the giant food producers and supermarket chains to the White House and publicly jawboning them to pare back their prices for meats, cereals, eggs, and milk. She might even have threatened them with federal price guidelines if they resisted and she won the election.

The economic dissatisfaction of working-class voters was much more challenging to address because the causes lie mainly with the computer and Internet technologies eagerly adopted for most workplaces and the large numbers of available college-educated workers. No one can roll back those structural changes, but a president can help make working people better off.

That’s what the Biden-Harris administration did. Employment and business startups, post-pandemic, grew 50 percent faster under Biden than under Trump pre-pandemic. And a good share of the credit should go to the administration’s four signature legislative achievements—the American Rescue Act, the Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.

With such success, how could Harris fail to win over more working-class voters? One reason is that voters, of course, knew little about it. It’s unsurprising given the administration’s genuinely baffling decision not to claim much credit for the historic job gains and business creation, lest people feel the administration didn’t see their pain. So, much of the public concluded that the economy was in bad shape.

Trump naturally seized on the misperception, blaming the administration’s trade policies and promising to turn it around—but with self-crippling, inflationary tariffs on our trade partners. It won’t work, but it helped get him elected.

Harris’s strategists responded by portraying Trump’s tariffs as a national sales tax and promoting herself as the tax cutter. She vowed to cut taxes for entrepreneurs and hike rates on the rich. It might have worked if Harris had pledged to use the revenues to fund initiatives that voters without college degrees could see as a path to get ahead.

Here’s an example that makes economic sense and could have communicated her determination to make the lives of working-class people materially better: Use the revenues to pay the cost of retraining courses at local community colleges for anyone without a bachelor’s degree. It could become a new way for working-class voters to get past a dead-end job and earn more as a bookkeeper, practical nurse, entry-level programmer, or plumber.

The Harris campaign completed their self-damaging trifecta by missing the mark on immigration. Their approach was to trumpet the administration’s support for immigration reform on “day one” and the bipartisan compromise on immigration earlier this year. But since neither passed Congress, she ended up boasting about the administration failing to make a difference for the voters’ third hot-button concern.

A new initiative highlighting her commitment to cleaning up immigration would have been more convincing. For example, the president already has legal authority to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” whenever she finds that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” The Biden administration used that authority in limited ways, yet the Harris campaign barely mentioned it. Voters might have felt that she heard their concerns if she had pledged to limit entry more broadly until Congress passed serious immigration reform.

Remarkably, the Biden and Harris campaigns also made little mention of Trump’s unprecedented convictions and civil judgments. That allowed Trump to deploy his greatest political asset—using his media talents to convince a majority to blame the system instead of him. It was a remarkable feat of political jujitsu that could work only in a populist era when people already distrusted the system.

In a populist era, voters demand that a candidate offer concrete actions that could plausibly change the conditions and circumstances that frustrate and anger them and then display the personal strength to carry them out. Kamala Harris has that strength, but it wasn’t enough because her campaign never provided a convincing blueprint.

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