Last Word: Why Kamala Harris Lost
| Published date | 01 December 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/20419058241305494 |
| Author | Katie Gaddini,Lucia Figueras-Pont |
| Date | 01 December 2024 |
32POLITICAL INSIGHT•DECEMBER 2024
Last Word
In early November, the United States
re-elected Donald Trump to be the 47th
President. By any measure, this was a
historic election, beset by assassination
attempts, a late withdrawal of the Democratic
candidate, and the meteoric rise of Vice-
President Kamala Harris, the rst woman
of colour presidential contender. Trump
defeated Harris in the Electoral College vote
and the popular vote, making it the rst time
a Republican presidential candidate has done
so in 20 years. In addition to a supermajority
on the Supreme Court, the Republicans
took control of the Senate, and the House
of Representatives. The conservative wave
heading towards the US in 2025 requires a
careful review of Harris’s campaign.
Despite remaining out of the limelight
the past four years, Harris exploded onto the
presidential race in July after President Biden
declared his withdrawal. Frustrated with
President Biden’s frequent gaes and facing
the prospect of an almost-certain Trump
victory, Democrat leaders quickly rallied
around the former State Prosecutor from
California. Harris’s campaign soon coalesced
around one word, plucked from a Beyoncé
song which played again and again at her
rallies: freedom. For the Harris campaign,
freedom signied reproductive freedom,
freedom as a joyful and forward-thinking
style of politics, and, crucially, freedom from
the previous eight years of Trumpism.
At the Democratic National Convention
(DNC) in August, just one month after she
announced her candidacy, Harris picked
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running
mate. Walz was a perfect choice for the
freedom motif. Upbeat and cheerful, Walz
championed progressive ideals from the
perspective of a down-to-earth Midwestern
dad. Combining American sportsmanship,
ruggedness and grit with sensitivity and
kindness, Walz’s form of masculinity foiled
Trump’s.
The Harris campaign hoped that Walz
would draw in male voters, especially
working-class white men in the key
swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and
Pennsylvania. Ultimately, however, white men
stuck with Trump, and he also pulled in a
signicant number of Latino and Black male
voters, all of whom prioritised the economy
and limited immigration during this election.
After the DNC, as the emotional high
started to fade, news pundits pressed Harris
to enumerate her actual policies. What would
she do to tackle record-high immigration?
How would she help an economy besieged
by ination? And how would she respond
dierently to America’s involvement with
foreign wars?
On the economy, Harris positioned herself
as solidly middle-class, reminding Americans
that her parents were immigrants, and she
was raised by a single mother. She also
proposed economic xes such as a child tax
credit, lowered medical costs, and a higher
minimum wage. Dubbed a ‘Marxist’ and
‘communist’ by the right, Harris countered
by calling herself a ‘pragmatic capitalist’ in
interviews, though she never managed to
distance herself from the critiques levelled
against Biden’s handling of the economy.
As a woman candidate, Harris rightly
saw women voters as a crucial population
to deliver her a victory. She courted
them by emphasising her commitment
to reproductive rights, hoping that pro-
choice women were still mobilised by the
overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. In a
campaign ad for Harris, aired shortly before
the election, Julia Roberts calls the voting
booth ‘the one place in America where
Why Kamala
Harris Lost
A campaign that stressed freedom over economic issues ultimately
failed, write Katie Gaddini and Lucia Figueras-Pont.
women still have the right to choose.’
This was a costly miscalculation. In the
two years since a national right to abortion
was struck down, pro-choice women see the
battle for reproductive rights waged most
fruitfully at the state level. This was amply
demonstrated by the passage of abortion
rights in seven out of the ten states where it
was on the ballot.
Exit polls reveal that women also prioritised
the economy in this election and believed a
former New York businessman would improve
it better than a candidate resembling the
current President. That accounts, in part, for
why more women voted for Trump in this
election than the last two. The longstanding
critique that Trump has a ‘woman problem’
proved false, especially when it comes to white
women without a university degree.
But Harris had to balance her gender
carefully in the run-up to the election. On
the one hand, she needed to relate to white
suburban women, who represented one
of the biggest voting blocs in this election,
without being accused of resorting to
identity politics. On the other hand, Harris
couldn’t be seen as too feminine or else
she would face critiques of being a weak
Commander-in-Chief of the world’s biggest
military, especially when up against a
strongman candidate like Trump. To solve
this dilemma, Harris downplayed her race
and gender, and instead leveraged her
prosecutorial background.
On 22 July, the day after Harris declared her
candidacy, she spoke to reporters from the
White House press oce, recalling her history
as California Attorney General and State
Prosecutor. ‘So, hear me when I say: I know
Donald Trump’s type. And in this campaign, I
will proudly put my record against his,’ Harris
pronounced to a cheering audience.
The eventual election result showed
that Harris’s record was not enough to win,
and a campaign that stressed freedom, at
the expense of brass-tack solutions to the
economic hardships facing many Americans,
ultimately failed.
Katie Gaddini is an Associate Professor
in Sociology at University College
London. Lucia Figueras-Pont is
ananthropologystudent at
University College London.
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