This is the difficulty for Democrats. The Republican strategy of “The reason you aren’t getting ahead and things cost too much is because of THEM” works on enough voters to get elected and just maybe end democratic (with small d) rule. If you reason with voters and treat them like adults, you lose. If you claim that you can fix everything on day one, you win. You can even claim that you have fixed everything even when nothing is fixed and those same morons that elected you will eat up every word as if they came down from Mt Sinai.
What could Harris possibly have said or done to win over people motivated by hatred and incapable of reason?
To agree with you, I believe that six elected presidents had no prior elective office experience (Taylor, Grant, Taft, Hoover, Eisenhower, Trump) while only one one runner-up had no elective office experience (Wilkie).
I haven’t worked it out, but I think this is close to being statistically significant. If the kind of experience we are talking about is experience in elective office, experience may be an electoral victory negative. Coincidence? Maybe, but I think that when you serve in elective office, you have to make decisions that some voters will dislike, thus harming your ability to become president.
P.S. Looks like P value is 0.055. So the relationship between inexperience (by my metric) and getting elected president is close to the rather arbitrary 5 percent measure of statisticaly significance, but not quite there.
P.P.S. If Harris had less experience when she ran in November 2024, would she have been more likely to win? Yes, but it would have been hard to get nominated.
I think the main problem with putting a number to this is we cannot really quantify “experience.” Does only elected office count? If so, what level of elected office and how long did they do it…heck…too long may seem like a person who is not moving forward? Head of a company? General in the military? Ran some government agency? Professor? Scientist? Etc.
What values can we assign to those? How long were they in each role? Not to mention assessing was the person successful in each of those roles or only some roles or none of those roles?
That was not an attempted gotcha I did genuinely think they were saying Harris somehow “checked out” of the presidential election before any votes were counted, not talking about the primaries.
Though TBH that is one respect I think the OP sort of has a point. Whatever you think of Harris as a candidate, it’s obvious that after her primary withdrawal, when Biden chose her as VP he didn’t think she was a strong presidential candidate. iMO he chose her because he didn’t think she was a strong presidential candidate and so there wouldn’t be less pressure on him to stand aside for her. That I do blame Biden for.
He should have chosen someone he did think was a solid presidential candidate as VP and agreed to only stand for one term on day one. He was always going to be too old to run successfully in 2024. This is not just 20:20 hindsight it was discussed in 2020 (at one point it was rumored he had agreed to only stand for one term).
Sure, but Grant and Eisenhower were top level generals; Taylor was a major general acclaimed for the Mexican-American War; Hoover had been the administrator of various WWI related food programs and the Secretary of Commerce; and Taft had been the Solicitor General, a judge on the Sixth Circuit, Governor General of the Philippines, and Secretary of War.
No. The study of economics is not easy, and even expert economist argue over the causes of inflation and how to ameliorate it. The voters did fail in that they bele9ived his lies in 2016, then voted him out in 2020- they forgot what a bald faced liar he was.
But here-
You are correct.
Thus that is a legit point of debate. Even the Op brings this up. So saying she had poor qualifications, allows us to show winners with worse qualifications. That shows that actually her experience was pretty good.
Taylor, Grant and Ike were all great military men. It is experience to organize something like the Allied forces, like Ike did. Hoover had much experience in running aid campaigns and was internationally famous for doing so. He was also Secretary of Commerce for 2 terms, and his service was very popular.
Right. Massive experience.
Good questions.
This whole thread seems to me to be one big Harris “gotcha”.
It is nice to look back with 20/20 hindsight, but not often very useful.
I have repeatedly written that background, including but not limited to experience, is not the thing that gets someone elected. It is A thing that can influence the outcome, one of many.
This is not a point that is worth pursuing further.
This. Harris is not below average. It wasn’t her. It was us (by which I mean the American voting population who actually voted).
What credentials did the Orange One have, besides a career of reckless criminality? Why are Dems subject to such higher standards?
The only problem Harris had was being thrust into the race mid-stream. It was a very difficult position to be in, but she managed it as well as was possible. The American public was just too fucking stupid to understand what they were voting for, and now they face the consequences.
Well, when it came to 2024, Trump did have the experience of being president for four years.
What are your standards for being “a particularly good president”? Who qualifies IYO?
Other than running a second time, I thought his record as president was quite good.
Really, I mean, demanding that “this was such a no-brainer anyone should have been able to close the sale” is unfair because if it were so then whoever was candidate should not have needed to close the sale.
Eh, you don’t want to lame-duck yourself on day one. Especially not if you’ll be seen as a placeholder for a successor being groomed.
I think the unique circumstances of 2024 had more to do with the outcome than Kamala’s personal political skills. She was dealt a very tough hand; running to succeed an unpopular incumbent President of her own party. The obvious move there is to throw the President under the bus and run a campaign stressing the things you’ll do differently. I think she needed to make more of an effort to do that than she did, but it still would have been extremely difficult to distance herself from an Administration of which she was the second-ranking member!
Given all that, I think it would be unwise to view her loss as a data point demonstrating that “America just isn’t ready to vote for a woman/minority”.
FTR I consider Harris to be a decent-but-not-great politician. A rare talent like Obama probably could have overcome those obstacles to win the election, but by definition, candidates like that aren’t usually available.
I don’t either. As opposed to trump, who had absolutely no political experience before being elected the first time, and displayed astonishing incompetence for the job while in office?
And even if you didn’t think Harris herself was completely qualified for the job, I have no doubt she would have surrounded herself with extremely qualified, highly competent, law-abiding people in her administration. As opposed to the shockingly incompetent and venal lackeys trump chose, whose only qualification is total servility and obedience to him.
You may not want to but if you are pushing 80 and facing a GOP candidate who is an existential threat to America, it is your duty to. The events of 2024 were entirely predictable, an octogenarian is too old to run for president. That’s a hard pill to swallow I know, I’m not saying it wouldn’t have been a really difficult decision for Biden to make. But he should have made that call, everything that followed is a direct result of his failure to do so in 2020/21. That tarnishes his (otherwise excellent) reputation.
At the very least he should have picked a VP who he thought would make a good presidential candidate, and whatever you think of Harris it’s clear Biden did not think that of her when he picked her
As I said earlier, I believe he could have done so as late as after the 2022 midterm, when losing the House ensured no more banner legislation would go through. And then thrown the campaign to succeed him open to all comers. Not imperative to have a “good candidate” Veep lined up in that case, let her earn it.
Again, read the thread title. this is not about comparisons to Trump, which are beside the point because he was not a Democratic candidate, nor with any other actual president.
One hopes that a good candidate will do a good job once elected, but the first job is to get elected, and she did not succeed there. Maybe it was all about her being a woman, and to whatever extent that is true that is certainly not any shortcoming of hers. To the extent that there were other factors, one of those was the lack of depth in her government experience.
Of course she would have been a million times better (hyperbole, but remember you can’t divide by zero) president than Trump. I most fervently wish she had been elected. But wishing does not make it so, and denying the existence of issues with her candidacy does not make them go away.
That said, any question like that posed in the OP smacks of blaming the losing candidate. I do not blame her for the loss. If I were going to blame one person, it would be Biden (and his advisors), for not accepting that he had been elected as a caretaker to allow the country to recover from the first Trump term, and for trying and failing to win a second term. I think he was a very good caretaker and accomplished some good things. But this failed run pretty much erases all the good that he did.
eta: I see the thread has moved on and this last point has already been made. So just consider this a “me too.”
I disagree because that gives throws away the advantage of being the incumbent (which a VP is never entirely going to be, but if you have spent the term as the obvious successor, and included in the real business of government, that makes you much more so), and having an obvious candidate helps avoid the circular firing squad that hotly contested primaries can turn into.
But that’s somewhat irrelevant especially on this thread. How and when exactly Biden should have agreed not to stand again is beside the point (other than it should have been way way earlier than a few weeks before the election, that doomed Harris’ campaign from day one).
What I hold against Biden is that he clearly chose Harris because in 2020 he didn’t think she’d make a good presidential candidate. Even if he didn’t immediately plan on deciding not to stand, it was always on the cards, and his VP would always be the front runner to replace him. He should have chosen someone he thought could beat Trump, but he didn’t he chose someone he didn’t think could beat Trump. That’s a huge stain on his reputation.
Again that was not a typical election cycle. There was an obvious fascist waiting in the wings to destroy America. Biden was going to be over 80 during the next election. Both those facts were known in 2020 and the outcome of the actions Biden took entirely predictable.
Well, there really are good reasons not to lame-duck yourself going into the election; people would reasonably ask “If you don’t expect to be capable of handling the Presidency in four years, what makes you think you can do it now?”
It would have been better for the Party and the country if he’d announced in like early 2023 that he wouldn’t stand for re-election. But this was totally foreseeable – all high-level politicians, even the ones we like, are basically egomaniacs. Biden was going to step down after one term like Gollum was going to give up the Ring, and that’s not so much a personal failing as a weakness endemic to the breed.
I think it’s obvious that Harris was the choice for primarily racial/gender balance reasons, but I don’t think she was a particularly poor candidate. Sure, her Presidential campaign crashed and burned, but 99% of them do. If he’d just picked the candidate other than himself who was most popular, he’d have picked Bernie Sanders, who would also be too old to run in ‘24 or ‘28. (Also, see “egomaniacs” above; I don’t think Presidential candidates really worry about their VP’s chances eight years down the road, they think “I am going to be the greatest and most successful President ever, and whoever I choose to succeed me will be swept into office by acclamation”)
And based on polling, Biden and Sanders were clearly our two strongest candidates against Trump. Given that Biden barely won, it’s likely that running a younger candidate in 2020 might just have led to Trump’s re-election.
Of course he should not have announced that going into the election. That would be insane.
All I’m saying he should have picked someone he thought would make a good candidate if, at some point in the year or two after he was elected, he decided to (or was forced to) not stand again. That is not remotely the same as saying publicly “I’m standing as a one term president” before the election.
There would of course be rumors that he planned to do that but there were rumors anyway.