People seldom even know what a platform is, much less vote for it. And people were hostile to her and in favor of Trump for reasons are are outright Republican lies. What she actually did, said or stood for was widely ignored in favor of those lies.
She lost because of the price of eggs, and mandatory child sex change operations.
Now that is very much on point. Huge part of the electorate quite simply wasn’t listening either way – no hearing what good points Harris may have, no hearing how deranged Trump sounded, no getting the fact checks. Either literally or just discounting it all as campaign noise.
Add to that how, as unbelievable as it may seem for some here, for another large part of the electorate…
…and you are climbing uphill, considering the Electoral College advantage and the anti-establishment wave.
Rolling Stone on the Democrats’ problems with neoliberal centrism and the perception that they talk a big game and then do nothing once elected.
Well, we sure gave them the cure for that, didn’t we??!
And the the Republicans promise to screw them over, and they always keep that promise. “They tell it like it is!”
Looking at the final polling averages, Harris’s net personal favorability over Trump’s personal favorability was at least five points better than her near-tie when it came to the horse race question (who will you vote for, Trump or Harris?). So I do not see the evidence for the median voters wanting Trump. Instead, the evidence is that median voters did not want either one – especially Trump.
I think median voters who tipped for Trump mostly saw the election as a referendum on the Biden-Harris administration. They didn’t dislike Trump as much as I do. They did not buy that he was a fascist, whatever that means. But they disapproved of him personally and did not want him. What they most wanted was an all new administration. That wasn’t available, but Trump being out of office for four years made him closer to new.
P.S. If you are correct that “people wanted Trump,” I think that, for those at the tipping point, it was unconscious. This could be! What we say is often a socially acceptable rationalization of unconscious desires! But the problem with the unconscious is that we can’t measure it. So I feel a need look at what we can measure.
Agree…even for a section of voters who voted for him, they did not favor him on the personal front. Still they voted for him…imo the statement that Kamala made on a podcast/TV show that there is not a thing which she would likely change wrt present Biden admin/polices did damage her in the eyes of considerable number of swing voters (for whom inflation/economy and immigration were the 2 major issues of concern).
She did try to pivot away from the so-called “open borders” policy but the above statement did damage her when voters weighted her statement to how she would govern if elected. The entire MAGA universe played it up and amplified it huge on X(twitter).
Perhaps in hindsight she should have worded it better…words do matter. Yes Trump’s irrational wordson many occasions did matter too…he lost considerable number of votes too, only it did not cost him that much electorally in that he ultimately won.
I keep seeing this come up as if it is the one magic thing that would have made a difference. Not calling you out specifically but I’d like to hear opinions on the following:
-
What was the right answer to this question? What was Kamala supposed to say that would differentiate her from Biden without the media running away with the story about how she talked shit about him? She knew the question wasn’t being asked in honesty and she didn’t dignify the “please say something mean about your boss” question with an answer. But the narrative continues that she could have somehow threaded this needle and it would have meant something. Okay, what is it then? I watched her speeches and she talked about immigration and the economy in every single of them. She did have plans that were different from Biden’s plan and she talked about them in detail.
-
What is Trump’s answer to the question of how he would be different from himself? Did anyone even bother to ask him? Hey Trump, you were in charge back in the day and you tanked the economy and mismanaged a pandemic to the point where half a million Americans died. What are you going to do differently this time?
But he has been asked questions like this and he did give an answer. He’s going to get revenge against anyone and everyone who has wronged him. He’s going to weaponize the Justice Department to go after his political opponents. He’s going to put millions of people in cages and he’s going to use the military to do it. He’s going to do stupid tariffs that will make everything more expensive across the board. Certainly a different way of managing the country from last time but by no means better. But no one cares that about that. All they care about is that Kamala whiffed on the magic question with no right answer.
I agree. I don’t see ‘she lost because she said she wouldn’t do anything differently’ as being an honest position. I see it as being either:
- an excuse for voting for Trump (and if it hadn’t been this excuse it would have been another one–the person was always going to vote for Trump and just didn’t want to be candid about it), or
- a “pundit” answer for Why Dems Lost that sounds like it means something, but that actually is devoid of insight or useful analysis.
I haven’t heard anyone I respect resort to this as “the reason” for the 1.62% margin of victory enjoyed by the Republican candidate.
Repeating the economic proposals she made at the debate was the right answer.
It was a gaffe for her not to do that.
Every candidate makes gaffes. Harris made few.
In my informal long distance interactions with family/extended family members who are citizens of usa and have voted straight democrat tickets till now…more than a couple members mentioned this very point as a reason they were voting Trump…one even said she doesnt like Trump but Kamala’s "word salad’ answers (whatever that meant…I’m clueless) put her off.
I put that point across here since it came across a few times in my interactions…I concede it is anecdotal and the sample size is too tiny but I thought it may have been valid on a bigger sample size too…atleast in the asian american community.
My expectations of a big consolidation in the indian american/asian american community towards Kamala unfortunately did not happen(shocking me hugely) and in fa ct there was a considerable swing to Trump
“Word salad” is a term for speaking in a jumble of words that is confusing, incoherent, or meaningless – something that Harris’s opponent is also often accused of.
I fully agree this is not the sole reason for the Trump win…
though for a tiny percentage of the voters perhaps it did matter. And in a close election (the swing states were close) perhaps it swung votes to a small extent but I fully agree there is no data that I know of if it were the sole cause of votes shifting.
Perhaps it was one of many reasons in the case of a few voters.
Thank you…I never understood the term till now. Perhaps it is an americanism.
I have mostly seen it in American media – if the references are to be believed, it is a popularized usage of a phrase originally used among therapists to describe a verbal communication issue.
The thing is, as with many such popularized usages, among a large swath of the public the meaning has seen drift, in this case in the direction of: “if I don’t understand what that means then it’s word salad”. Which as you can imagine unfairly extends it to cases where the speech does have content but the audience are the ones not understanding.
The winning candidate OTOH has christened his version of it as “weave” to try and project that his own stream of consciousness wanderings are an actual rhetorical strategy.
Must I remind you America elected a perpetual gaffe machine?
Kamala didn’t lose because of any gaffes.
As I believe I’ve said before (though perhaps not here) there were so many factors working against her that I’m amazed now that she did so well. What could they have done differently in hindsight? I’m really not sure. Would Rogan really have made a difference? More time in Michigan and PA?
- Close the border and actively deport anyone with a court order.
This may have been the most important issue. I had a diehard Democrat ask me how i felt about Trump’s plan to deport illegal immigrants. This person did not vote for Trump but expressed support for it.
People remember President Biden calling on Harris to address the border issue. She was referred to as the Border Czar. IMO Biden intended to keep the border open and by assigning her the task to “fix it” he was throwing her under the bus. When she didn’t address the issue in the campaign she signaled her intent to keep the border open. She looked like Biden 2.0.
I don’t see the election as a yes vote for Trump. I see it as a no vote for Biden. I also see the task of defeating Trump as low hanging fruit. Instead of hiding Biden’s failing mental health the media supporting the party should have cut him loose a year ago so a primary could provide a better choice.
And then get blamed for the resulting economic disaster.