Kamala Harris was convinced to abandon her progressive ideas. So Democrats didn’t vote for her

Harris sought centrist Republican votes, experts tell John Bowden, at the expense of the Obama coalition. But Republican women didn’t end up turning out for her — and neither did a large part of the Democratic base

Democrats are looking at spending at least the first two years of Donald Trump’s second presidency in the wilderness after losing the Senate. It looks increasingly likely they will fail to retake the House of Representatives, too. Now, many are questioning whether the party is truly going to learn anything of value from the second defeat of the Democratic standard-bearer to Trump and MAGA Republicanism.

Centrist Democrats in particular are taking it from all sides, humiliated with a seven-swing-state sweep after successfully talking Harris into abandoning the progressive-ish agenda she championed in her 2020 bid for the White House. Those centrists spent the past few months stating plainly that she would not be a meaningful departure from the presidency of Joe Biden, with whom Harris could not identify a single issue on which she disagreed.

Instead, she campaigned with Liz Cheney and sought out moderate Republican voters — the Nikki Haley coalition — in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Analysts now agree with what the election results seemed to show last week: that strategy failed to move a significant number of voters to Harris’s side in all but a few areas. Worse, it likely alienated the vice president’s base at a time when Democrats were already in dire straits with those same voters.

J. Miles Coleman, executive editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, explains that the so-called “#NeverTrump” Republicans of 2016 are now either “standard Republicans or #Resist Libs”.

“You did have some of the suburbs around Milwaukee shift a little to Harris compared to…last time,” he noted. “[But] fundamentally, you know, it’s Trump’s party now… You probably have a lot of Democrats now saying, ‘We maybe, kind of should have focused more on turning out our base.’”

There’s also reason to believe, he says, that fears about younger Black men leaving the Democratic Party may be real, yet still overblown.

One fact remains to skew the numbers, which some Democrats are loath to admit: millions of voters, particularly younger ones, stayed home rather than turn out to vote for Democrats in 2024. Harris’s vote total marked a sharp decrease from Joe Biden’s in 2020, which was a year of higher voter turnout especially for younger voters.

Joe Biden won millions more votes in 2020 than his running mate Kamala Harris did four years later, while voter turnout nationally dipped by 2% (AP)

Even in states where Harris campaigned intensely, there are already signs that a failure to turn out voters who inherently lean Democratic and likely were not considering Donald Trump at all contributed to Harris’s loss. Consider Detroit, a majority-Black city in one of the nation’s biggest battleground states. Despite turnout statewide remaining roughly unchanged from 2020 levels, there was a 3-percent drop in the share of eligible voters who cast ballots in the deep-blue city this year. And that’s not even touching the vice president’s collapse in Dearborn, the hub of Arab American life in the state, where Democrats were swept to re-election easily in local races while Harris’s support sank to unrecognizable depths.

Just about everyone agrees: a massive part of the Democrats’ inability to motivate their own base to turn out stemmed from the refusal of Joe Biden to consider stepping down before the 2024 primaries took place. The stink of a party lurching on for months bound by pride to nominate a candidate voters so clearly did not think was physically or mentally capable to serve another four years in office never washed off Harris, his former running mate — especially as she declined to distance herself from those decisions at all. Pod Save America host and Obamaworld insider Jon Favreau revealed last week that internal Biden campaign polling had the incumbent president losing a 400-electoral-vote blowout before he withdrew from the race in July.

“We modeled that she would need about 83-84% of the Black male vote to have a chance of winning. She didn’t get anywhere near that until our last October poll,” said Dr Alvin Tillery, whose group tracked Black support for Biden-Harris for months. “[By that point] she’s at like 71% after being at like 59% for months.”

Tillery, a professor at Northwestern whose 2040 Strategy Group projected in late October that Harris was in striking distance of turning out the requisite percentage of Democratic-leaning Black men to actually win, told The Independent that Harris’s campaign never made the sustained investment in turning out the Democratic base — rather than swing voters — which it needed to overcome Trump’s consolidated dominance of the GOP.

“The craziest thing is that the Democrats just — I don’t know if it’s overconfidence, [but] they just didn’t message to those groups,” Tillery said.

Kamala Harris became the first Democrat to lose the popular vote to Donald Trump (AFP via Getty Images)

“In an age of digital ads, where you can message to those groups and the white swing voters that you really prize won’t even see those messages because they’re all on, like, YouTube?” he continued. “Yeah, just crazy to me that they didn’t do that.”

Trump’s biggest successes in the 2024 cycle were his gains among younger men of all races, but mainly white and Hispanic men. He also made slight inroads with Republican voters, further diminishing the already-tiny share of registered Republicans who voted Democratic in 2020. That’s a statistic which is notable for how un-notable it is — in any other year, expected, but not after a sustained months-long effort by the Harris campaign to target white Republican women, moderate and conservative alike.

The lack of a clearer backlash stemming from the overturning of Roe vs Wade stunned even some analysts.

“It was surprising to me that Harris lost the white women’s vote by like six points,” Coleman said in his interview. “It wasn’t even close.”

“It was…an election for the Democrats where the kind of long-term trends that had been working in their favor…basically stopped. Reversed some. Whereas the trends that were working against them just kept going.”

Tillery offered one clear diagnosis for why younger voters and Black voters turned out in such lower numbers.

“I wish somebody would come out and just be truthful about the fact that…Israel’s war on Gaza probably cost them, like, 50,000 to 100,000 votes in all of these swing states, right? Like, look at Michigan!” said Tillery. “But if you don’t want to own up to that stuff, then you know, you can tell your story about what a titan Donald Trump is.”

“If that’s the story, that’s the story. But a lot of us gave them other pathways to follow.”