It’s one thing to lose an election; it’s another to lose your identity. The Democratic Party in 2024 faced both these crises, culminating in Kamala Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump. But the real story isn’t just the loss itself—it’s the timeline. The Democrats didn’t simply wake up to a red wave on election night. They saw it coming, months—if not years—before the polls closed. The warning signs were blaring, yet their response was tepid, constrained by internal contradictions and a miscalculation of their own base’s discontent.
For decades, Democrats relied on their coalition of diverse, working-class, and young voters to carry elections. However, in the Trump era, that coalition began to fracture. By the time Harris inherited Joe Biden’s shaky mantle, the party’s grip on its base had loosened significantly. The cracks had been forming for years, but in 2024, they split wide open. Voters who once delivered decisive Democratic victories either stayed home or, more surprisingly, voted Republican.
What makes this loss even more striking is how predictable it was. Internal Democratic polling revealed grim realities early on. Harris’s campaign never showed her leading Trump, and despite public polls briefly suggesting otherwise, her advisers never bought into the optimism. They weren’t fighting to win; they were fighting to mitigate a looming loss. This wasn’t just a bad election cycle—it was the culmination of deep-seated issues the party had long ignored.
The Early Warning Signs
From the start, Kamala Harris’s campaign was an uphill battle. Internal polling, as disclosed by her senior advisers, never showed her leading Trump.
And she might not have had much chance of winning anyway, given the deficit she inherited from Biden when he dropped out of the race in July.
“We were hopeful. I don’t know how optimistic we were, but we thought, OK, this is tied, and if a couple things break our way [we could win],” David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the campaign, said Tuesday on the “Pod Save America” podcast in a joint interview with fellow Harris campaign alums Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter.
Plouffe said the campaign’s internal polling never had Harris ahead of Trump.
“We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” he said. “I think it surprised people, because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”
Her campaign strategy, while emphasizing loyalty to President Biden, lacked the adaptability required to confront Trump’s populist narrative. Biden’s late withdrawal left Harris to inherit an administration plagued by discontent, a struggling economy, and a pandemic hangover. […]
— Read More: redstate.com
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Author: Red State
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