The Harris campaign’s swings and misses

Part One of Two.

As with any losing effort, the Kamala Harris campaign is taking big hits in the wake of the vice president’s defeat last Tuesday. Most focus on the things she didn’t do—break with President Biden, offer a better response to anxiety over inflation, or make effective outreach to working-class voters. But her campaign tried plenty of other things that just did not work. Here are five:

1. Appearing with Liz Cheney and never-Trump Republicans. In the last month of the campaign, Harris went heavy on appealing to Republicans supposedly disaffected from their party and looking for an excuse to cross over and vote for a Democrat. She unveiled multiple endorsements from Republicans and spent Oct. 21, only 15 days before the election, touring three battleground states—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—with former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney.

Progressives were appalled. “Does anyone see the electoral danger of the Democratic Party spending a decade and literally billions of dollars on TV ads telling the country that Bush/Cheney are horrible, and then the same Democratic Party turning around and touting the endorsement of the Cheneys?” asked progressive activist and editor David Sirota on Oct. 26.

Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, on Election Night demanded “a reckoning in the Democratic Party,” adding, “Campaigning with billionaires and Liz Cheney instead of holding a single earned media event in front of the HQ of a corporate price gouger or campaigning side-by-side w/ populist fighters shows rot.”

It was the exact opposite of Donald Trump’s approach.

William Galston, the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program and a veteran of the Clinton White House, said Trump rejected cushioning his message to appeal to moderates who had supported Nikki Haley in the primaries, instead choosing to make an “all-out appeal to the Republican base.” He said Trump “won the gamble that the party would unite” behind him.

Harris lost her gamble. Not only did she not attract more Republican votes, she received the lowest number of crossover votes recorded in exit polls for the last 13 elections. Trump received votes from 94 percent of Republicans, the same percentage he had in 2020.

Former Rep. Jim Greenwood, a leader of Republicans for Harris in Pennsylvania, said the goal was to persuade as many as 9 percent of Republicans to switch to Harris. But Harris received only 5 percent, one less than Biden in 2020 and considerably less than the 13 percent Bill Clinton received in 1996.

2. A bumbling appeal to Catholics. Harris was the first presidential nominee since 1984 to skip the Al Smith dinner put on by the Diocese of New York to help Catholic Charities. That was on Oct. 18. Eight days later, she was a no-show at the National Italian American Foundation, declining either to attend or send a taped message as Trump did for the big annual event.

Trump repeatedly cast Harris as anti-Catholic, with little rebuttal from Democrats. “Any Catholic that votes for Comrade Kamala Harris should have their head examined,” he said in a Truth Social post in September.

Soon-to-be vice president J.D. Vance, himself a convert to Catholicism, also laid into her. In an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he said Harris played “an integral part of the most anti-Catholic administration in living memory.” He said the administration used “the power of the government to target Catholics for their faith.”

On the stump, Politico reported “cultural dissonance” in Pennsylvania between Harris and Catholics in the state with the second-highest Catholic population.

Exit polls showed that Catholics flipped against Harris more than any other religious group compared to Biden’s showing in 2020. She lost Catholic voters by almost 20 points after Biden, a Catholic, had won them by 5 points. In both elections, Catholics made up more than 20 percent of the electorate.

3. Emphasizing democracy over pocketbook issues. Before Biden dropped out of the race, he took pains to cast Trump as an existential threat to democracy. But Harris moved on from that when she replaced the president at the top of the ticket. She knew it had not been working for Biden; it was too theoretical for voters grappling with the reality of higher prices. As Election Day grew closer, though, she inexplicably revived it. It didn’t work any better for her.

Exit polls showed much of the country was indeed concerned about threats to democracy. They just didn’t agree with Democrats about who poses the threat. “Many Republicans and independents saw Harris and the Democrats as the real threats to democracy,” wrote Galston. “And also because the charge offered no new information that would sway voters whose minds weren’t made up.”

Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder who was at the center of election-integrity fights in Arizona, vigorously opposed the Democratic line of attack even as he fought with Republicans who questioned his state’s 2020 count. “If we label everything as a threat to democracy, we will undermine the credibility of our public comments, we will impede attempts at election reform, we will exasperate good-faith actors who simply have different policy priorities, and we will cause outrage fatigue,” he wrote, adding, “Don’t cry wolf unless there’s a wolf.”

In the end, CNN exit polls found that 73 percent said democracy was either somewhat or very threatened. The 35 percent who said democracy in the U.S. is somewhat threatened voted 50 percent for Trump, 49 percent for Harris. Of the 38 percent who said it was “very threatened,” 51 percent voted for Trump, 47 percent for Harris.

4. Expecting too much from the abortion issue. For much of the campaign, Harris put protection of women’s health and abortion rights at the top of her agenda. It did not pay off at the polls, partly because those rights were not specifically threatened in most of the battleground states.

That there is overwhelming support for making abortion legal is clear both from the success of most of the abortion referenda on various state ballots and from the exit polls. Nationally, 68 percent said abortion “should be legal in all or most cases.” Only 29 percent said it should be illegal in all or most cases. The seven battleground states mirrored those numbers, topped by the 71 percent in Georgia who said it should be legal. Sixty-six percent said it should be legal in Nevada, the lowest of the seven.

But that was not reflected in who they voted for. Harris won women 53-45 according to NBC’s exit polls, a weaker showing than Biden, who got 57 percent of the women’s vote four years earlier. It is also a lower percentage than every Democratic nominee since 2008, according to the Roper Center.

5. Celebrities, celebrities, and more celebrities. Both parties trot out celebrity endorsements. Hulk Hogan and Brett Favre versus LeBron James and Magic Johnson; Kelsey Grammer and Mel Gibson versus Robert DeNiro and George Clooney; Kid Rock and Lil Wayne versus Beyonce and Taylor Swift. But only Democrats get blowback for their celebrities, perhaps because Hollywood is a very liberal place and easy to peg as elitist. In the wake of Harris’s defeat, that blowback has been fierce.

Democratic presidential candidates—or at least the last three losing candidates—have a tradition of staging big concerts in the place of standard speeches, usually to inject some pizzazz and excitement into their closing pitches. John Kerry in 2004 , Hillary Clinton in 2016, and now Harris in 2024 brought out the firepower, each including Bruce Springsteen. In each case, Republicans fired back with talk of “Hollywood elites.” In each case, Democrats lost.

All that star power even triggered speculation that the A-listers may have harmed her effort. The only clear benefit was they brought more focus on the campaign, most notably when the vote.gov website got 405,999 visitors in the 24 hours after Taylor Swift posted the URL on her Instagram post endorsing Harris.

Since the election, the backlash has gained steam. Stephen A. Smith, the ESPN commentator who said he voted for Harris, lashed out at Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama and other celebrities, saying some of what they said on the stump “alienates an electorate.”

“In the end, celebrities who are worth hundreds of millions, if not billions, who most American citizens feel are incredibly detached from their way of life and their quality of life, were not going to get away in guilting them into doing something different than what their experience says is going on and what they should do about it,” he said on his podcast.