Nov. 12, 2024, 12:47 p.m.
This is the second of two parts on the Harris campaign's missteps. Click here for numbers one through five on our list, which includes ineffective appeals to Republicans and Catholics and an overemphasis on democracy, abortion, and celebrities.
6. Making Trump's character the closing issue
Kamala Harris could not resist the temptation at the end of the campaign to attack Donald Trump for his many character flaws, calling him a fascist and follower of Hitler. It was, analysts now agree, a waste of time. She could have learned that lesson much earlier if she had just paid attention to what the conservative, anti-Trump Club for Growth had done a year earlier.
In 2023, the Club spent $6 million testing 40 anti-Trump ads, hoping some of them would help block him from getting the Republican nomination. As The New York Times noted at the time, “None of them worked; some even helped Trump.” They concluded that “Trump's bad character is already baked in.”
The CNN exit polls found that voters who decided in the final week went for Trump by 8 points. That was the week during which Trump spent much of his time denying he was a Hitler figure, after his former chief of staff John Kelly told The New York Times the former president was an admirer of Hitler.
Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic group Third Way publicly tried to get Harris not to launch those attacks, warning the campaign should be focused more on voters’ economic concerns.
But like so many other Trump opponents before her, she could not hold back. Pollster Frank Luntz called it “political malpractice.”
7. Too much campaigning with Biden
The history of incumbent vice presidents running to succeed the president who appointed them offers one lesson—even when the president is as popular as Ronald Reagan was in 1988: Run independently with almost no joint appearances. Harris ignored that history. Vice President Richard Nixon campaigned just twice with President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960. Vice Presidents Hubert Humphrey in 1968, George H.W. Bush in 1988, and Al Gore in 2000 campaigned only once with their respective presidents.
Harris interacted with President Biden 16 times after he handed off the nomination on July 21. Ten were in public—six campaign events and four official events.
8. Ignoring attacks on crime and transgender issues
Steve Harrison, like many North Carolinians, watches a lot of football. But, as the political reporter for Charlotte’s WFAE, he also watches the campaign commercials during the games. And he was amazed at what he called the “seemingly endless loop” of Trump commercials mocking Harris’s 2019 interview in which she said she supported taxpayer funding of surgeries for inmates who want to transition to a different gender. The tagline—“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”—was devastating. “The ads are in heavy rotation in North Carolina,” Harrison wrote, adding, “What’s most surprising about the commercials is not the content, but the lack of reaction to the content” from the Harris campaign.
“We have to answer it and say we won’t do it,” said former President Bill Clinton, according to The New York Times, which reported that he pressed the point with the campaign “and was told the Trump ads were not necessarily having an impact.” But the Trump campaign found they were having a big impact, making “her look unserious, foolish and outside the political mainstream.”
Kenneth Baer, a White House speechwriter for Bill Clinton, wrote that Harris was “Dukakis-ed,” referring to the 1988 Democratic nominee’s infamous failure to respond to GOP attack ads calling him soft on crime.
A Project 2025 fan (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
9. Focusing on Project 2025
Whether at the Democratic National Convention, on X, or pontificating on MSNBC, Democrats were convinced that the key to victory was shedding light on Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s effort to staff up a new Trump term and provide a policy road map. That belief was so strong that the Harris campaign made it the focus of an ad campaign aired during football games and aimed at Black voters. Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager, said in a statement that “Donald Trump’s Project 2025 makes one thing clear to Black America: He doesn’t give a damn about us. This campaign is going to make Trump defend his indefensible Project 2025 and ensure the key coalitions this campaign needs to win in November know exactly how his extreme agenda will take their communities backwards.”
The ads didn’t get any response from Trump, who had already disavowed Project 2025. And there is no evidence that football-watching Black Americans who were worried about the economy or inflation were in any way influenced by a nearly 900-page policy document put out by a think tank.
10. Tim Walz, ambassador to rural America
When Harris picked Tim Walz to be her running mate, she stressed his small-town rural roots in Nebraska and his days as a football coach. As the election approached, the campaign leaned into that role for the Minnesota governor, seeing him as Harris's ambassador to rural America. On Oct. 12, they dressed him up in Carhartt hunting chaps and an orange vest and sent him with his shotgun to the town of Sleepy Eye in Brown County, Minnesota, for the opening day of the state’s pheasant-hunting season.
Three days later, he wore a flannel coat and a campaign-branded camo hat in Lawrence County in western Pennsylvania as he unveiled the campaign’s plan to help rural areas. The campaign also began airing an ad on more than 500 rural radio stations in five battleground states. It ended with Walz saying, “Now Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, they don’t think like us. They’re in it for themselves.”
Harris adviser John Anzalone explained the strategy to Politico: “If you can do a couple points better, five points better, in those rural areas, and you multiply that by all the rural areas in those states, it’s a big deal.” He said Walz was “the first nominee in modern history, maybe since [Jimmy] Carter, who can talk small town America, rural America.”
Rural America was not listening to Walz’s pitch. On Election Day, Brown County went for Trump, 67 to 32 percent, up 2 points over 2020. Lawrence County went for Trump, 66.6 to 32.7, again 2 points better than in 2020.
Exit polls show rural voters made up 19 percent of the electorate. Trump won them by 27 points in 2016, 15 points in 2020—and 30 points in 2024.
