Don’t Blame Kamala Harris for Donald Trump’s Win

Blame the millions of eligible voters who sat out the election

Credit: Christopher Weyant, The Boston Globe

Here we are, just days away from swearing in the forty-seventh president of the United States, and the postmortems on the election are still pouring in. Here’s mine: While it’s true that no candidate has ever run a flawless campaign, Kamala Harris ran a near-flawless campaign.¹

Nitpick all you want, but the finger-pointing doesn’t persuade in light of the plain choice for president: a sane, competent, and well-meaning woman with a distinguished career as a prosecutor, senator, and vice president, or a guy who’s a known fraudster, grifter, adjudicated sexual assaulter and insurrectionist—and convicted felon.

So how did the election go? “Half the voters made an insane choice,” noted George Takei. Keep in mind, too, that Takei is referring only to the people who voted, not to the roughly 36% of eligible voters who didn’t vote.

Trump won the popular vote by about 1.5 percent, which tells us that enthusiasm for Trump wasn’t high. We know this to be true because of a YouGov survey on Harris’s and Trump’s proposals. Here’s the clever catch: It was a blind-test survey. Participants were simply asked which proposals they liked and which ones they didn’t like. They were not asked to attach a name to the proposals. So what did the survey show? That if the election were decided purely on proposals alone, Harris was the clear winner.

Another apparently winning position, or so many of us thought, was reproductive rights. When Roe v. Wade was overturned, women immediately became second-class citizens. The reaction was fierce. When the 2022 midterm elections came around, several states had put up ballot measures that would secure a right to an abortion. The measures prevailed — even in some so-called “red” states. It was then assumed that people would come out in droves again for the presidential election — and maybe in even larger numbers, with Michael Moore even saying there would be a “tsunami of women” showing up at the polls. The tsunami didn’t transpire. Here’s a question I’d like to see answered: Of those ninety million people who didn’t vote, what percentage of them were women who would like to see Roe v. Wade restored? It’s probably a significantly large number — and if those voters had come out to vote for the candidate in favor of reproductive rights, Kamala Harris would have walked away with the election.

If the phrase “character matters” means anything, it means we place a high degree of importance on how a person behaves in a world of other people. We see this in courtrooms when an attorney brings in a “character witness.” In the case of Donald Trump, he’s been a public figure for decades, which means we have a track record of his character. Care to see some highlights from the entirety of his public life? Here you go:

• He and his father wouldn’t rent apartments to Black people
• He’s stiffed contractors and drove one person to suicide
• He’s a failed businessman many times over with multiple bankruptcies
• He scammed students with a fake university
• He misused funds from his own charity
• He has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women
• He was found guilty of sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll
• He was found guilty of engaging in election interference (the New York “hush money” trial)
• He neglected to take the pandemic seriously
• He incited an insurrection and tried to overthrow the government
• And on his way out the door, he walked off with classified documents

There is more. Yet Trump’s long record of malfeasance means nothing to his followers. They love him for his bigotry, his crudeness, his vulgarity, his inane sharks and battery² story — and decided they wanted more.

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Trump should never have been able to run for president for a third time. Section 3 the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly states that no person who has engaged in an insurrection can run for political office — including the office of the presidency. So much for taking direction from the Constitution. And it’s true that Attorney General Merrick Garland slow-walked his investigation. He could have moved more swiftly to investigate Trump but chose not to, apparently.³

Prior to any opportunity for Garland to act, there was Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had the power to whip up an anti-Trump bloc to convict Trump on his second impeachment. A conviction would have prevented Trump from seeking office a third time.

We can blame Kevin McCarthy for helping to resurrect Trump. For a few weeks after the attempted coup, Trump was in the doghouse—and then McCarthy decided to make amends with a man whose actions he inspired and was condemning just weeks prior. This visit opened the door to more people visiting Mar-a-Lago to pay respects to the disgraced loser.

And then there’s Joe Biden, I’m sorry to say. The man should have stuck to his implied promise he made at the outset of his run that he had no intention of running for a second term, that he saw himself as a “bridge” to a new and younger generation. Did Biden lie or did he change his mind? Probably the latter — but only after Trump said he would run for president again. Maybe Biden was thinking, “I beat him once. I can beat him again.” Water under the bridge now. Absent a primary that she may or may not have won, Kamala Harris could have used a longer runway.

And behind all of that — Mitch McConnell refusing to act, Merrick Garland dragging his feet — we can go back to 2015 and pin blame on the major newspapers and networks that failed to hammer Trump relentlessly for being unfit to hold the highest office in the land. The media had a bounty of stories to choose from — not renting to Black people, stiffing real estate contractors, allegations of sexual misbehavior from multiple women, his suspect business dealings (just how do you go bankrupt running a casino?) — but instead they went easy on the star of a long-running reality TV show. It was Trump’s appeal as a TV personality and for saying outré things — what a maverick! — that kept him in the race in 2016.

Fast forward to 2024, the Harris campaign discovered that “it proved disturbingly difficult to persuade undecided voters that Trump had been a bad president.” Was this due to living in a Fox News silo? Yes, but other media sources can share some blame as well. As Michael Tomasky wrote in The New Republic: “Today, the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more — sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.”

Our political structure in recent years has changed because the media structure has changed. The “mass media” — the major networks, the major newspapers in the country — are locked in the political structure of the twentieth century. But today we no longer have electronic mass media. We have electronic individual media. Everything is atomized. Hey, a news story personalized just for you! I can see how living in a silo of lies can get a person to vote for Trump, but I also want to believe that people can’t be that detached from reality. Can they? Are they? Yes, they are.

Google Trends reported that the query “Did Joe Biden drop out?” spiked on election day. This suggests that the people who made such a search aren’t low-information voters, they’re no-information voters.

For voters who knew Joe Biden wasn’t on the ticket, there are still many examples that demonstrate the degree to which our benighted electorate could be clueless and out of the loop. Two examples will suffice to prove my point.

For years people have been complaining about inflation and high prices, so what did a majority of voters do on election day? They voted for a guy who will raise prices because of his dedication to tariffs. Even the people over at the George W. Bush Institute understand what tariffs are. Google Trends shows that a search for the term “what are tariffs” spiked after the election.⁴ Isn’t this the same as studying for a test that you failed? Oh, and just how serious was the concern about inflation anyway? Did the high price of things crimp people’s enthusiasm for shopping? Would people rein in their spending on Black Friday? Nope: “Black Friday hits a record $74.4B in sales online, up 5% on last year.”

Immigrants taking away American jobs? How about immigrants accepting jobs that most Americans don’t want to do? Nearly three quarters of immigrants are agricultural workers. We’re talking about people who pick fruits and vegetables. Imagine if even a quarter of these workers were deported. Such a move would wreak havoc on the economy. As for undocumented immigrants coming into the country, illegal crossings at the southern border decreased under the Biden administration while deportations increased.

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Here’s a great quote from recent essay on World War II in The Atlantic by Timothy W. Ryback. He’s referring to Frederick Birchall, who was an English journalist and editor at the New York Times: “Birchall expressed his dismay at the apparent willingness of Germans to submit to authoritarian rule when they had the opportunity for a democratic alternative.”

Sound familiar? All you have to do is swap out a few words and replace them with others to make it contemporaneous: “Birchall expressed his dismay at the apparent willingness of Americans to submit to a person with authoritarian sentiments when they had the opportunity for a democratic alternative.”

By no means am I saying Trump and his actions are on par with the man who became chancellor in Germany in 1933. What I am saying is that the prevailing mood and beliefs of those who voted for Donald Trump — that a strong man is seen as the ideal person to run the country (Trump is not a strong man⁵) — mirrors the general sentiment of the German population in January 1933.

Or as Ross Rosenfeld of The New Republic puts it: “[Trump] won because uninformed Americans bought into narratives about inflation, migrant invasions, and governmental ineptitude. The election said more about voter gullibility than voter desires.”

And so now we are just days away from the beginning of what it appears to be an authoritarian administration. Voters could have chosen a democrat — that small “d” is deliberate — but instead they went for the demagogue.

Here’s something disturbing from Charlie Sykes: “As the passing of Jimmy Carter reminds us, presidential legacies are complicated matters, and it is difficult to predict the verdict of history. But as Biden leaves office, he is less a transformational figure than a historical parenthesis. He failed to grasp both the political moment and the essential mission of his presidency.”

He is less a transformational figure than a historical parenthesis.

People thought Trump was just an aberration. Nope. It was Biden who turned out to be the aberration. It is the Biden administration that will be remembered as an interregnum in this new political era. Sure, Biden was president for four years, but Trump has been a constant presence in the news since 2015. And if you think Trump’s first four years in office were bad, his second administration is likely to be worse now that he has, unlike the first time, a slew of devoted and dedicated sycophants in his circle.

I will leave you with some words by Mary Trump: “Nobody can erase the fact that Donald is a felon who was found guilty by a jury of his peers, just as nobody can erase the fact that he is an adjudicated rapist, a business fraud, an insurrectionist, and a traitor. It will take a very long time to sift through all of the reasons that, in the end, none of that mattered to a plurality of the American electorate, but those are the facts about the incoming president.”

Just one more thing, if I may: How does annexing Canada and buying Greenland lower the price of eggs?

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¹. Yes, Harris should have found a way to distance herself from the Biden administration (hard to do when you’re still part of the administration). And, yes, not having a Palestinian speaker at the convention was not a good move. As for the charge that Harris didn’t pay enough attention to economic matters, that is simply not true. But I do tend to believe that she and Walz probably talked too much about an “opportunity economy.” Sure, everybody wants an opportunity in life, but Harris and Walz’s pitch seemed more directed toward budding entrepreneurs. A tax deduction of up to $50,000 to help start your business? Great. But here’s the thing. Not everybody wants to start a business. There are people who love their jobs (working for someone else), and there are others who may not love their jobs but would rather be an employee. More talk pitched toward the concerns of average working people and less toward entrepreneurs would have been preferable. Finally, was it a bad idea to reach out to Republicans who saw Trump as a threat to democracy? No. But the courting of Republican defectors probably did little for people who wanted the campaign to focus more on the Democratic Party’s working-class base.

². “What would happen if the boat sank from its weight” is a wacky thing to say (aren’t all boats buoyant?), but “One of the wettest we’ve seen from the standpoint of water” just might be my favorite utterance from Trump.

³. I understand that investigations of this magnitude will use an “outside in” approach. It’s similar to the method used when going after organized crime figures: You start with the peripheral characters as a way to get to the central malefactor — and the central malefactor here, Donald Trump, eluded justice in both the January 6 and stolen documents cases. To which Mehdi Hasan wrote: “I’m not sure what was worse: that Merrick Garland couldn’t bring himself to prosecute Trump on his own and felt he had to bring in a special counsel as cover, or that he waited so long to do it that Smith never got Trump inside a courtroom. History won’t be forgiving to Garland.” Not entirely true according to Harry Litman, who wrote a defense of Garland. Laurence Tribe responded: “This is a fine defense of AG Garland, my former student and long-time friend — the best defense possible — but it’s unconvincing even to me and sadly leaves me persuaded that history will not judge this smart, decent, well-intentioned man kindly.”

⁴. A primer, in case you need one, from Bob Cesca: “For the eleventy-billionth time, let’s be clear about this. Tariffs are taxes on foreign imports, paid to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency by American importers like Costco and Walmart, which then pass along the fees to consumers — you and me — in the form of higher prices. In other words, we pay the tariffs. Not China. Not Canada. Not Mexico.”

⁵. This, from Jeff Tiedrich, will suffice for now: “Donny is a weakling. He’s an insecure little boy who can’t go out in public without wrapping himself in a girdle, putting lifts in his shoes, slathering on a quart of makeup, and teasing his six remaining strands of hair into that weird cotton candy rat’s nest.”

Barry Lyons is a freelance writer living in New York City. He’s also written about the Second Amendment, the Beatles, and the five Indiana Jones movies.