Four Myths About Kamala Harris’s Loss

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

Vice President Harris is pictured during an interview with CNN's Dana Bash in Savannah, Ga., on Thursday — her first in-depth, on-the-record conversation with a journalist since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. Will Lanzoni/CNN

1. The Country Turned Right

Most people vote for a candidate or party because after weighing it up, they decide that one, on balance, is the better option. Very few consider their vote an across-the-board endorsement of every part of a politician’s platform, rhetoric, or behavior. This is why Democratic voters voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates this election, despite being vehemently against their party’s support for the Gaza genocide.

But this is not how political pundits think, which is why we’ve heard a variety of commentators saying that voters “rejected progressive ideas,” that “America, after its long journey through the 2010s and ’20s, is becoming more conservative again,” and that “the U. S. has revealed itself to be distinctly more conservative than many had thought.” Trump gave voters “an opportunity to reject the perceived leftward shift of progressivism and to stake a claim for conservative culture,” charged one MSNBC analyst. But this claim is hard to square with the data.