Wrong voters, wrong message: progressives’ autopsy lays bare Kamala Harris failures

RootsAction report finds Harris courted moderates instead of working-class Democrats – and Gaza stance did not help

By David Smith, The Guardian

Kamala Harris lost last year’s US presidential election because she chased the wrong voters with the wrong message, ultimately demobilising the very base that she needed to win, according to an autopsy by a progressive grassroots advocacy group.

The vice-president focused on courting moderate Republicans over motivating core Democratic working-class, young and progressive voters, a misstep compounded by her failure to break from Joe Biden on Gaza, says the report by RootsAction.

Kamala Harris lost last year’s US presidential election because she chased the wrong voters with the wrong message, ultimately demobilising the very base that she needed to win, according to an autopsy by a progressive grassroots advocacy group.

The vice-president focused on courting moderate Republicans over motivating core Democratic working-class, young and progressive voters, a misstep compounded by her failure to break from Joe Biden on Gaza, says the report by RootsAction.

“To win back the White House and Congress, we urge the Democratic party to change course and embrace economic populist policies that inspire and help working-class Americans,” argues the autopsy. “The Democratic party must show voters that it has a spine and can stand up to corporate and big-money interests.”

The Democratic National Committee has not yet released its “after-action review” of the November 2024 election, in which Donald Trump won the national popular vote by 1.5% after having lost it to Biden by 4.5% in 2020. Trump won all seven major swing states, whereas Biden had won six of them in 2020.

Autopsy: How Democrats Lost the White House, authored by Christopher Cook and edited by Sam Rosenthal, says the pivotal factor was a massive drop in Democratic turnout: Harris received approximately 6.8m fewer votes than Biden did in 2020, while Trump gained about 2.8m votes.

For the first time since 2004, independent voters turned out in greater numbers than registered Democrats. Turnout plummeted in Democratic strongholds. A substantial drop-off in turnout and support among voters aged 18-29, who were disillusioned with the administration’s policies, proved politically fatal.

RootsAction notes that Biden’s initial decision to run for re-election despite low approval ratings and his late exit from the race left the Harris campaign with only 107 days and no primary process to build momentum. It saddled the nominee with an unpopular incumbent’s record.

But the Harris campaign failed to inspire or mobilise millions of voters who had supported Biden in 2020 because of messaging that was out of touch with voters’ economic anxieties.

It adopted “joyful” messaging and sunny talking points (“Bidenomics”) at a time when nearly 70% of voters rated the economy as “not so good” or “poor”. Harris also did not create distance from Biden, stating on The View that “not a thing comes to mind” that she would do differently from him.

Her campaign made a critical strategic error by prioritising an appeal to moderate, suburban Republicans over mobilising its core working-class and progressive base, leading to significant erosion of support among these vital constituencies. A strategy, articulated by Senator Chuck Schumer in 2016, of trading one blue-collar Democrat for “two moderate Republicans in the suburbs” was repeated and failed again.