Kamala Harris, the commentators widely agreed, ran a nearly perfect campaign. She hit her cues, avoided mistakes, and was really good at laughing for no reason other than her joy at being our next president. Her campaign skillfully choreographed support from a cast that ranged from the socialist firebrand Bernie Sanders to the conservative Republican Liz Cheney. Not to mention all the celebrities!

It’s almost unfair that the object of a presidential campaign is to win the most electoral votes rather than the highest scores from a panel of talk show hosts and former Obama speech writers. 

Still, even after the results came in, giving Donald Trump a sweeping Electoral College victory and the first Republican popular vote majority in twenty years, the immediate reaction in many quarters was to insist Harris had done the best she could in the face of voter bigotry and global inflation that has caused many incumbent parties to lose office around the globe.

(Few mentioned Claudia Sheinbaum, who just months ago ran on the incumbent party ticket and became the first woman — and first Jewish — president of the country directly south of us. But that’s a left-wing party that angered elites and reduced economic inequality, which for our media makes what happened in Mexico about as relevant as the far side of the moon.)

In fairness to Harris, her campaign was indeed more functional than the weird Trump operation where an obviously declining candidate turned over essential operations to his usual assortment of eccentric billionaires and trolling influencers. But in 2024 having a smoothly running machine mattered less than convincing people that you are actually going to do something different. 

For as long as he’s been in politics, polls have shown that most people don’t like Donald Trump, and that didn’t change this year. Exit polls indicate that Harris slightly led Trump in “favorability.” She lost because voters don’t like Trump, but they don’t like our system even more. 

Cheney You Can Believe In

If Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party ran a great campaign, the fault must lie with us. And so liberals eagerly turned to debate which identity groups will go down in history as the cause of ending civilization as we know it: It was “Black men” for allowing a small minority of their demographic to vote for Trump! No it was “white women” for turning out to be white and not just women! Or maybe it was “trans people” for…existing, thereby giving Republicans an issue to attack us on!  

The only thing anyone can possibly learn from this “debate” is the emptiness that exists at the core of what passes for coalition building in the Democratic Party. 

On the left we have no problem blaming Harris and the Democrats, but we get stuck in our own dead-end debate: identity vs. class. Harris, the argument goes, didn’t offer anything enough to the struggling working class and focused instead on appeals to gender, race and sexuality that without a class component appeal mainly to middle-class liberals. 

The first half of this argument is undoubtedly true. ­Democrats spent much of Biden’s term claiming that complaints about inflation — which many economists say has hit working people harder than any time since 1980 — were just right-wing propaganda. Turns out that’s bad politics. 

But the second half presumes the Harris campaign actually offered something more substantial to various “identities.” What, exactly? She moved hard to the right on blocking immigration, did her best to ignore trans rights, and was an active participant in the Gaza genocide that enraged Arabs and Muslims.

The only exception is abortion… kind of. Harris loudly warned about Trump’s threats to reproductive freedom and, more quietly, mentioned she favored getting rid of the Senate filibuster so that Democrats could conceivably pass pro-choice legislation. But then she spent the final weeks of her campaign touring with Cheney, who regularly voted against abortion access and trans rights before she was ousted from office like most other anti-Trump Republicans. 

Most voters may not be aware of Liz Cheney’s voting record (although many of them remember that her father Dick as the war criminal Vice President who helped push the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). But they could pick up the vibe that any campaign being promoted by a Cheney scion and pillar of the old Republican establishment was unlikely to fight for any kind of equality, economic or social. 

After all, for the past decade we’ve seen Trump prove the inverse: the political potency in angering and frightening his opponents, how getting under the skin of CNN anchors and insulting progressive billionaires can make his supporters feel (rather pathetically) empowered.

Democrats aggressively refuse to learn anything from this. They think they can make bigots and billionaires feel entirely at home in their campaign — as long as they’re anti-Trump — and the rest of us will still believe in their commitment to defending trans rights. Or immigrants. Or unions. Or Social Security. Or anything. 

The Invisible Left

A full accounting of the election can’t focus exclusively on the Democrats’ failures to address working-class anger over inflation. Yes, the economy has been very bad for working people, but, as a friend of mine put it, it was “throw the bums out” bad, not “let’s turn to fascism” bad.

Post-pandemic inflation can’t explain why one of America’s two parties has been transformed into a demented far-right project. Trumpism offers far more than an outlet for economic frustration; it puts forward an emotional narrative to address the existential fears of life in a declining empire on a dying planet. That narrative is a muddled and ever-changing cinematic universe of scapegoats, conspiracies, Christianity and now Elon Musk jokes. But at least it seems to recognize the dark horizon we are rapidly approaching. In contrast, the Democrats’ primary message about the future is, “Look, we’ll talk about that later. For now, just help us hold back the Trump tide. Again.”  

That turned out not to be enough. To stop the far right, we need an actual left. That left was reborn in the last 10 years through street rebellions and election campaigns, Native-led pipeline blockades and university-solidarity encampments. That left still exists, but it was absent from the 2024 presidential race. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being some of the last defenders of Joe Biden’s farcical campaign symbolized a surrender whose causes need to be sorted out in the coming weeks and months.

Once they stopped feeling pressure from a rising left, the Democrats quickly snapped back to their natural place at the center-right of the political spectrum. All the while Trump has permanently changed the shape of the opposition to the point where none of us can say what the coming years of Republican rule will look like. As we try to figure out how to resist, we have to draw some conclusions about the left’s failure to do anything similar inside the Democratic Party over the last eight years. Right now I’m only ready to offer one: Guys, I don’t think Kamala Harris ran a perfect campaign. 

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