For a change President-elect Donald Trump was neither exaggerating nor lying when during his victory speech he said “They came from all quarters. Union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American,” he told a roaring crowd. “We had everybody, and it was beautiful,” writes Vidya S Sharma, Ph.D.
I did not think either Trump or Harris were competent to be the President of a country that seeks to be the leader of the Western World. I was not a supporter of either of them, but if I had to choose between the two, I would have favoured Harris (in recognition of the intelligence of readers of the EU Reporter I disclose my bias).
In the last 6 weeks before November 5, every time I analysed the data it showed Trump winning handsomely. I found that prospect depressing. Consequently, I did not write the article that many of my friends and readers of EU Reporter expected me to write, ie, of the two who was most likely to win the November 5 election. However, I did reply to some of my friends that I expected Trump to win the 2024 election and win it well.
This is the first in a series of three articles. In this article, I wish to explore the reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss. In the second article, I wish to examine what the Trump II presidency would mean domestically for Americans. In my last article, I wish to discuss how the Trump II presidency would impact international scene, especially for its allies in Europe and Australia and its perceived main adversary/competitor, ie, China.
HARRIS SUFFERED A HUMILIATING DEFEAT
By any measure, Kamala Harris was defeated resoundingly. Even humiliatingly. As soon as the election results started to become clear, the Democratic Party’s narrative was that sexism and race were the decisive factors in Harris’s defeat. In other words, Harris lost because she was a woman and she was not white. As I discuss later in the article, these issues were factors, but they were not major factors.
How badly Harris was defeated is demonstrated by three facts:
(a) All pollsters considered the following 7 states as the battleground states in the 2024 election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won all seven of them. And won them handsomely.
(b) The GOP had a trifecta win: Trump not only won the Presidency but on the coattails of his popularity the GOP won the control of the Senate and will retain a majority in Congress.
(c) Trump’s overall (ie, popular) vote in 2024 was 74,263,828, ie, about the same as in 2020 when he received 74,223,975 votes. But Kamala Harris received 70,355,846 votes, ie, about 11 million less than what Biden received. This was even though Democrats outspent the Trump campaign by $400 million. That is a colossal loss of popular support.
A loss of support of this magnitude cannot be whitewashed by simply saying it was primarily due to sexism and racism. Two things are worth remembering:
(a) Hillary Clinton, though widely loathed and excoriated by various groups for different reasons, received nearly 2.87 million more votes than Trump when she lost the election in 2016; and
(b) The US electorate had twice elected Barack Obama as their President even though he was black.
To be fair to Harris, I must also state that had Biden continued with his re-election bid he would have lost by a bigger margin. Maybe not in terms of Electoral College votes accumulated but certainly when it comes to popular votes.
TRUST RENT ASUNDER
As the policy positions adopted by various state governors (in all instances belonging to the Republican Party) and by a vast number of Americans who were against pursuing isolation measures during the COVID–19 pandemic, the results of the 2024 election have proven what Hannah Arendt said about the United States in her last interview with Roger Erras:
“Well. See, this is not a nation-state, America is not a nation-state and Europeans have a hell of a time understanding this simple fact, which, after all, they could know theoretically; it is, this country is united neither by heritage, nor by memory, nor by soil, nor by language, nor by origin from the same.”
For Arendt ‘nation’ and ‘state’ are not synonymous. ‘Nation’ for her means the dominant group with its culture, language and shared history living in a defined territory. While ‘State’ refers to the ‘legal’ status of individuals living in a territory; ie, those who are its legal citizens (ie, passport holders).
As we saw during the Covid 19 pandemic, Trump’s victory has again shown the United States is a collection of individuals living in the same country pursuing their own aims with little regard to what their actions will do to the image or status of the United States abroad or the extent to which their actions might undermine their civic institutions, threaten democracy and even the individualism they cherish so much.
In any democratic country in Europe or even in a partly democratic country in Asia, Latin America or Africa, a politician who had as blatantly tried to overturn the election results as Trump attempted to do (eg, making a phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state”, pressurising and threatening Vice President Pence not to certify election results and when the certification process was in progress he unleashed his violent and armed supporters to storm the Capitol Hill, etc.) would have been expelled from his/her party, jailed for treason and barred from ever running for an elected office again.
But President Trump’s re-election demonstrates the extent to which trust has been rent asunder between the State (I use the term as Arendt used it) and its institutions (law enforcement agencies, legislative bodies, judiciary, publicly funded education, etc.) on one hand and those of its citizens who for various reasons feel abandoned/neglected or they feel their worldview does not matter anymore or find they are not permitted to carry out certain things/activities which their forefathers were able to do.
WHY I WAS CERTAIN OF TRUMP’S WIN
Despite all the polls, I concluded that it would not be a close race and Trump would do well. There were three simple reasons behind my assessment:
(a) it is now well-documented that pollsters generally underestimated the depth of Trump’s support both in 2016 (when he won) and 2020 (when he lost) elections. As it turned out it was the case in this election too.
(b) Some readers may know that the original U.S. Constitution did not define voting rights for citizens.
Until 1870, only white men were allowed to vote. The 15th Amendment (ratified in 1870) gave voting rights to men of all races. However, this amendment did not deliver on its promise because various states (especially in the southern United States) used their constitutions and restrictive laws (eg, poll tax, literacy tests, etc.) to prevent or limit black Americans from voting. Only when the Johnson Administration passed the Civil Rights Act (in 1964) and the Voting Rights Act (in 1965) that the universal franchise was extended to Black Americans.
Since 1965, most southern states in the US have been passing laws to circumvent the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. These two acts have been challenged in the US Supreme Court more than a dozen times. Consequently, some clauses of these acts have been ruled unconstitutional thus rendering racial discrimination in voting easier. To prevent or discourage Black Americans and more recently Latinos from voting, some states employ such tactics as not having enough voting booths, not having voting booths where Black Americans or Latinos live, etc. In other words, they have resorted to various tactics to suppress casting of votes by black and other minority communities (ethnic and cultural both: homosexuals, transgenders, Latinos, etc.).
Even today it is not uncommon in the southern US for members of such organisations as KKK, Proud Boys, Q Anon to openly intimidate Blacks and Latinos to prevent them from voting.
I mentioned above very briefly the history of voting rights in the US to point out that this process of vote-suppression was given a new urgency after Trump’s loss in 2020. Such vote-suppressing measures were passed “to bring or restore the integrity of the election process.”
Even during his victory speech on November 5, Trump reminded his followers that his victory in 2020 was stolen from him.
In this context, it is also worth recalling many US GOP senators, governors of various states, and members of Congress including the 56th and outgoing Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, are election deniers, ie, they never accepted that Biden was the legitimately elected 46th President of the USA.
(c) Ever since Trump’s loss in 2020, his supporter base has not only been busy seeking out like-minded people and encouraging them to register as voters but has also been planning how they would challenge vote counting to reduce the Democratic tally of votes.
OTHER REASONS FOR KAMALA HARRIS’S DEFEAT
There were many other reasons why Kamala Harris lost to Trump. I outline some of them below (not in any order of priority).
BIDEN’S DIRECT CONTRIBUTION President Biden has also contributed to Harris’s defeat in a major way: he should have pardoned Trump of any Federal offences he might have committed.
But Biden chose to hide behind the excuse of letting the judicial process take its course. But his real reason for not pardoning Trump may have been that he hoped that once Trump had been found guilty of various charges, it would be easier for Biden to defeat a convicted felon if Trump were the GOP Presidential nominee.
If Biden had pardoned him it would have been seen as a unifying/healing gesture, ie, bringing the country together. It would have deprived Trump of the victim/grievance narrative that helped him to keep his supporters energised and win the 2024 election.
HER LACK OF DEPTH ON VARIOUS POLICY ISSUES Biden was forced to pull out of the race because the extent of his cognitive deterioration became clear to all Americans, indeed to the whole of the world, when they watched him debate with Trump. This was about a month before the Democratic National Convention. Various factions of the party needed to come together and find a unity candidate. This helped Harris to clinch the party nomination by the dint of being a sitting Vice President. In my view, she would have NOT won the party nomination had she been forced to go through the process of winning the primaries.
Because she was young and not Biden she was favourably received by the US electorate. That is when she peaked. She never got a bump after the Democratic National Convention. She never got a bump when most people thought she bettered Trump in the debate.
Every time Harris spoke extempore (there were only two or three such occasions) she went backwards in the polls because she could not give straight answers. She may have been ambitious but her inability to speak without the help of her teleprinter demonstrated to the electorate her lack of depth of knowledge on most issues. In her stump speeches, she was still introducing herself to the electorate as she knew she had no policy achievements to her credit as Vice President.
She had shown a similar lack of depth during the 2020 primaries. In other words, she had not grown intellectually during the last four years when she was Vice President. Maybe this is why Biden chose her as his running mate because he figured out she would never grow to challenge him intellectually however cognitively impaired he may be.
In short, there was a wide chasm between her ambition and her abilities. She was also pitted against a cult figure who is a genius in promoting himself and is a street fighter.
LACK OF CLEAR POLICY TO DIFFERENTIATE HERSELF FROM TRUMP She ran on Biden’s policies with two exceptions: (a) tips earned by waiters/waitresses would be tax-exempt under her administration (a policy she pinched from Trump); and (b) first time home buyers will qualify for a federal grant of $25,000. If Australian experience is a criterion then this would have simply made houses more expensive by a further $25,000.
Donald Trump may be old, angry, and capricious. He may be a compulsive liar. He may be a rapist. He may be a narcissistic and who also lacks grace and good manners to be a leader of a social club, not to speak of the US. But he is not empty. One may not agree with his prescriptions but he has views on every issue.
On the other hand, Harris was a symbol of emptiness. She did not offer any new ideas on domestic policy, broken immigration system, or any of the many international challenges confronting the US (eg, the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon, Ukraine-Russia war, tensions in the Taiwan Straits or the South China Sea, etc.).
Her main slogan was “We are not going back.” In other words: “Oh, no, you are not going to elect that person again.”
WHY ECONOMY DID NOT HELP HARRIS This is true that when measured against traditional indicators the US economy is doing well when compared to the last year of the Trump administration.
In November 2020, COVID-19 deaths were running at 10,000 per week, and unemployment was 6.7% versus 4.1% today.
When asked by pollsters,“Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The voters always answered, “No.”
Why then have voters consistently told pollsters that they were most concerned with the economy?
The answer lies in the following graph of mean income brackets based on US Census Bureau data and prepared by Professor Carla Norrlöf of the University of Toronto.
Figure 1: Comparative Income Growth under Biden/Harris and Trump
Source: US Census Bureau data as extracted by Carla Norrlöf of the University of Toronto
From the data extracted by Carla Norrlöf it is evident that “the bottom income quintile (those earning less than $30,000 per year) has experienced higher income growth under Joe Biden, and favored Kamala Harris. Voters in the second and third quintiles ($30,000-$99,999) experienced higher income growth during Trump’s previous administration, and favoured Trump this time.”
But there were other reasons too that the voters felt economically dissatisfied. As Professor Thomas Ferguson (Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Boston) has shown until the pandemic hit, during the Trump years American workers’ wages grew faster than preceding years. These gains were reinforced by COVID-19 relief measures.
Post-pandemic, as the economies around the world opened up they were hit by supply chain issues leading to higher inflation. A phenomenon not experienced by Americans since Paul Volcker tamed it in the 1980s.
The resultant price increases took away their gains, leading to economic dissatisfaction. So when Biden/Harris talked about the economy, Americans were thinking about affordability, not such economic indicators as unemployment rate, GDP growth, non-farm payroll data, etc. They were thinking they now pay $5 for a dozen eggs but during the Trump years they paid $2.
According to exit polls analysed by Carla Norrlöf “Among voters who felt that their family’s financial situation is worse now than four years ago, 81% supported Trump, suggesting that subjective perceptions” of the economy played a crucial role.
HARRIS WAS PITTED AGAINST A STREET FIGHTER Harris was fighting an election against a street fighter, not an intellectual duellist. Harris’s campaign strategy assumed that Donald Trump, a convicted felon, who incited January 6, 2021 riots/insurrection, who calls Latinos rapists and murderers and accuses them of stealing and eating their neighbours’ pet dogs and cats, who wants to tear their families apart by deporting all illegal immigrants, who engineered the overturning of Rowe vs Wade decision (ie took away reproductive freedom from women), was unelectable.
The Democratic Party again underestimated his genius for self-promotion, his aggressive fighting instincts including abusing and humiliating his opponents, his ability to lie and then double down on his lies, and his reputation for making wild unsubstantiated statements.
Figure2: Changing demography of the US
As in 2016 and 2020, this time too Trump relied on simple, catchy phrases and anecdotes to exaggerate voters’ fears about cost of living issues, job insecurities, the changing demography of the US. He talked about how wages increased during his first administration. He talked about the porosity of the US’s border with Mexico.
The Figure 2 above shows how the demography of the US has changed in the last 50-60 years, ie, in one generation. In 1965 whites comprised 88% of the US population. In 2023 this cohort has shrunk to 59%. He was telling them that a few years they would be in a minority in their own country.
So it was not difficult for Trump to convince a large swathe of the electorate that immigration whether legal or illegal was the primary cause of their problems whether they related to job insecurity, the changing nature of their neighbourhoods, crime, cost of food, home affordability (worst since 1984), scarcity of beds in their local hospitals, etc.
Trump, as he did with Hilary Clinton, also mercilessly attacked Kamala Harris at a personal level. He called her “stupid”, “a person of very low IQ”, and “being part of the worst administration in the history of the US” thus contesting her competence. He questioned her race, colour and cultural heritage. He tried to frighten the electorate by calling her Marxist (her father taught Marxism at Yale University).
Trump has coarsened US political discourse single-handedly to a level not seen in any democratic country.
TRUMP — A CULT FIGURE One might ask if Trump supporters in 2016, wanted Hilary Clinton to be jailed for life for using her personal server to send official emails (admitted a politically naive decision, but one that did not result in a single felony or misdemeanour charge) then why did they support Trump even more enthusiastically this time in spite of the fact that he has faced numerous indictments and allegations related to sexual misconduct, tax fraud, obstruction of justice, election interference, taking home numerous highly confidential documents, incitement of the January 6, 2021, insurrection/riots.
The answer is simple: the electorate perceives him as a strong leader capable of delivering on his promise (eg, appointment of very conservative judges to various courts, forcing European allies to spend more money on their defence, putting tariffs on Chinese imports, building a fence on the US southern border, and not worrying about democratic niceties or court orders (a sign of weakness in their view) when it came to treatment of illegal migrants, etc.).
Therefore all his crimes are forgiven. Just like themselves, they saw him as a persecuted individual who understood their grievances and thought like them. He has built a cult following around himself.
MORE AFRICAN AND LATINOS VOTED FOR TRUMP THIS TIME A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in early October, 2024 found that 78% of African-Americans supported Harris. Compare this to 92% of Black supported Biden in 2020 and even Hillary Clinton got 91% of Black vote in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center.
The Harris campaign knew that they were losing support amongst African Americans. Obama tackled this issue famously a few days before the election. Addressing Black voters, and specifically Black men, he said:
“I’m going to go ahead and just say some, speak some truths if you don’t mind. Because my understanding based on reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities, is that we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running. Now, I also want to say that that seems to be more pronounced with the brothers. So, if you don’t mind just for a second, I’m going to speak to y’all directly.”
Obama berated “reasons and excuses” for Black men “thinking about sitting out” this election.
To identify solidly with African Americans, she invited such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey, Whoopee Goldberg to introduce her to the crowd.
Onn the other hand, besides maintaining his support amongst the white working-class voters, this time around according to exit polls Trump received 14% more votes of Latino working class than in 2020. It is worth remembering that Latino working class has been a key part of the Democratic voter base for decades.
Only 56% of Latinos voted for Harris in 2024 compared to 63% for Biden in 2020. Trump’s support grew from 35% in 2020 to 42% in 2024.
Trump also did better amongst young Americans (another cohort that traditionally votes for Democrats).
It was Latino voters that especially helped Trump win the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin (Liz Chaney’s state).
JEWS AND MUSLIM VOTERS Both these groups have solidly supported democratic candidates for decades. Harris lost not only votes of Arab Muslims (many of them live in Michigan, a battleground state that Harris lost to Trump) but of the Muslim community across the US generally because of the Biden/Harris Administration’s unqualified support and shipping of weapons and missiles to Israel though it was clear to any impartial observer that the Israel Defence Forces were committing war crimes on a mammoth scale.
Her support amongst Jewish voters was soft because they thought that if she won the election then Israel could not count on the 100% support of the US no matter what Israel dis as under Biden or Trump.
WOMEN’S VOTES ARE NOT A MONOLITHIC BLOCK Kamala Harris strongly campaigned on restoring abortion rights to women. This was the only policy she had for women. This is an important issue for many women. But not to all women. (I must disclose here that I am in pro-choice camp.)
According to CNN’s analysis of exit polls, women supported Harris, but by a smaller margin: 10% more than Trump. The same figures for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were 13% and 15% respectively.
Harris could not maintain the support of women (though she was a woman herself) because abortion is not an issue for post-menopausal women. Many Catholics and women belonging to various evangelical churches are also anti-abortion.
Just as for economic reasons, Latino male voters favoured Trump, Latino female voters cast their ballot for Trump because most were against abortion. Latino voters of both sexes did not like the policies of Democrats towards transgender, lesbian and gay groups. They considered them as anti-family. Ditto for Muslim families.
Among young women, Trump did better than in his last two attempts. This may be because Kennedy pulled out of the race in favour of Trump. Kennedy was considered an anti-establishment candidate and attracted the support of many young voters for this reason. Young voters look at Trump as an anti-establishment figure as well.
TO SOLELY IDENTIFY HERSELF WITH BLACKS WAS A MISTAKE Though it cannot be proven one way or the other, in my view, if she had identified herself with Indian-Americans (I do not mean Native Americans) she would have suffered less backlash in parts of the US where African Americans are not treated equally for historical reasons.
American-Indians are a small minority in electoral terms: there are over 2.1 million Indian American eligible voters. But they are highly respected by all Americans and carry more weight than their numbers. Chief Executive Officers of two biggest companies in the US, Alphabet and Microsoft are first generation Indian-Americans.Some other US companies with Indian-American CEOs are: Novartis (Vasant Narasimhan), Adobe (Shantanu Narayen), IBM (Arvind Krishna), Micron Technology (Sanjay Mehrotra), Palo Alto Networks (Nikesh Arora). The list goes on…
Indian Americans have average household earnings of US$123,700, nearly double the nationwide average of US$63,922, according to the latest U.S. Census data.
However, on this point she suffered because of her lack of knowledge of India’s heritage, culture, religions and history. Even her comprehension of Tamil, her mother’s mother tongue, is very poor. As a Senator or Vice President, she never visited India or took any interest in Indian politics or India’s relations with the US. More Indian-Americans voted for Trump this time than in 2016. Some were influenced by his friendly policy towards small businesses and tax cuts. Others saw him as Indian Prime Minister Modi’s friend. They believed Trump would not criticise Modi for any human rights abuses perpetrated either inadvertently or deliberately towards minorities in India, especially Muslims Christians and tribal Indians.
CONCLUSION
Democrats lost an unlosable election. It was a self-inflicted defeat. Harris not only did not win enough electoral college votes, she also did not win popular support. For the record, Trump will be the first Republican to win the popular vote in twenty years since George W Bush won his second term against John Kerry. He received 2 million+ votes more than Kerry.
That was NOT all. The Republican Party kept their majority in Congress and snatched the control of the Senate from Democrats.
I can understand the depth of shock Kamala Harris must have felt as she saw the election results coming in. They were so devastating that she could not even muster enough courage to make a congratulatory phone call to Trump when it was clear to anyone watching the results that Trump was leading by such a large margin in each of 7 battleground states that even she received all the votes yet to be counted she could not win any of those states.
The second Trump Administration will have unparalleled power to push through its agenda. The GOP has its man in the White House but it also controls both legislatures. Further, during his first term, Trump ensured that a majority of the Supreme Court judges will mirror his political and cultural values. The Supreme Court judges have already ruled that the President cannot be prosecuted for any action he takes as President of the US.
Democrats are not a party of working-class people anymore. Whether it were white blue-collar workers, Latinos or Blacks – all of them voted for Trump in greater numbers than in previous elections. Indian-Americans followed the same trend. They may also have been influenced by the fact that South Carolina ex-Governor Nikki Haley (who ran against Trump to seek the GOP nomination in 2024) and pharma entrepreneur Vivek Ramasawmi (who ran against Trump in 2020) are Republicans.
There is also a growing evidence that the GOP local party officials are trying to build relationships with Indian communities in counties with a high proportion of Asian Americans. The fact that Vice President-elect Vance’s wife is an Indian-American may provide further stimulus to this trend.
When Trump won for the first time, most political observers called it a fluke, an aberration.
Trump was neither lying nor exaggerating when during his victory speech he said, “They came from all quarters. Union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American…We had everybody, and it was beautiful.”
Trump is President-elect today not because of old white workers in rust belt states nor because of rural Americans nor because of the support of KKK, Proud Boys and Q Anon but because he built the broadest multi-ethnic coalition.
While Democrats were telling people as their main slogan “We are not going back.” indicated that the election was about democracy and the future of the Republic. The induction of Liz Chaney to Harris’s campaign, a vain attempt to attract Nikki Haley supporters were clearly meant to tell voters that this election was about the future of the Republic.
On this score, Democrats might be proven right in the coming months or years. But for most voters it was about what they talked about while sitting down having dinner. For them it was about such issues as: the cost of food items, arrival of illegal immigrants, inflation, job insecurity, people working several jobs to earn enough money to put food on the table, higher rents, and housing affordability etc.
Instead of talking about the issues that concerned most voters, Harris talked about reproductive freedom and “We are not going back.” and the future of the Republic. The electorate thought she was not interested in solving their problems.
She had enough time to moderate or modify some of her positions so that she could peel away some of the voters who ultimately chose Trump over her.
Let me give you just three examples: She could have talked about reproductive freedom but she could have also said she was against late term abortions. Then she would have added we need to do more about babies born this way and thus opened a flank against pro-lifers who also want to reduce the size of the government, especially cut down on welfare programmes and use those funds to reduce taxes.
She could have defended the role various Covid-19 vaccines played in taming the pandemic but she could have tried to assuage anti-vaxxers by stating in some instances Biden Administration overreached itself as was evident when in January, 2022 US the Supreme Court blocked Biden to mandate that businesses with more than 100 employees require their employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or else wear face masks and be tested regularly.
She could have stated that Israel’s response in the Gaza Strip was disproportionate and the IDF was committing war crimes. By doing so she would have merely repeated what the International Court of Justice in The Hague has said. This would have helped her to distance herself from Biden and also (and at least partly) mollified American Muslims in Michigan and elsewhere.
To run for President is not the same thing as running for the position of Attorney General in a state: the bigger the electorate the more heterogeneous it is. So it requires a more nuanced message.
In summary, Democratic Party needs a reality check. It needs to move to centre and distance itself from left wingers, people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris, etc. These people are not its future.
If Trump is outside the pail of the American cultural mainstream then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris is even further away from the centre of America’s culture and values.
Vidya S. Sharma advises clients on country and geopolitical risks and technology-based joint ventures. He has contributed many articles for such prestigious newspapers as: EU Reporter, The Canberra Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age (Melbourne), The Australian Financial Review, East Asia Forum, The Economic Times (India), The Business Standard (India), The Business Line (Chennai, India), The Hindustan Times (India), The Financial Express (India), The Daily Caller (US). He can be contacted at: (email protected).
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