Donald Trump, a former president and convicted felon, was elected to a second term as president of the United States. Unlike 2016, he actually won the popular vote this time around. To many of us here at Brandeis and across the country, this was a shock. With a candidate switch after the primaries and two different assassination attempts, this election season has been anything but normal. Following the New Hampshire primary, then-candidate and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley predicted that “the first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate will be the party that wins this election.” So why was she wrong? As Harris supporters in the mainstream media and on social media blame everyone from President Joe Biden to third-party candidate Jill Stein, it would be helpful to take a step back and dissect the 2024 campaign to figure out how we ended up here.
To figure out why Harris lost, it would seem smart to look at her campaign from beginning to end and figure out where they made mistakes. However, in our search for everything that went wrong with this campaign, we should actually start our search a little more than a year earlier. In July 2023, Biden decided to run for reelection despite promising to be a one-term president during his 2020 campaign. As Biden was running in the Democratic primaries against former Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, there were warning signs that his campaign was in trouble the entire time. Biden elected not to include his name on the New Hampshire primary ballot to punish the state for holding its primary first, as it had for over 100 years. However, when it became clear that this was a bad idea, Biden ran in the primary as a write-in candidate. Despite being a three-term congressman from Minnesota who was almost completely unknown outside of his home state, Phillips got almost 20% of the vote. It should be noted that Phillips did not run on any of his own policies; the entire premise of his campaign was that Democrats needed a candidate other than Biden.
The bad news for the Biden campaign did not stop there. About a week after the New Hampshire primary, an ABC News poll found that 86% of Americans thought that Biden was too old to serve a second term, including 91% of independents. For those unfamiliar with polling, or even just basic math, these numbers are really bad for a campaign—a fact that the Biden team ignored. Had Biden chosen to step aside at this point, as opposed to five months later, the Democrats could have had a primary to choose their candidate, taking away what would become a Republican argument in this election—that Harris was not chosen by voters, but appointed by party elites.
If the New Hampshire primary and the ABC poll were yellow warning lights, metaphorically speaking, the Super Tuesday results served as a flashing red light with sirens. Half a million voters in the Democratic primary voted “uncommitted” to protest Biden’s policies related to the war in Gaza. 100,000 of those voters were in the key swing state of Michigan. Biden even lost the American Samoa primary to Jason Palmer. If you’re asking who that is, you’re not alone: Palmer had never been involved in politics before the primary, but the businessman managed to beat the incumbent president (at least in American Samoa). Biden still continued to ignore the warnings.
Then came the debate on June 27. Trump stood on that stage and lied for an hour and a half. He referred to working-class jobs as “Black jobs” and called Biden a “bad Palestinian.” He accused former Speaker Nancy Pelosi of being responsible for the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and started an argument with Biden about who the better golfer was. Despite this, Trump was declared the overwhelming winner of the debate by both the media and the average viewer. Why? Because his opponent, Joe Biden, couldn’t even manage to use complete sentences for the first third of the debate. When he finally remembered how to speak, he spent the debate insulting Trump and also getting sidetracked with golf scores. He was unable to push back on any of the false claims, racism or bad policy spouted by Trump throughout the night. His most memorable moment of the night was when he froze before declaring that “we finally beat Medicare” in response to a question on the economy.
At this point, what was clear to Dean Phillips and 91% of independent voters back in February became clear to all 51 million viewers: Joe Biden cannot serve a second term. The Democratic party elites, who had been backing Biden despite the warning signs from before, suddenly found themselves unable to continue doing so. Dozens of Democratic House candidates publicly called for him to drop out. Donors began to withhold donations. Editorial boards, including The New York Times, withdrew their endorsements. White House staff leaked embarrassing stories about Biden’s mental capacity, including an Axios report that the president was only coherent from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Still, Biden decided to remain in the race. As polls showed him losing nationally by about six percentage points and doing even worse in the swing states, he told the country that his debate performance was because of jetlag from a trip more than two weeks earlier. The gaffes continued. Following the debate, Biden hosted a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit where he introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by saying “Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.” Two hours later, he called Harris “Vice President Trump”.
Another event made Trump, who was by this point already considered the frontrunner, look infallible. At a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old former Haley voter named Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate the candidate. A bullet grazed Trump’s ear, while one rallygoer was killed and two were critically injured. As he was being escorted to safety by the Secret Service, Trump stopped to have his picture taken while raising his fist. Suddenly, Democrats’ rhetoric about Trump being a threat to democracy was labeled inflammatory and dangerous, leaving the party without a message. Meanwhile, the Trump team portrayed him as someone who took a bullet. A few days later, at the Republican National Convention, Trump announced Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate, a pick intended to energize his base in a blowout rather than appeal to swing voters. For Trump and the Republicans, this seemed to be their election to lose.
Suddenly, that all changed. On July 21, Biden realized what the rest of the party had figured out a month ago. After party heavyweights from Pelosi to former President Barack Obama to Speaker Hakeem Jeffries practically begged him to drop out, Biden finally gave in. He announced via an Instagram post that he would be dropping out. The next day, he endorsed Harris.
It is at this point that I will interrupt my retelling of the events of this election to analyze the question that I asked in the beginning of this article: how did we get to where we are today, with Donald Trump the winner of the election despite the fact that he’s a deeply unpopular rapist who told more than 30,000 lies during his first term? A look at the media today would tell you that Biden’s decision to drop out in late July meant that Democrats were stuck with a non-optimal candidate and left her without enough time to introduce herself to the country. Indeed, Harris’ 2020 primary campaign was a trainwreck. As the Senator from California and one of the few progressives in the race at a moment in time when Americans were desperate for change, she started out as one of the frontrunners. She had a great moment in the first primary debate when she attacked Biden for supporting segregation early in his Senate career (yes, Biden is so old that the Senate was still voting on segregation when he was first elected). However, her campaign soon fell apart. She flip-flopped on most of the major issues of that election and ran away from her record as a prosecutor. With an inexperienced campaign staff led by her sister, she was unable to raise the money to keep running. She dropped out months before the Iowa caucus.
Democrats soon found those worries disappearing. Having inherited both the Biden campaign team and party as a whole, led by veteran campaigners with decades of experience, 2024 Harris proved to be a significantly better candidate than 2019 Harris. In her first week, her campaign raised over 300 million dollars. A surge of momentum pushed her ahead in the polls, and despite not having run in any primary election, nobody in the party tried to challenge her for the nomination. After announcing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential nominee, the Democrats once again broke their fundraising record with $36 million in 24 hours. As she racked up dozens of celebrity endorsements and the support of former Trump staffers, going into the Democratic National Convention, the political landscape had changed drastically from a month earlier. For the first time this cycle, Americans had a candidate that spoke in complete sentences that didn’t include Hannibal Lecter or whale psychiatry.
The Harris campaign, now considered the frontrunner, chose a different message than the Biden campaign. While the Biden campaign focused on the threat posed by another Donald Trump term, Harris presented herself as a change candidate focused on freedom and lowering costs. The campaign’s slogan became “we’re not going back.” As shown by Harris’ rapid rise in the polls, this message had a much stronger appeal with both the Democratic base and with independent voters. Harris’ lead and the stress of running against a disciplined campaign led to Trump repeatedly going off-script, including at an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, where he claimed that Harris “happened to turn Black.”
This message was working. During the second presidential debate, which was the first and only one between Harris and Trump, she stuck to this message. Meanwhile, in front of an audience of 67 million, Trump talked about his crowd size, spread conspiracy theories about Haitian immigrants, used the word “we” to refer to Jan. 6 insurrectionists and accused Harris of wanting to “do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prisons.” Leaving the debate, all that people talked about was the moment when Trump said that “they’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Moments after the debate ended, Harris received another major celebrity endorsement: Taylor Swift.
Following the debate, the already-leading Harris campaign saw another boost in the polls. At this point, nobody was talking about a close election. Harris had the lead in all seven swing states and appeared competitive even in some red states. Down-ballot Democrats who had distanced themselves from Biden were eager to appear at rallies alongside Harris. Democratic worries about Harris being unprepared due to not campaigning in the primaries or about not being able to introduce herself to the nation subsided; Harris had introduced herself, and voters liked what they saw.
If the Harris campaign kept going down the same path, they were on their way to a resounding victory. Instead, about six weeks before the election, the Harris campaign ditched the strategy that they had spent months developing and fine-tuning. Instead, they replaced it with the strategy that had proven a failure both for Biden before he dropped out and for Hillary Clinton in 2016: warning of the dangers of a second Trump term. Harris went on a tour of several battleground states with Liz Cheney, who is politically toxic to a campaign for reasons that I will discuss in a minute. During this final stretch, almost all of the talk about the issues that had gotten Harris the lead had disappeared. The candidate who had been running as the change candidate only a month earlier now said that she couldn’t think of anything that she would do differently from Biden. Accompanying this shift in rhetoric was a shift in the poll numbers—back towards Donald Trump. The race that polling aggregator 538 had predicted that Harris had a two in three chance of winning following the debate had shifted back to a toss-up by the start of October.
I mentioned that Liz Cheney was politically toxic. The reason for this is simple: most voters do not like her. Republicans absolutely despise her because she dared to stand up to Trump and not only voted to impeach him following Jan. 6, but also served on the House committee that would investigate the attack. Democrats and Independents admire her for putting country over party, both then and now. However, most Democrats still disapprove of her. After all, she is anti-abortion, opposed to gun control and a supporter of disastrous foreign policy, including the Iraq war. As one might imagine, being hated by both Democrats and Republicans tends to leave someone unpopular. Cheney’s approval rating, according to a Morning Consult poll from 2022, is just 27%. Now, that sounds bad. That’s because it is. Vance is regarded as one of the worst VP picks in history because of his low approval ratings. His ratings stand at 38%, 11 points higher than Cheney’s. Even Matt Gaetz, the Congressman known for sabotaging his own party’s speaker, has a 34% approval rating. Cheney’s approval rating is even lower than the approval rating of Sean “Diddy” Combs, who received a 28% approval rating in a YouGov poll taken the week after the rap star had been arrested for sex trafficking. If it’s any consolation to Cheney supporters, she is still slightly more popular than Mark Robinson. Robinson is the failed gubernatorial candidate from North Carolina, a self-described “black NAZI” who called for slavery to be brought back and claimed that he’d rather have Hitler as president than Obama. His approval rating is 24%. Common sense would dictate that a candidate who actually intends to win should avoid appearing with someone as unpopular as Cheney. However, common sense appeared to be something that appeared to be lacking in the upper levels of campaign management.
In the week before the election, the Trump campaign handed Harris what could have been a major opportunity. For reasons that I cannot possibly explain, Trump decided to hold a rally in New York City. Instead of appealing to undecided voters in swing states, he decided to speak to MAGA diehards at Madison Square Garden. As odd as that decision was, the true gift to the Harris campaign was not where the rally was held; it was what was said. The rally opened with a comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe, who seemed to be on a mission to insult every single voting demographic that Trump was trying to improve his margin with. Hinchcliffe made jokes about Puerto Ricans being garbage, Jews being cheap, Palestinians throwing rocks, Latinos having a lot of sex and Black people wearing lampshades on their heads. As if that wasn’t enough, the next speaker said that the whole Democratic party was “a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew-haters and lowlives. Every one of them.” Other speakers implied that Harris was a prostitute and stated that she was “low-IQ.” Former Trump immigration advisor Stephen Miller even used a Ku Klux Klan slogan in his speech. The Daily Beast even reported that the Trump campaign had vetted all of the speeches before the rally began.
This rally should have been a gift to the Harris campaign. However, Joe Biden inadvertently ended up back in the national spotlight at this inopportune moment. When asked about Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico, he responded by saying that the only garbage he saw was Trump supporters. When the White House began to receive backlash for that comment, they released an edited transcript of his remarks to prove that he wasn’t actually referring to Trump supporters. Thus, the final big news story before the election was not Trump’s hate rally but a negative story about Biden.
Of course, it would be impossible to talk about where Harris went wrong without talking about the campaign’s treatment of Arab and Muslim voters. A key voting demographic in Michigan, they had made their displeasure with the Biden-Harris administration clear during the primaries. Instead of reaching out to these disaffected voters, who had overwhelmingly supported Biden in 2020, Harris ignored them. When the uncommitted movement asked to have a Palestinian-American speaker at the Democratic National Convention, they refused, despite the fact that their proposed speech was almost entirely about Trump rather than Gaza. The results? In Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest Arab-American population in the country, Harris lost by 19 points to Trump. This represents a 69 percentage point swing from 2020, when Biden won the city by 50. The results in Dearborn, with a population of more than 100,000, contributed heavily to Harris’ loss in that state.
Now, I’ll finally answer the question that I asked at the very beginning of this article: why is a man who campaigned on the promise of being a “dictator on day one” now headed back to the Oval Office? The answer is that while Biden deserves a small part of the blame, it is far less than the media is giving him. The real reason that we are here right now is because those in the upper echelons of the Harris campaign failed us. They abandoned their winning message in favor of one that had proven twice to be a loser against Trump. Had Harris’ top aides done their jobs, I would probably be writing a piece about the excitement of electing our first female president, instead of the one that you just read. All that we can do now is hope that Democrats will learn their lesson before 2028.
