Nothing Inevitable About Losing This Election

There are few things more irritating than the post-election period after Democrats suffer a defeat. The backbiting, finger pointing, personal pettiness, axe-grinding, and intra-party brawling start immediately, and get old within about the first nanosecond. I try to avoid all of the above, because while I have strong opinions as to the way forward, my goal in general is to be more of a uniter in the party rather than a divider. 

However, there are sometimes things major players in the party say that I feel compelled to respond to strongly. This is something I can’t shut up about: the notion being pushed by some of the top leaders of the Harris campaign that the election result was inevitable, that there was nothing they could have done to win this campaign.

I believe that kind of statement is profoundly wrong, and incredibly irresponsible. I think if we just accept it at face value, our party will never do the kind of strategic examination we need to do. And it is also deeply alienating to all the volunteers who poured hundreds of hours and their hearts and souls into this campaign, and to all the donors, big and small, who gave money.

Let’s start with the fact that this election was in fact close. The nationwide popular vote was about a point difference, and none of the seven swing states were a blowout. Our worst two losses of the seven were in Arizona and Nevada, where the margins were 5.5% and 3.1%. In the two Southern swing states, the margins were 2.2% (Georgia) and 3.2% (North Carolina). In the three most important battleground states, where we would have won the election if we had taken all three, the margins were all less than two: Pennsylvania (1.7), Michigan (1.4), and Wisconsin (0.9).

It is one thing to say a result was inevitable when one candidate leads another by a huge margin in the polling throughout and then wins a landslide victory, such as in the 1984 Reagan re-election victory. But when the margins are as close as they were this year, to throw up your hands and say this was inevitable and there was no way to win is, to use a technical term we sometimes use in the political consulting business, total bullshit. I have never been involved in a campaign that close where I couldn’t think of things that might have turned the tide.

Yes, there were some serious headwinds, especially on the inflation issue. Yes, there was some racism and sexism that impacted the vote. Yes, it was a truncated election season because of President Biden getting out so late. But the whole point of campaigns is to look at the challenges you face and figure out strategies that allow you to overcome them.

How Harris might have won

If your biggest headwind is inflation, maybe you need to focus like a laser beam on the inflation issue, driving home in every ad and speech that you will have an aggressive plan for fighting inflation. Maybe if your candidate is a relatively unknown Black woman from San Fransisco, you need to spend the campaign defining yourself as a fierce fighter for struggling working class people on the economic challenges they face. 

I also don’t buy that because the switch-over to Harris happened so late, she was doomed. As Stan Greenberg captured in his spot-on American Prospect column, in the first weeks after Harris got into the race, she was going up in the polling, probably even establishing a slight lead. Coming out of the box with a great first speech on price gauging and housing prices was a masterstroke that got people’s attention and made them respond well to her, and if she had stayed on that message she might well have won this race.

None of us will ever know for sure what might have changed this race from a close loss to a close win, but we have to examine other ideas on what might have made a difference. Here are a few strategies that might have turned the tide:

1. The economy, stupid. Okay, I talked about this above, but what the campaign chose to do and not do on the economy was central to what happened in this election. Nobody in the focus groups I was seeing knew what the hell the “opportunity economy” was, and campaign slogans like “a new way forward” and “turn the page” didn’t mean anything to people either. They wanted to know what Harris was going to do about inflation and raising their standard of living, how she was going to rebuild their communities that had fallen on hard times. They wanted to know what she was going to do about corporate CEOs making their lives harder in a hundred different ways.

What voters were looking for was a fighter for them and their families on the kind of kitchen table issues that mattered the most in their lives. Spending so much time talking about what a bad guy Trump is, and so much time hanging out with Liz Cheney and emphasizing how she would work with everybody and listen to everybody, did not give people what they were looking for in a candidate so undefined to them.

2. Taking credit for the popular things the Biden-Harris administration got done while distancing herself from the least popular thing. The most discussed answer to a question in the campaign was Harris saying on The View that she wouldn’t have done anything differently from Biden. What is less discussed is her staying silent on all the incredibly popular things the administration did get done.

This was a really tricky balancing act – Harris didn’t want to seem disloyal but also wanted to “turn the page” on the past. For my part, I would have come out strongly in saying that the administration should have moved much faster and more aggressively on inflation and price gauging, which was the issue most important to voters. I would have emphasized that difference between her and Biden everywhere she went. But I would have balanced that move by spending more time taking credit for having been the person in the administration that took on corporate power in antitrust policy, that stopped corporations from using junk fees, that helped unions fight back against corporate abuse of workers. In other words, be the champion for the good things happening because of the Biden-Harris, say it was her priority and her leadership that got them done, but establish her independence by making it clear that she thought the administration moved too slowly and too timidly on inflation. That would have been a far more effective way of threading the needle she needed to thread. 

3. An earlier and bigger focus on rural and mid size county organizing. Voters in rural and medium sized counties are highly cynical about Democrats, and most of their news sources are on the conservative side of the ledger, so they are a tough audience for our side. The only way to cut the yawning margins for Trump in these kinds of counties is doing person to person organizing and local social media organizing, starting early to get that done. I encouraged the campaign to start putting organizers into these counties a year out, and they had no interest. They waited until September 2024 to hire the Harris-Walz rural coordinator, giving him very little resources to work with. And out of more than 500video ads produced by the campaign, only 3 of them were specifically targeted toward rural voters. Cutting the margins we lost rural and mid size factory town counties by might have given us the win in those 1.7, 1.4, and 0.9 percent losses we suffered in the blue wall states.

4. More money, and more early money, into youth organizing. Democrats have done very well starting in the Obama years and all the way through 2022 with younger voters, but in 2024 both youth turnout and the Democratic percentage of the youth vote went down. The leading youth organizing groups I talk to all felt strongly that there weren't enough resources put into youth organizing in this campaign, either persuasion or GOTV. If we had doubled or tripled our investment in young people, we might well have won this election.

5. Not enough money targeting young male voters. The ratios I was hearing toward the end of the campaign about what Trump was spending to target young men vs what we were spending were insane, 9-1 or worse in some areas. I don’t know where things ended up on this metric, but we clearly should have been doing more to target young men. There has been a lot of conversation on this topic so I’m not going to dwell on it, but young men were not cultivated nearly enough.

6. Too many dollars on conventional advertising, not enough money going into more highly targeted streaming advertising and organic social media. This article describes the different approaches the Trump and Harris campaigns took in terms of advertising to swing voters. I tend to side with the Trump people on this one. Democrats for years have relied way too much on TV and digital ads that go to way too many people, as opposed to carefully target approaches like the one the Trump campaign used.

Even more importantly, the Harris campaign did not make the investment it needed to make in organic digital networks, especially in terms of building networks of local influencers who had the best potential to influence their friends. For my money, the most effective way to win voters over is to find trusted messengers who will do it because they believe in the campaign. The Harris campaign did invest in relational organizing tools, but not nearly enough in those harder to reach voters outside of the usual Democratic areas.   

An unwinnable race?

The Harris-Walz team did many things well. The fundraising was phenomenal. The convention was very well done. The number of phone calls and door knocks done by the field operation at the end of the campaign was outstanding. Some of the ads were very well done.

I also want to acknowledge that no one knows for sure whether one strategic approach or another might have turned the tide, and we never will. It’s all speculation at this point.

However, I am pretty damn confident that this election was not hopeless from the beginning. Any of the above six strategic adjustments might have turned the tide in a close race, and some combination of them would have increased our chances even more. The smart people running the Harris-Walz campaign worked their asses off, and deserve a lot of credit for doing many things well. They should not be tainting their legacy by suggesting that they ran a flawless campaign but were doomed from the start.