US Election 2024: Why Kamala Harris Lost

There are many reasons why Vice President Kamala Harris lost the 2024 United States presidential election. Most of these proffered will be true, but only to a very limited extent. Because political events are unique and cannot be run again with different variables, simply highlighting one or multiple factors and assigning blame to them without looking at some of more long term and structural reasons will be insufficient. Given the scale of this defeat many smaller tactical errors can be considered essentially meaningless. For example, the charge that Harris picking Minnesota governor Tim Walz rather than Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro was a fatal mistake. Or not going on "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast in the closing stretch. Or for her comments on "The View" that she couldn't think of an instance where she would have done something different to what President Joe Biden had done. Even if all three of those had a different outcome it's unlikely they would have been sufficient to have swung the election, and ditto for the next 30 factors one can name. Any of these might have moved thousands or even tens of thousands of votes, but this was a contest lost by millions and the consequence of conditions that evolved over a period of years.

Likewise, those blaming Biden and his late abandonment of his own re-election bid as the main reason for Harris' loss will not find a simple explanation there, though many will claim to. A lot of the same journalists now writing their "She didn't have enough time to build her own campaign and had to inherit the weaknesses of her boss's political operation" autopsies will have also their bylines attached to "This truncated campaign is likely to help Harris and the vibes are totally great now that Biden is out of the picture" think-pieces from July and August. Ever since the 2022 midterms the perception had been growing that Biden was too old and shouldn't run for re-election, and it was only his disastrous debate performance in June that convinced him to step aside, finally admitting (after much outside cajoling) he wasn't up to the job. However consider that with all else being equal, what if the president been convinced by his family, staff and party to announce he would not stand for re-election earlier; what would have been the most likely scenario to play out?

It is November 2022 and President Biden states that, as intimated in 2020, he sees himself as a transitional figure, a bridge to a new generation of Democratic leaders, and will not run again. Obviously at this stage he won't want to put his finger on the scale for any candidate in the party primary, not even his own vice president. So Harris launches her campaign, as does California governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, perhaps some of the candidates from the 2020 primaries such as senators Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar and former representative Beto O'Rourke, along with other current and former elected officials. What this would have resulted in would have been an 18 month protracted battle for the nomination that would have likely dragged the party far to the left, as primaries tend to elevate the more extreme ideological positions as candidates attempt to carve out a "lane", as happened in 2019-20. However Harris, as number two in the administration, would not have been able to distance herself from its least popular elements such as migration and inflation, and then after October 2023, the war in Gaza, while the other candidates would have been to argue for what they would do differently. And while the Democrats spent a year and a half fighting themselves, whatever was going on in Republican world would have looked like a model comity by comparison.

Rather than engaging in fantasy politics or easy punditry – the above hypothetical used as an illustration of the former, the preponderance of "The Democrats should have gone full Bernie" or "It was only racism and sexism that cost the election for Harris" takes being examples of the latter - it is more elucidating to see what can be learned, or in some cases un-learned about America's fast evolving political culture. Donald Trump is a unique figure in US history, and there is an undeniable political realignment happening, on a scale not seen since the 1960s. But it's not simply a matter of states or groups of voters shifting their preferences or tribal loyalties. There is always continual, if previously slower-moving, change in this regard. Since the 1990s the major shift has been that the cities have become increasingly Democratic and the exurbs and rural areas increasingly Republican. And while not all the votes from 2024 have been counted, this will likely still hold true, however the number of educated moderate conservatives in the suburbs repelled by Trump who are now voting Democratic were overwhelmed by the number of black and latino men pulling the leaver for the Republican this time, as well as simply increasing his turnout among low propensity voters. It's more that how campaigns are conducted that is changing rapidly.

The old fundamentals of politics no longer matter, it's all about the messaging.

A famous failure to see what was coming occurred in the late 1980s with the west's intelligence agencies and the Soviet Union. From the outside the USSR looked as intimidating as it ever was. In early 1989 the Soviet Union had the world's third highest population (286 million), the third largest economy (behind the United States and Japan), a six million person military with tens of thousands of fighter and bomber aircraft as well intercontinental nuclear missiles in launch silos, on mobile vehicles and in submarines. The idea that all this would all be gone in less than three years would have seemed unthinkable, yet this happened. What these highly trained observers did not see was the rot in Soviet society, the distrust in institutions and total lack of confidence in the state, that things like military strength and nationalist rhetoric merely painted over. This is, to deploy a cliché, a failure to see the wood for all the trees. When assessing, from the outside, a political culture or the strength of an individual campaign, most observers have been looking at and giving excess value to the wrong things. All the old metrics of American political success, such as money raised, campaign strategy, approval ratings, endorsements, field operations, debate performance, voter enthusiasm, policy positions, none of these seem to matter any more.

Money. In this past this was the most important quality a campaign could have, yet Trump was comfortably out-raised by both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024, but in a world where political ads have less and less power to influence this is almost money wasted. Meanwhile lies that go viral on social media cost nothing, neither does dominating the press coverage. In 2016 Trump barely had a campaign, just a few loyal aides and some lackeys and grifters, while Clinton's team was stacked with top campaign professionals from her husband's era as well as President Barack Obama's White House, for all the good it did her.

Campaign strategy. It's very easy, now that Harris has lost, to start picking on all the mistakes that she made even though, once again, many of the same voices doing this were but days ago lauding her campaign with words such as "flawless". Some pundits will say the VP made a crucial error by not distancing herself from the broadly unpopular Biden more, but again, it's difficult to run away from your own administration, which is why so few incumbent vice presidents have won election to the top job. In terms of policy, Harris moved to the middle which is where elections are almost always won and lost, but as noted below, 2024 was not a policy-focused election.

Approval ratings. Biden was unpopular, but so was Trump. He was underwater for essentially his entire four years in the Oval Office, and after the insurrection of January 6, 2021 and his subsequent impeachment along with the criminal trials after he left office means he didn't get any more popular. When Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in July she too was at net negative, however the more the voters got to know her, the more they liked her. Tim Walz also enjoyed higher personal approval ratings than Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance. But the voters decided the hated the economy even more than they did Trump and Vance.

Endorsements. In the before times, these mattered somewhat. Donald Trump had only one of the former living Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees, Sarah Palin, backing him. While George W. Bush and Dan Quayle kept their silence, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan confirmed they were not voting for Trump as did his former VP, Mike Pence, while Dick Cheney campaigned for Harris. She also had the stars of the Democratic party as well as actual movie and pop stars, and with Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Bad Bunny, the biggest names in white, black and latino music respectively. Meanwhile all the GOP could rustle up were a few has-been C-listers, mostly from the 1980s, as typified by faded and weakened American icon Hulk Hogan. But when Trump is the biggest celebrity there is, other famous names and faces simply can't compete.

Field operations. These used to be crucial in American politics, as getting out the vote and building enthusiasm used to be the key to winning on the margins in battleground states. In 2016 the Republican National Committee did some work on behalf of the Trump campaign, but inferior ground game proved not to be decisive, James Comey did. In 2020 the GOP actually did more door knocking than the COVID-conscious Democrats, but as much as Trump ridiculed Joe Biden for campaigning from his basement, it worked. And while Harris inspired an army of volunteers, it wasn't Elon Musk's underpaid workers bused in from out of state that was the difference, once again it was all about the top of the ticket, not who worked for it.

Debate performance. In the space of five months two contradictory things have been proven to be true. After Joe Biden's halting, stammering performance in June the calls for him to step aside became to loud to ignore, so he did, thus proving that debates are hugely significant. In September Kamala Harris delivered what even her critics had to acknowledge was one of the best performances in living memory in such a format, while Trump shouted angrily and incoherently about the size of his rallies and Haitian migrants eating pets, in what even his biggest defenders had to concede was a debacle. The result in November proved that debates are totally insignificant.

Voter enthusiasm. When the switch from Biden to Harris was made one thing most commentators could agree on was that the vibes were so much better. The Democratic National Convention was the peak of the good vibes narrative, although some wondered, correctly as it turned out, if this could be sustained until November. But as with the opinion polls, people did attempt to put numbers on voter enthusiasm, and the images of the packed Harris/Walz rallies in the campaign's final stretch while an exhausted and increasingly incoherent Trump spoke to half-filled and slowly emptying venues of smaller and smaller size suggested the Democrats were re-living Obama-mania. But the end result was much more like 2016 than 2008.

Policy positions. The least credible reason for voting for Trump over Harris suggested has been her paucity of policy positions. The same question never seemed to be asked of the Republican nominee, who was free to riff about Hannibal Lecter, his dream job as a whale psychiatrist and, most infamously of all, the size of a dead golfer's penis. In as much as he had a policy platform, he actively tried to run away from it when the GOP pollsters explained how poorly his Project 2025 was being received in focus groups. Harris moved to the right on immigration, brushed off the pro-Palestinian activists and offered the sort of economic policies that would have actually made the lives of the working class voters backing Trump better, whereas he offered little but culture war grievances and more tax cuts for the rich. The election of 2024 was not a contest of policy, if it genuinely had been the result would have gone the other way.

The simplest and therefore true explanation is that Trump was so much better at selling a message to the public than Harris was. The Adolf Hitler comparisons have been overdone in sections of the discourse (although it is Trump who is on record as saying positive things about the Nazis, and one of the most high profile figures to compare Trump to Hitler was J.D. Vance in 2016, before he realised he could have a future in the MAGA if he reversed every previous ideological position he'd held), but the relentless falsehoods and their dimension makes the invocation understandable. There is no attribution for Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels actually saying "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it" although this is an oft-cited quote. However while in office Trump was recorded as uttering more than 30,000 falsehoods, and after the 2020 election propagated the Big Lie that he'd actually won it. And yet tens of millions of Americans seem to be at peace with the lies just as they were the attempted insurrection on January 6 2021 to try and overturn by force the election result that legal efforts as well as public and private pressure failed to. So while most of his campaign rhetoric might have been untrue (much of it was purely made up, such as the endless stories Trump tells about big strong men crying in his presence), he repeated it constantly and effectively, and in the end bent a bare plurality of the electorate to his will.

It's always the economy, stupid.

There is an iron law of politics that is both true and deeply unfair. It states that when times are good economically, an incumbent government gets to claim credit for this even if they had nothing to do with it, and if times are bad economically an incumbent government will always get blamed even if the causes of this were totally outside their control. Barack Obama took office in January 2009 with the global economy in free fall, and despite his best efforts was rewarded by a shellacking in the 2010 midterms which gave Republicans control of Congress and stymied much of the rest of his administration's agenda. However the economy he and Vice President Biden handed over to Donald Trump in 2017 was a strong one, and Trump enjoyed the benefits of this for three years, doing nothing other than giving away a massive upper class tax cut to reward not the people who voted for him but the people he thinks deserved relief, people like himself. And then came the economic calamity of the COVID-19 pandemic, but every indication is the voters accepted this as an exogenous event and gave Trump a pass on this one and remembered only the good parts of 2017-2019. The attitude seems to be "Sure, millions died and the economy cratered, but it was really China's fault."

However it was the pandemic and the pressure it put on global supply chains, particularly in China, that was the major cause of the post-2020 spike in inflation. And inflation was probably the biggest issue in this election, at least the biggest one the Trump campaign ran on. And it cut through because unlike most of what he talked about, what Rick Wilson dubs the catalogue of imaginary demons it actually existed. Why it provoked such anger is unsurprising; when everyday items suddenly cost a lot more than they used to people notice, which is different from regular inflation where prices rise in small increments across a longer span of time. And even beyond that, the United States has almost no collective memory of inflation. Despite minor recessions in the early 80s and 90s, the dotcom bubble bursting in 2001 along with the terrorist attacks of September 11 and then the Great Recession as part of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008-9, none of these economic downturns resulted in protracted high inflation. So unless you were a consumer with a good memory of the stagflation of the 1970s, which is essentially only those in the 65+ age bracket, this was not something people had any experience of.

While there were other policy areas where Trump attacked first Biden and then Harris on, such as the southern border and the Afghanistan withdrawal (conveniently avoiding the fact that Biden was only following through on the 2019 deal Trump himself negotiated directly with the Taliban), it was on the economy where he scored the most hits. And just as crucially neither Biden or Harris seemed to find a way to push back effectively. In 2012 the United States was only slowly recovering from the Great Recession, yet Obama sold the public on a "things are getting better, stay the course" message and won re-election in the end quite comfortably. The key differences were that like Bill Clinton before him, Obama was a once-in-a-generational political talent, and in Mitt Romney he faced an opponent with personal integrity who operated within the normal bounds of political debate, rather than in realms of pure fantasy, projection and self-aggrandisement. If the 2024 election had a lede it would be "Trump and the GOP depicted a strong economy with low inflation (2.4% on election day) as the worst in living memory, and managed to convince more than half of the electorate to buy into illusion."

The two American media ecosystems

In 2004 David Brock published a book titled "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy", and shortly afterwards launched his watchdog website, Media Matters for America. In the two decades since this noise machine has been supercharged and in the era of social media its reach is greater than ever, while at the same time the withering of traditional print and broadcast media has left competitively little balance let alone opposition to the flood of misinformation and partisan political rhetoric masquerading as news that the public then base their votes on. Fox News gets the most attention, but conservative talk radio, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, predated that, as did a wide variety of print publications, many of which were never profitable enterprises but exist only to push ideological messages. For example, "The Washington Times" was launched in 1982 by the Unification Church, to offer a conservative alternative to The Washington Post along with ahistorical revisionism and quack science. In 2013 the Washington Times launched "One America News Network", for those who find Fox News not receptive enough to pro-Trump conspiracy theories and obvious falsehoods.

The rapidly evolving social media landscape has also been crucial to the remaking of America. In 2016 it was easy for Russian operatives to use Facebook and Twitter to push pro-Trump and pro-Kremlin narratives to digitally illiterate older voters. But 2024 was the podcast election, with Donald Trump making time to sit down on multiple bro podcasts that most news consumers had never heard of, but with high numbers of regular listeners, especially young men. Accelerated by Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter and his manipulation of its algorithm to push Trump and his political opinions, there now exists and entire information ecosystem that has almost no connection to reality, but is highly influential on those within it. Two illustrative examples. In August a report came out showing violent crime was down across the United States, however Fox News ran hours of coverage about how Democratic-run cities were hotbeds of crime committed by migrants. This then filtered out through social media and podcasts. The conspiracy about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield Ohio started on Facebook, but was passed up to vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, and then got to Trump who talked about it in his debate with Kamala Harris. This was proved to be complete fiction, but dominated the mainstream discourse for days afterwards.

So in reality America in 2024 was a place where crime and inflation was down, but in the right wing media bubble it was the exact opposite. In reality Donald Trump had been charged by multiple grand juries with serious crimes at both federal and state level, but inside the bubble this was a witch hunt to distract from the "Biden crime family". Denizens of the bubble don't know that Trump called those who served in the US military "suckers and losers", nor most of his other outrageous statements, nor the tens of thousands of lies. Those who actually followed politics know how many laws, rules and norms Trump broke, and the heroics of White House staff congressional leaders, senior public servants and military leaders to either talk him down from insanity or block orders that would be illegal and unconstitutional. David Rothkopf wrote a whole book about this. However in that other media silo all people would have heard about was a normal-to-successful administration led an uncharacteristic but in no way dangerous or radical political figure. As Johnathan V. Last put it, looking back on all the crises avoided and thus invisible to those not closely following the news, "The voters never give you credit for the dogs that didn't bark."

The other reality in 2024 was that 81 year old Joe Biden was old and had clearly lost a few steps and the media couldn't stop talking about it, but also that 78 year old Donald Trump is old, clearly mentally declining, and the media wasn't interested. A few voices such as George Conway kept pointing out that Trump fulfilled all the criteria for both psychopathy and narcissistic personality disorder, and other people highlighted his increasingly incoherent speech and physical decline, but very little discussion in the mainstream press, and the same right wing noise machine that had been screaming about Biden's age for the last couple of years was, of course, silent on this point. A new term was thus coined to describe how the media filtered Trump's rambling rallies and social media outbursts to succinct policy statements: sane-washing. Things reached a nadir on the 14th of October when Trump gave up on a town hall he was supposed to be hosting and told the venue to start up his playlist of favourites, and then just swayed to the music for the next forty minutes while everyone else on stage just froze, not knowing how to react, as the audience slowly filed out. How not normal this is is self-evident, that it would end the career of any other politician who engaged in such behaviour for a fraction of the time does not need explaining. But for Donald Trump it was covered as just another day on the campaign trail, then for the media it was back to minute scrutiny of Kamala Harris' policies and extensive discussion of the latest rounds of opinion polling.

The media's addiction to polling also had the effect of both normalising and boosting Trump. Opinion polls are an example of what is known as a "pseudo event", something created by the media so it can then report on but that doesn't actually represent anything or have any deeper meaning, just something to fill column inches, generate clicks and then be talked about on television, online and in the streets. In 2023 New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen pleaded with his industry to cover "not the odds but the stakes" of the 2024 election. While individual journalists did provide quality reporting and analysis, and some smaller publications focused on these structural issues, for the most part the press ignored the stakes and fixated on the odds, offering up the same old horserace coverage. By positioning Trump as a normal candidate in a neck-and-neck race, everything about his criminal trials, his pledges to keep violating both the law and constitution if reelected as well as his clear physical and mental unfitness for the rigours of office went unmentioned. When former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley declared Trump "a fascist to the core" this was relegated to a small column several pages inside that day's New York Times, while a story about Kamala Harris' polling dominated the front page.

Thus while mainstream media did cover reality (between the polling "stories"), their biases and failings also contributed to a political environment that all but assured Harris' defeat. Part of this was simple self-interest. The first Trump Administration was the golden era for the American political media; cable news ratings and newspaper subscriptions were soaring, and given his White House leaked relentlessly and furiously, reporters previously only known to hardcore politics junkies suddenly had bestselling books and could hit the interview circuit themselves. Joe Biden won, in part, in 2020 by promising to "turn down the temperature", and exhausted by the constant drama many found this a compelling message. And while he kept this promise it seemed after years of the non-stop Trump show, sober, policy-focused governing was considered too boring, suddenly the expectation of the President of the United States was not simply to be head of the government and commander in chief, but also to be entertaining. And no one demanded more circuses than the drama-craving media, so when the Biden books at first didn't materialise, and then didn't sell, the junkies started craving another hit, and the coverage shifted back to all Trump all the time.

The long shadow of the social justice reflex falling on the growing gender divide

It might turn out that the Kamala Harris who lost the election was not the incumbent vice president in 2024, but the senator who ran in 2020. Harris entered that cycle planning to campaign on her record as a district attorney, attorney general and senator from the state of California. During the Trump administration she'd made a name for herself with tough questioning during hearings, and given the 2020 Democratic primary field was shaping up to be nominated by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren's unapologetic leftism and Joe Biden's old school Democratic centrism, there was a clear lane for a law-and-order but compassionate modern Democrat. But that's not what happened, and the early primary season turned into a wokeness olympiad as most of the candidates galloped to the extreme left, all trying to out-progressive one another. This was likely a combination of the broader social justice movement that powered by Twitter hashtags such as #blacklivesmatter and #metoo along with over-learning the lessons of 2016, where it turned out a large percentage of Bernie Sanders' support came not from those who shared his socialist politics, but rather regular centrist Democrats who simply didn't like Hillary Clinton.

In the space of a few months Harris reversed almost all her old policy positions, performed so poorly at a debate she was actually taken apart by future Trump booster Tulsi Gabbard, and flailing around tried attacking Joe Biden for Richard Nixon-era policies that he wasn't responsible for, which almost everyone agreed was an unfair hit. Her numbers collapsed, donations dried up and she withdrew from the race in December 2019, not even making it to the start line in the Iowa caucuses. When picked by Biden in 2020 to be his running mate she stayed on message, and once sworn in acted as a loyal vice president. So when Biden dropped his bid for reelection in July 2024, those deluding themselves that Harris could have run hard against her own administration are guilty of fantasy politics as noted above; the questions would have been endless as would the "Dems in disarray!" headlines. There was a lot of affection for Biden, and his popularity actually ticked up after he withdrew, and so party unity was the best of two bad options. She could not run away from her own record, and it would have been futile to try.

What Harris did was move to the centre. In another lesson from 2016, unlike Hillary Clinton Harris never made her race and gender a part of her stump speech or pitch to voters, leaving that to surrogates. She worked hard to reach out to moderate conservatives and anti-Trump Republicans, hosting events with Liz Cheney and the 2024 Democratic National Convention featured multiple GOP speakers endorsing her candidacy. Harris campaigned on strengthening the southern border, spoke of creating a "lethal fighting force" and talked about economic growth. Even her framing of the abortion issue was more about personal liberty and opposing government intervention, which in the pre-Trump era would have been considered a more Republican position. But a lot of voters didn't see it like that. They didn't credit her for moderating her stances, instead she was seen as inauthentic, with enough voters viewing her as the California progressive she cosplayed as for a few months late in 2019. This perception was, naturally, being constantly reinforced within the MAGA media bubble and because the mainstream media doesn't view its job to correct misinformation merely to report on it, the label stuck.

It's that progressive orthodoxy that has become political poison in the last few years, and to regain power the Democrats will have to spend most of their energy in the next few years trying to put distance between its worst traits and themselves. This emerged from a bubble of a different kind, one that was inflated at the top of the ivory towers of university humanities faculties, the same origin point for perhaps the single worst political slogan of the 21st Century: "defund the police". (It turns out that voters, unlike a lot of privileged academics and authors who live in nice areas, are very concerned about crime and want better policing not fewer police.) This culture of identity-driven everything, enforced pronouns, "problematic" aspects of history and popular culture, "white guilt" as well as the whole notion of "toxic masculinity" is to all who have not marinated in it, a totally alien worldview that seemingly only exists to scold and belittle, while booking no criticism for its obvious limitations and fallacies (consider another terrible slogan "people of colour", which not only lumps all no the non-Anglo Saxon peoples of the world into one massive blob, it also means that modern so-called progressivism requires people to be judged not by the content of their character but the colour of their skin).

The final mistake contributed to Kamala Harris' loss was not made in 2016 but was based on preexisting social trends that the presidency of Donald Trump helped accelerate. The reaction to his culture war politics and personal misogyny (and this was even before he was a convicted rapist), especially by women, emboldened a lot of the actors pushing identity politics, but the imposition of campus attitudes upon the American public has only further increased the education gap and the gender gap between Democrats and Republicans. Such a divided country cannot stand. The (potential) solution to this does not entail accepting the grievance-fuelled MAGA worldview, nor does it entail throwing women and LGBT people under the metaphorical bus. It means actually reclaiming the political centre, for example respecting the individual freedom and dignity of trans people, but not attempting to force science to bow to sociology by insisting that biological sex is a merely social construct, and ceasing to pretend there's nothing wrong with trans women who benefited from male puberty out-competing their female rivals in women's sports. It's not the biggest issue, but it's a symbolic one, where common sense is being pitted against politically correct ideology and/or pedantic arguments about micro-differences in testosterone levels, as if there exists some ideal number or formula that will solve the problem definitively. One political ad of the 2024 cycle that is thought even by Harris' team to have been effective was on the transgender issue. That is might have only applied to two individuals and was policy of the Trump Administration, but as noted above, something repeated over 30,000 times has a tendency to gain traction.

Given the challenges of a once in century global pandemic and subsequent inflation not seen in almost half a century, along with having to replace and elderly and unpopular incumbent shortly before an election, it is perhaps unsurprising that solid speeches, some popular policy positions and good vibes couldn't carry Kamala Harris to the White House. The old ways of doing politics are gone, and it's either adapt or lose again. Within months Donald Trump, as the master of branding, will be trumpeting the excellent economy he inherited from the Biden Administration as all thanks to him, just as he did in the three years he coasted on the Barack Obama's economy. For the Democratic Party to combat this it will be all about the messaging; policy is good, but bad policies expertly sold will convince more voters than great policies haltingly explained. The hostile and mendacious right wing noise machine will not be silenced, and while Harris won the majority of voters who read newspapers and watch actual TV news, those are not a majority of the electorate any longer. For any message to cut through the language and attitudes of prescriptive social justice will need to replaced with liberal values that have meaning to society, values the public can feel inspired by, not simply upbraided for failing to adhere to. Because the American public has proved, contrary to George W. Bush's famous mangled aphorism, that it can get fooled again.

Originally posted at https://astanddefiant.substack.com/p/why-kamala-harris-lost