Harris’s unsuccessful presidential campaigns “started with great promise,” according to analysts, and her second unsuccessful candidacy is similar to her first in 2019, which was brief and centred on subjects that American voters cared about.
“Both started with great promise,” presidential historian Tevi Troy, a former high-ranking official in the George W. Bush administration, said in an interview with Fox News Digital.
“There’s the sense that she’s the savior of the new flavor, the next generation for Democrats, and both kind of failed spectacularly,” he stated.
Eleven months after she entered the race, then-Sen. Harris cancelled her presidential run in December 2019, claiming a lack of campaign finances and a poll gap. Staff members quickly revealed the chaos in her campaign.
Harris’s campaign, however, got off to a great start, drawing a sizable audience in Oakland, California, before she became one of the more well-known early dropouts among the field of Democratic candidates. At first, she was seen as a significant contender.
However, as the campaign continued, her messaging got hazy, and she encountered strong resistance from Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard, Bernie Sanders, and then-candidate Joe Biden.
“Both [campaigns] ran aground on the same two items. The first is her incapacity to explain even the most basic concept to the American people. Troy remarked of Harris, “And it’s not because she’s not intellectually capable of doing it, but rather because she’s in a box.”
He said, “She’s trapped,” She has left-leaning preferences and supporters, but she also wants to win the general election. Therefore, she must abandon the more progressive ideas she has consistently advocated to win over voters.
Troy, however, stated that doing so would cost her enthusiastic, progressive, large funders.
After President Biden halted his reelection campaign in July due to allegations of his deteriorating mental health and a dismal debate performance against Republican former President Trump in June, Harris emerged as the Democratic front-runner. Harris made “reproductive rights” a central campaign topic, which eventually failed to win over enough swing state voters, and Biden swiftly supported him. For a few four months or so, Harris was the Democratic nominee.
According to another GOP strategist, “I don’t think voters felt like abortion rights were at risk,” Fox News Digital. “They largely agreed that the voters should decide, which was President Trump’s message that it should be sent to the states for voters themselves to decide.”
“I think our biggest strength was Kamala’s own words that she had so many far-left San Francisco liberal policy proposals that were all explained by her on camera during the 2020 campaign that we were able to deploy really effectively and target into districts where people have really negative views of those,” the Republican strategist stated.
According to voters, the economy is by far the most critical problem confronting the nation, with immigration and abortion coming in second and third, respectively. Approximately three times as many people believe they are falling behind financially as those who believe they are going ahead, which reflects the economic toll of inflation.
Harris ran an “expertly run campaign,” according to Democrat strategist Mustafa Rashed of Philadelphia, but she also had to deal with severing her ties to Biden.
“It was going to be hard to distance herself from the sitting president; she couldn’t use him as a surrogate because he was just not an effective surrogate,” Rashed stated to Fox News Digital. “He isn’t very good on the campaign trail, and his popularity doesn’t justify the drawbacks of having him as your partner.”
After Trump secured a majority of the electoral vote overnight, Harris gave in to him over the phone on Wednesday morning. Later that day, she delivered her concession address at Howard University, her alma mater.
“The outcome of this election is not what we hoped, not what we fought, not what we voted for,” Harris stated. “But hear when I say … the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”
