Did Kamala Have A Real Chance?
Thoughts On Why My Candidate Lost
She was in this race as a sort of “semi-incumbent.” She’s like an incumbent in that she was judged by many on the record of the administration but she’s only a semi-incumbent because she wasn’t the President so she didn’t actually shape the Biden record and had to deal with questions like ‘What has she done over the last four years?’ and ‘If she proposes to do that, why hasn’t she done it already?’ That was a tough tightrope to walk.
Inflation is high and when inflation is high it’s very hard for an incumbent to win. We are now in a period when incumbents around the globe are being sent home, leaders from both sides of the aisle, because of inflation. In the last year all incumbent parties in developed countries have lost vote share. That has never happened in the 100-plus year history of democracy. There’s a global political trend of incumbents losing. Kamala needed to buck a global trend in order to win.
She had an incredibly short window in which to campaign. One thing I felt and heard a lot in the waning weeks was that people felt like they didn’t know her. The nagging notion from many voters was what is she all about? In the larger discourse of the election the question ‘who is she’ took on different forms—it morphed from ‘Is she really Black?’ to ‘How come she hasn’t done more interviews?’ to ‘I don’t really understand her.’ I recently spoke with an Indian-American woman, a liberal NYer, who said she found Kamala “cold.” This woman still voted for her but you would think that she would be among the easiest voters for Kamala to win over on a deep level but she did not. Kamala did a flurry of podcasts and shows, furiously trying to bridge the gap in a few weeks, but it was not enough. Americans are used to campaigns that go for almost a year, giving us lots chances to get to know the candidate.
Of course, the reason why Kamala had an incredibly short time to campaign had nothing to do with her. Biden’s original decision to run for re-election was a defining moment in this campaign. It set Dems on a course for disaster. The real question for me is when was it clear to the people around him that he really shouldn’t be running for a second term? To the people who interacted with him regularly, I’m sure the debate was not a surprise. So, when did they know? A month before? A year? The sundowning of an older person can happen quickly so it will be impossible to know until the insiders start chirping, but whenever it was, they didn’t say anything and that was our first big problem.
Biden’s low approval rating was another drag on her campaign that she did not create.
Kamala did not effectively deal with the economic needs of working class people who feel like they’re hurting in a time of high inflation. Early on she talked about price gouging but then advice from Wall Street began to drive her economic messaging. Voters preferred Trump’s broad and vague economic message about lowering prices (not sure how he could do that), supposedly sticking it to other countries through massive tariffs (which do not work the way he told voters they do), and erasing taxes on tips and overtime (is that even possible)? So, her realistic message was less well received than Trump’s fantasy message. How do you compete when you feel like you should tell the truth, and your opponent doesn’t have to.
But what is the Democratic economic message? As Celinda Lake, the veteran Democratic pollster said, people know Trump’s economic message is about China, tariffs, lower taxes, lower prices. If you ask people what are Democratic economics many can’t name anything. Others joke about welfare. The Democratic brand has no economic aspect. People know Republicans are about lowering taxes. What are Dems about economically? Kamala inherited this problem which is endemic to the modern Democratic party. Dems do not talk about bread and butter economic issues in a way that moves most of the country. Where’s a high federal minimum wage? Where’s universal healthcare? These are progressive economic approaches that would make a material difference in the lives of working-class people. But that’s not what we as a party are talking about and that’s a huge problem. This is a party that shivved a candidate who was all about the economy, Bernie Sanders, when he had a real chance to win the 2020 primary.
If I’m going back to Biden deciding to run for re-election as one of the problems in this campaign then I think we can go back to 2020 when Obama put his finger on the scale and made sure that Bernie Sanders would not win the Democratic primary. Sanders was a candidate with an economic message who excited a wide array of voters. In another parallel universe Obama did not clear the field for Biden to win and Sanders won that primary and his economic message just led him to re-election.
Kamala was tasked with working on the border but when a bill that could’ve made major change came up, Trump called Senate Republicans and had it killed. Then Republicans said to Kamala why haven’t you done anything on the border? This is the kindof politics Republicans have been playing since early in the Obama era. People refer to it as obstructionism—Senate Republicans blocked Obama’s legislative initiatives but when election time came they said he hasn’t accomplished anything. He hadn’t accomplished more because they obstructed but to casual watchers of politics who just noticed a lack of Presidential achievements it appeared like he was ineffective. The same game was run on Kamala—block legislation to solve the border problem and then say she didn’t do anything on the border.
The Gaza War was a very difficult issue for Kamala. A massive surge in pro-Palestinian protesters pushed her to take a stand on a complex issue but again semi-incumbency screwed her. She said she wanted to create a two-state solution and she called for a cease fire but the Vice President calling for a cease fire begs the question, instead of calling for a cease fire, why aren’t you creating it? For many Arab-American voters, voting for Kamala became akin to being complicit in genocide which is something they could never do. So Kamala did not start the war, she did not have a say in how America responded, she said the right things about what she would do in the future, but she was punished for not doing something that she did not have the power or the ability to do. The Biden administration made it impossible for her to have a position on Gaza that could work.
The message that Trump was scary did not resonate in a world where he was the President not long ago. A lot of people thought there’s nothing to be scared of because we got through a Trump Presidency already. It baffles me that most people don’t hold Trump responsible for Covid. Sure, he didn’t invent the virus but the response he led was slow, chaotic, and anti-scientific. He made things worse but that’s not how many Americans remember it. So the Dem message “Trump bad, beware” didn’t scare.
She’s a Black woman in a country that’s not ready to be led by a Black woman.
Your ending sums it all up and says it all…”She’s a Black woman in a country that’s not ready to be led by a Black woman.” That’s it That’s all!!!
No, I think any Dem would’ve lost: too many headwinds against Democrats this cycle, a base that was demoralized, MAGA was energized, etc.
If anything they should all get the blame in power to varying degrees no matter how much they sling it at each other, they had 4 years to do their jobs— and they all failed, at their jobs, period.