Kamala Harris Did Not Try to Win the 2024 Election

Unpacking the Rot at the Heart of the Democratic Party

Kamala Harris did not try to win the 2024 Presidential Election. This might come as a shock to those of us who watched her go through the motions, hold the rallies, do the debates, and run the TV ads from the day that Joe Biden handed her the reins until the day that she met her ultimate fate in an embarrassing loss. If you followed her campaign from the beginning though, it was obvious that Kamala Harris did not run a campaign that was oriented towards the singular goal of winning an election. Kamala Harris’ campaign is emblematic of the rot in the Democratic Party: it prioritized the total cohesion of the special interest groups in the party over the goal of obtaining power.

Kamala Harris should have picked Josh Shapiro to be her running mate. This is not Monday morning quarterbacking; it was obvious at the time. Long before Kamala took over from Biden, it was perfectly clear that the party’s best path to 270 revolved around winning Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and the Omaha Congressional District. There is not a single Democrat who would disagree with this assessment, and the election results clearly demonstrate that this was true.

The night of the Biden debate debacle, I was texting with friends about how to move forward. The consensus was, well we just need to triage the sun belt, pick a replacement ticket that can win in the rust belt, and then hold the Presidency for another four years. It’s a tall order, but not impossible. I hoped for a primary process that would play out because I did not believe in Kamala Harris, and I hoped that we would end up with Gretchen Whitmer who very obviously has better political instincts than Harris. But Biden endorsed Harris when he dropped out, and that was the end of that.

All hope of getting a rust belt oriented ticket wasn’t lost. Harris still had her VP selection, and there were two wildly popular governors in that region who Harris could tap to anchor her rust belt strategy. Gretchen Whitmer did not really want the job, and I sadly understand the logic of not having a ticket composed of two women. Well ok, that leaves Josh Shapiro. A great pick by any stretch of the imagination, if your goal is to actually win a presidential race. Shapiro had a +18 approval rating in Pennsylvania, had absolutely trounced his Trump-endorsed candidate in the 2022 Gubernatorial Election, and polls consistently showed that Pennsylvanians were more open to voting for a ticket that contained Shapiro. We also know that Pennsylvania is highly correlated with Michigan and Wisconsin, so his appeal in the Keystone state was likely to resonate in the other two states.

Harris picked Walz. I could not believe it. It was, frankly, shocking. To be clear, I like Tim Walz. But the numbers said what the numbers said. Below is a map of the 2022 gubernatorial elections that show the county level swings from the 2020 presidential election. The three governors up for election here were Walz, Shapiro, and Whitmer. Shapiro and Whitmer overperformed Biden by FOURTEEN and nine points, respectively. Yes, FOURTEEN percentage points. This improvement came from every part of the state: rural, suburban, urban, southeast PA, the Philly region, Allegheny, Appalachia, the Sheetz people and the Wawa tribe. Tim Walz improved over Biden’s margin in Minnesota by about half a percentage point. There was not a very substantial difference in candidate quality between their opponents.

I don’t claim to be an expert in midwestern politics. I’m not going to pretend that I know how to appeal to steel workers in Scranton or farmers in Hillsdale County. That’s exactly why I never bought the idea that Tim Walz, with his flannels and his folksy demeanor, was the answer to Democrats’ midwestern problem. For reasons I’m not going to pretend to understand, midwestern voters accepted the idea that Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer were really worth putting into office, and they did not say the same thing about Tim Walz. I did not need to commission any polling or focus grouping, nor did I have to imagine myself as a coal miner or a farmer. I simply looked at the 2022 election results.

Now, would a Shapiro pick have swung these three states by the two percentage points that were needed to win the election? Probably not, at least not by itself. But the Walz pick was a canary in the coal mine; it was a strong indicator that Kamala Harris was not building a campaign motivated by the singular goal of winning an election.

So why did Harris snub Shapiro and pick Walz? It seems to have been a confluence of a few factors. First, the Teachers’ Unions lobbied against Shapiro because he supports school vouchers and has publicly clashed with the unions. Second, progressives opposed Shapiro because he spoke against the campus protests and had a milquetoast middle of the road Democratic position on Israel and Palestine (a very similar position, I may add, to Walz’ position). Third, Shapiro bothered to ask Harris what he would actually do as VP, while Walz kissed her feet and told her that he was her loyal servant. Perhaps someone who was interested in the minutia of governing would have been a good pick, and maybe would also have been interested in the minutia of campaigning? Perhaps his high approval rating stems from his demonstrable attention to the details of the job? 

This was a consistent theme in Harris’ campaign. Decisions were made, not with the goal of winning, but with the goal of avoiding intraparty conflict with the special interest groups. Take, for example, the inability to push back on the Trump campaign’s ubiquitous “Kamala is for they/them” ad.

Let’s start with where this ad came from. When Kamala ran for President in 2019, she filled out an ACLU questionnaire that asked, among many other things, whether she would use “executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care – including those in prison and immigration detention – will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.” Harris said yes.

When Donald Trump brought this up at the infamous September debate, most people laughed at him. He was widely mocked on social media for saying something so stupid because, after all, how could anyone really believe that Harris was going to give away sex change surgeries to detained transgender illegal migrants? But Harris, in fact, had said that she was going to do that. That’s just a fact.

Now, five years after she filled out the questionnaire, Harris was running a campaign that was at least pretending to be about winning the Presidency. How hard would it have been to say, “well of course I don’t think that, my answer was taken out of context?” How hard would it have been to say, “people are entitled to call themselves what they want and feel how they want, but we can’t have our hard-working high school girls getting bulldozed by males in field hockey?” She and her team of highly paid consultants could have wordsmithed it much better than that, but the fact is that they just didn’t try, even as the data showed that the ads were resonating and she was losing vote share over it.

Would a campaign that was being run with the singular goal of winning an election be terrified to offend the .0001% of voters who are biological males and really want to play women’s sports? Of course not. Would a candidate focused on winning have been afraid to say how she voted on California Prop 36 (increased penalties for repeat drug and theft offenders), which passed overwhelmingly, even if it meant offending the small circle of activists who care a great deal about the rights of shoplifters? Give me a break.

And then there was the Joe Rogan debacle. 

Joe Rogan has the single biggest audience among any political figure in America. Trump’s Rogan interview currently has 46 million views on YouTube, and God knows how many more across all the platforms. Joe Rogan has opinions that I do not like, but he is very much a softball interviewer. His podcast is about having conversations, and he really lets the guests talk. Sometimes he pushes back on them a little bit, but usually he just tries to let the conversation flow. This has gotten him into hot water because he has let some of his kookiest guests say crazy or offensive things that I personally believe are quite harmful to society, but he is popular because of, not in spite of, this format. Rogan is not pretending to be a great investigative journalist willing to find the hard truths, he is just someone who facilitates conversations and he happens to be very good at it.

Kamala turned down Rogan. She and her team can spin all that they want about how he should have made way for her preferred format, but he has a show and she declined to do it. Can you imagine Barack Obama declining to do a show that has that type (and demographic) of audience in the weeks before his election? Of course not, because Obama was focused on winning the election. Trump and Vance adeptly spotted the opening and did shows with Rogan, Lex Fridman, the Nelk Boys, Theo Von, and a ton of other popular podcasters. Kamala and Walz did a smattering of them, but they were absolutely outworked on the podcast circuit.

So why didn’t Kamala do Rogan? One theory is that she just didn’t trust herself to do a three-hour long softball interview. It’s possible, but I have a different theory. In 2020, Bernie Sanders did Rogan and was then endorsed by Rogan. Was Sanders praised by Democrats for reaching out to new audiences of persuadable voters? No, he was viciously attacked by members of his own party, including allies of Kamala Harris, because Rogan and his guests say some off-color things sometimes. Democrats later labeled Joe Rogan as “problematic” and lobbied YouTube and Spotify to remove his show. This is, unfortunately, the Democrats’ way of showing virtue and keeping an increasingly small group cohesive, and it is the core of why Harris was not willing or able to run a campaign focused on winning the Presidency. It is also how she was elevated onto the national stage in the first place.

In both 2016 and 2020, Bernie Sanders challenged his Democrat rivals from the populist economic left for their Wall Street ties and for their support for the Iraq War. In both cases, Sanders’ opponents moved to attack Sanders from the left on social issues. Clinton and her allies went after Sanders for his position on guns and eventually attacked him as both racist and sexist for daring to challenge a woman who had strong black support. His supporters were viciously smeared as “Bernie Bros” and compared to Nazis. Biden at least had the good sense to apologize for his Iraq War support and distance himself to a larger degree from Wall Street, but he still responded to Sanders and the left in general by promising to choose a woman as his running mate. Because of intraparty pressures on social justice, particularly from Jim Clyburn (who Biden very much owed one to), Biden was at that very moment locked into picking a black woman. He picked the woman who was unfortunately the only plausible choice from that group, Kamala Harris.

Kamala Harris was not the worst VP pick in the world, but the mechanism by which she ended up in the job is the exact type of politics that voters hate, and unfortunately it is also the politics that Kamala continued in her campaign. We all watched it play out, and we all watched the party try to gaslight us into thinking it was not true. Calling Harris a “DEI hire” was said on cable news to be the equivalent of calling her the n-word. It is not. It is not the label that I would use, but it is accurate to say that her race and gender were big factors in her pick. Biden literally told us as much, on stage, because he was trying to run to the left of Bernie Sanders.

Kamala adopted this exact playbook, and any MSNBC watcher can tell you that it has fully infected the party. Other than some nonsense about price gouging, she let Wall Street shape her economic agenda and touted her endorsement from Dick Cheney, perhaps the least popular politician in America. She then ran to the left on social issues, just like Clinton did eight years ago. She placated the Gaza leftists (and some unions) with her VP pick, refused to engage with “problematic podcast bros,” ignored the transgender stuff that she and her team knew was working against her, and wouldn't say how she felt about the civil rights of career criminals. Does this sound like a playbook that is designed to win the White House?

The transgender ads were not effective because of some widespread high-salience transphobia. I’ve seen plenty of issue polling on this, it is simply not true that people agree with right-wingers on transgender views; there is no appetite for Matt Walsh to become the Secretary of Gender Studies. The transgender ads worked because they got at the core of the campaign that Kamala Harris was actually running: she was so afraid of pushback from the social left interest groups that she could not say simple truths about how men are physically stronger than women and should be in separate sports leagues. At the same time, Kamala could not run on a populist economic message because that would offend Wall Street, even as Kamala tried to gaslight us by pretending to run as a tough prosecutor who stood up to the very same monied interests who were funding and running her campaign.

Kamala simply did not run a campaign that was motivated by victory. We can go through so many more examples, from her answers on immigration to her answers on Biden. This was a campaign designed to not piss off anyone in her orbit and to give all of her allies a seat at the table. The problem is that her allies could not win the election for her because they do not represent the majority of the country.

Kamala is now signaling that she intends to be the leader of the Democratic Party going forward, and is probably eyeing another run. Her allies are already blaming the serious and real headwinds they faced, which undoubtedly played a role in her loss. But the blame must be placed with the candidate who did not bother to try and should be thrown into the political wilderness.

In 2028, let’s please vote for someone who is actually interested in winning an election, cares about the nuances of governance, and is willing to cut out the cancer that has infected the Democratic Party. That person is not, never has been, and never will be Kamala Harris.