Why She Lost

By Michael Hirsh

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris boards Air Force Two in Nassau, Bahamas, in June 2023. Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images

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The postmortems about U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 U.S. presidential election will go on for a long time. Many books will be written, pundits’ reputations made and unmade, and academic careers launched as the polling data behind this baffling, unprecedented election are pored over for years to come. But as a first rough draft of history, there are a few ominous road markers that stand out.

After a remarkable start to her campaign, Harris failed to close the deal rhetorically. In an unfortunate echo of Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, Harris spent far too much time trying to argue that Trump was unfit for the presidency and too little time delivering a coherent message about why she would be better.

Despite overpowering Trump in their only debate on Sept. 10 and raising more than $1 billion in donations in just three months—a new record—Harris often floundered when challenged to deliver a convincing summary of her agenda on critical issues such as the economy and immigration. She also fumbled badly in explaining her flip-flops on issues such as fracking (which she once opposed and later supported, but without pointing out the simple fact that improved technology had made it environmentally safer). That led Wall Street Journal commentator Peggy Noonan to label Harris an “artless dodger.”

And, in the end, Harris failed to find a politically agile way of distancing herself from her unpopular boss, U.S. President Joe Biden.

In an interview with Politico in the final weeks before the election, Trump campaign manager Jason Miller put his finger on what he called the turning point of the race. This came after weeks of polling in Harris’ favor following her abrupt—and, by some accounts, undemocratic—emergence at the top of the ticket on July 21. Miller said it was Harris’ botched answer to an easy question from a friendly TV anchor, Sunny Hostin, co-host of The View, who asked Harris on Oct. 8 if she would have done anything differently from Biden over the past four years. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris awkwardly responded, horrifying her advisors and sparking an eruption of Trumpian triumphalism online.

In subsequent weeks, Harris tried to recover, telling CNN, “[My administration] will not be a continuation of the Biden administration,” but the damage was done. “Who would have thought that Sunny Hostin from The View really killed Kamala Harris’s candidacy?” Miller said. “But you can make the case that Sunny did.”