WASHINGTON – When Kamala Harris appeared on ABC’s “The View” last month, it was meant to be a friendly forum to introduce herself to Americans who didn’t know her story.

The Democratic presidential candidate struggled to explain what she would do differently of President Joe Biden. “Nothing comes to mind,” Harris, the outgoing vice president, told the hosts.

After the president-elect Donald TrumpIt is lopsided election victory against HarrisThis televised moment highlighted a fatal flaw in Harris’s campaign that doomed her electoral bid: an inability to separate herself from an unpopular president whose approval ratings hovered around 40 percent for most of his four years at the White House.

David Axelrod, a former longtime adviser to Barack Obama, called the exchange – which became a Trump ad − “disastrous” for Harris because he summarized the election results on CNN early Wednesday. “There is no doubt about it. The question is: what motivated him?

In poll after poll, the majority of Americans have said for months that they think the country is heading in the wrong direction.

Live election updates: Final results and instant reaction after Donald Trump’s electoral triumph

Harris presents herself as a “new generation of leaders” and a forward-thinking candidate who would work across the aisle and seek solutions, not political warfare, to address America’s concerns about rising costs and housing affordability.

But given Harris’ status as a sitting vice president, she never fit the mold of a traditional “candidate for change” and she remained committed to Biden – remaining loyal to him even as Americans clearly indicated that they disapproved of his handling of inflation and migration at the top. southern border.

More: Trump pounces as Harris hesitates to draw contrasts with Biden

Ultimately, the election was not as difficult as many hoped. This is a resounding victory for Trump and a rejection of Harris and the Democratic Party as Republicans. took control of the US Senate.

Harris underperforms among Black and Latino voters

Trump’s victory became almost certain when the former president was the projected winner of the battleground state of Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes. It’s a state that Democrats have only lost once since 1988. That happened in 2016 with Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton.

The Harris campaign devoted significant resources to four Sun Belt battlegrounds — Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina — but it seemed unlikely that she would win any of them. And the Democrats’ “blue wall” collapsed as Harris trailed Trump in Michigan and lost outright in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

An analysis from the New York Times found that Trump widened his margin in 2020 in 2,367 counties nationwide and decreased his performance in just 240 counties.

Harris and her campaign hoped to win the White House by bringing together moderate and independent Republican voters tired of nearly a decade of division during the Donald Trump era.

These efforts did not work. Nor has Harris been able to prevent key Democratic constituencies – Black, Latino and young voters – from splintering.

Harris underperformed among voters of color – particularly Latino voters – but also among black voters in urban centers like Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. Harris carried black voters between 86% and 12% and Latino voters between 53% and 45%, according to CNN exit polls. But in the 2020 election, Biden won black voters by a wider margin of 92% to 8% over Trump, and Latino voters by 65% ​​to 32%.

“I think it challenges a lot of traditional identity politics,” said Julián Castro, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration. said on MSNBC. “I think it’s going to rewrite how the parties approach Latinos and other groups.”

Harris also lost ground in many college suburbs, which have become Democratic strongholds in recent election cycles. In Montgomery County, outside Philadelphia, Harris beat Trump by 23 percentage points. Biden won by 26 points.

More: Harris will return to Howard after a bittersweet election night

Meanwhile, Harris worked to stem the bleeding in heavily Republican rural counties in states like Pennsylvania, but she ultimately underperformed Biden in 2020 in those places, returning to the levels Clinton achieved in 2016.

Has Harris focused too much on Trump?

From the start, Harris tried to make this race a referendum on Trump.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Harris ramped up her rhetoric, calling the former president a fascist, warning him that he was “unhinged and unstable,” and highlighting the former Trump chief of staff’s assessment at the White House, John Kelly, who claimed that Trump had made admiring statements about Adolf Hitler.

She increasingly tends to present the election as a fight for democracy, much like Biden did before withdrawing from the race in 2024.

“Kamala Harris lost this election when she focused almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump,” Veteran pollster Frank Luntz said onformerly Twitter. “Voters already know everything about Trump, but they still wanted to know more about Harris’ plans for the first hour, first day, first month and first year of her administration.

“It was a colossal failure for her campaign to put the spotlight on Trump more than on Harris’ own ideas.”

Harris, who campaigned aggressively to restore access to abortion, won voters by a whopping 54 to 44 percent margin, according to CNN exit polls, but it was a narrow margin slimmer than Biden’s 57-42% showing among women in 2020. Trump won. male voters defeated Harris by the same 54–44% margin that Harris won against women.

Abortion ultimately was not the galvanizing force it was in 2022, when Democrats outperformed expectations in the midterms.

Harris’ defeat marks the second time in three election cycles that Democrats have fielded a female presidential candidate in hopes of making history — only to lose to Trump each time.

The Democrats have reason to question

Harris was an unproven political commodity at the top of the ticket, ending her 2020 Democratic primary bid before voting began. She won the Democratic nomination this time, without obtaining a single vote while Democrats quickly rallied behind her after Biden left. She attempted to distance herself from some of the liberal positions she took as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic primaries, in an appeal to Republicans and moderates.

At the same time, polls have consistently shown that Americans today have better memories of Trump’s four years in office — particularly his leadership of the economy — than when he was in the White House. Many Americans were willing to forgive Trump’s well-documented baggage: four criminal charges, two impeachments and his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Most voters, 51%, said they trusted Trump over Harris to manage the economy, which 31% of voters cited as their top concern, according to CNN exit polls .

For Democrats, the questioning has now begun: Was Harris the right choice to take on Trump? Should they have looked elsewhere? Or should they have stuck with Biden?

Contact Joey Garrison on X, formerly Twitter, @joeygarrison.

This article was originally published on USA TODAY: Kamala Harris lost support from Black and Latino voters in 2024 race