Reckoning with defeat: What went wrong with the Harris campaign?
by Abby Sommers (class of 2025)
In the weeks since the 2024 presidential election, Democrats across the country have been reckoning with Donald Trump’s victory, and questioning where the Harris campaign fell short. Some pundits have pointed to policy inconsistencies and platitudes in Harris’s rhetoric, while others have condemned the Democratic Party as a whole for shifting away from the needs of working-class Americans. Other strategists have attributed her loss to racist and sexist attitudes among the electorate. Across the board, however, analysts have pointed to one fatal flaw in the Harris campaign — its association with an unpopular Biden administration.
While thermostatic voting — the tendency of public opinion to swing in the opposite direction of the status quo — is not a new phenomenon, political scientists have noted that incumbents worldwide have faced increasingly hostile electorates since the pandemic. It seems that the Harris campaign could not escape this global trend. Blueprint, a Democratic polling and strategy organization, found that the top reasons why voters were resistant to Harris in 2024 were associated with perceived failings of the Biden-Harris administration, like inflation and uncontrolled immigration. The same study found that voters were concerned that a Harris administration would be too similar to Biden. A Politico article similarly accused the Harris campaign of “never sufficiently [burying] Biden’s ghost.”
The Harris campaign was uniquely positioned in the 2024 election. As Biden’s Vice President and replacement, Harris effectively ran as an incumbent in the race. Simultaneously, however, she was running against Trump, a man who had already been a low-approval president, arguably a different type of incumbent. These circumstances beg the question: if Harris had been able to either sell herself as a departure from the “incumbent” Donald Trump, or as a new way forward entirely — both of which would serve to detach herself from Biden — might she have garnered more support?
Before the election, I fielded an experiment on the Tufts Public Opinion Lab’s national survey. The experiment presented participants with one of four conditions that varied the framing of a Harris housing policy. The policy, which promised to provide first-time homebuyers with $25,000 to assist with down payments, was selected for its relative simplicity and salience. It is also related to a major issue of both campaigns — inflation and high housing costs. The conditions presented the policy either as a departure from Trump, a continuation of Biden, or a new way forward entirely. There was also a control condition that presented the same policy in a neutral frame. Respondents were randomly assigned one of the four conditions, then asked to rate their approval of the policy, and their excitement about a potential Harris presidency. To provide additional context, I also asked participants to rate their excitement if Trump or Biden were to be president for another four years.
The experiment did not yield significant results; the various frames did not significantly affect either the levels of support for the policy, nor the feelings towards a Harris presidency.
Still, perhaps there is something to glean from the lack of results, especially when they are viewed in retrospect. Some liberal voters and pundits have dwelled on what Kamala Harris could have said or done differently on the campaign trail, but these results suggest that the nuances of her rhetoric were less important than we may want to believe. Despite Harris’s efforts to distance herself from Biden and position Trump as an unpopular incumbent, the American people had four years of Biden-Harris at the front of their minds. In a similar vein, pundits have noted that some of Trump’s more outrageous rhetoric surrounding election fraud and January 6th did not seem to diminish his support among Republicans. On both sides of the aisle, it appears that campaign rhetoric was not a decisive factor in the 2024 presidential election.
The unusual way that the Harris campaign began has also attracted questions in the weeks since the election; some campaign leaders have suggested that the abbreviated campaign limited public knowledge of her name, character, and policy positions, therefore contributing to her ultimate loss. This begs the question: would the Democrats have been better off if Biden had kept himself at the top of the ticket? Approval rating data and findings from the Tufts Public Opinion lab poll suggest otherwise.
In the days following Biden’s first debate, Gallup reported that his approval rating had tanked to 36%, which was a record low for his presidency. Survey data suggested that Democratic voters were less likely to vote for Biden after his performance in the debate, many of them citing concerns about his health and mental faculties. While Harris’s approval rating was similarly low around this time, her campaign announcement assuaged concerns about electing an aging candidate and appeared to bring about a new wave of enthusiasm from Democratic voters. The Tufts Public Opinion Lab poll data revealed evidence of this Democratic excitement margin between Harris and Biden.
Our poll asked respondents to rate their feelings on a scale from excited to disappointed if Harris were to be president for the next four years. We asked the same questions about Trump and Biden. Regardless of party ID, there were very few respondents who reported higher excitement levels for Biden than for Harris. Among Democrats, an overwhelming majority preferred Harris to Biden. The majority of independents, and to an even greater extent, Republicans, expressed no difference in their feelings towards the two Democrats. When they did, they were more likely to feel more excited for Harris than vice versa.
Upon further investigation, it becomes clear that the vast majority of Republicans report extreme disappointment for either Democratic candidate, which explains why most report no difference in excitement levels. Democrats, on the other hand, appeared overwhelmingly excited about a Harris presidency, while they are far more indifferent about the possibility of another four years of Biden. It is important to acknowledge that we ran the poll after Biden had dropped out of the race, so another Biden presidency was a purely hypothetical scenario at that point. Still, the findings are consistent with the aforementioned approval rating data, and provide a compelling argument that the Democratic Party made the right decision to replace Biden, despite the concerns about Harris’s stunted campaign. While excitement is not a direct indication of vote choice or turnout, it certainly has been proven to have mobilizing effects. It seems possible that, had Biden stayed in the race, he may have lost by even more than Harris ultimately did.
For Democratic voters, pundits, and campaign leaders, it has been tempting to obsess over the choices that ultimately led to Harris’s electoral loss. Of course, there is still value in these investigations as the party attempts to rebuild and strategize for future elections. Still, the findings from our poll suggest that nuances in campaign rhetoric, nor the decision for Biden to leave the race when he did were decisive in the results of the election. Analysts ought to turn their attention elsewhere.
