Wrong voters, wrong message: progressives’ autopsy lays bare Kamala Harris failures | Democrats

Kamala Harris lost last year’s US presidential election because she chased the wrong voters with the wrong message and ultimately immobilized the base she needed to win, according to an autopsy by a progressive grassroots advocacy group.

According to the report, the vice president focused on courting moderate Republicans to motivate core Democratic working-class, young and progressive voters; It’s a misstep made worse by his failure to break with Joe Biden on Gaza. RootsAction.

“To win back the White House and Congress, we call on the Democratic party to change course and embrace economic populist policies that inspire and help working-class Americans,” the autopsy says. “The Democratic party must show voters that it has a backbone and can stand up to the interests of corporations and big business.”

The Democratic National Committee has not yet issued a statement “after action review” The November 2024 elections, in which Donald Trump won the national popular vote by 1.5% after losing 4.5% to Biden in 2020. While Trump won all seven major swing states, Biden won six of them in 2020.

Autopsy: How Democrats Lost the White House Christopher Cook and edited by Sam RosenthalThe key factor, he says, was the huge drop in Democratic turnout: Harris received about 6.8 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020, while Trump received about 2.8 million.

Independent voters for the first time since 2004 appeared in greater numbers than registered Democrats. Turnout fell in Democratic strongholds. The significant decline in turnout and support of voters ages 18 to 29, disillusioned with the administration’s policies, proved politically fatal.

RootsAction notes that Biden’s decision to run for re-election despite low approval ratings and his late exit from the race leaves the Harris campaign with only 107 days left and no primary process to build momentum. This weighed on the candidate’s record as an unpopular incumbent.

But Harris’ campaign failed to inspire or mobilize the millions of voters who supported Biden in 2020 because of messages unrelated to voters’ economic concerns.

He embraced “cheerful” messaging and sunny conversation topics (“BidenomicsAt a time when nearly 70% of voters rate the economy as “not very good” or “weak,” Harris also did not distance herself from Biden, stating on The View that she couldn’t think of anything Biden would do differently than her.

His campaign made a critical strategic error by prioritizing appeals to moderate, suburban Republicans over mobilizing his core working-class and progressive base, leading to a significant erosion of support among these vital voters. a strategy, Stated by Senator Chuck Schumer The 2016 trade of a blue-collar Democrat for “two moderate suburban Republicans” was repeated and failed once again.

This led to a disastrous failure to reach the Democratic base. In Philadelphia, campaign organizers were reportedly told not to engage in essential vote-getting activities in Black and Latino neighborhoods, forcing staffers to form a “rogue” operation in the final days of the campaign.

The campaign also featured heavily former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney and focused on themes of democracy while ignoring voters’ more pressing economic concerns. This muddied the Democrats’ message and drained valuable resources.

The Democratic Party’s long-term support among working-class voters is accelerating toward collapse in 2024, the autopsy indicates. According to AP Votecast, Trump won voters without a college degree by a margin of 54% to 44%; this made a significant difference from 51% in 2020 to 47%.

RootsAction argues that the Harris campaign’s economic message is weakened by corporate influence. Advisers like Uber executive Tony West and billionaire Mark Cuban steered the campaign away from bold populist proposals. A New York Times report noted that the campaign adopted “marginal pro-business adjustments” that never “transformed into a clear economic argument.”

As the election approached, progressive phrases like “living wage” and “union jobs” faded from Harris’s lexicon, while Harris spent more time with Cheney and Cuban than with labor leaders like Shawn Fain.

Many of these reflected mistakes Democrat Hillary Clinton made when she lost to Trump in 2016. In an interview, Norman SolomonThe national director of RootsAction called the parallels “frustrating” and said: “The autopsy we did for the Hillary Clinton campaign is in many ways very similar to the autopsy we are releasing now.

“It would not be an exaggeration to say that if you change the names Clinton and Harris, sometimes they fit very well and this is a distortion because Hillary Clinton did not lose the working class per se, but Kamala Harris did.”

In addition, Harris’ refusal to signal any meaningful change in the Biden administration’s deeply unpopular policy toward Israel and Gaza has alienated Arab American, Muslim, young and progressive voters and cost her critical support in swing states.

Biden won 59% of Arab American votes in 2020. In 2024, polls showed Harris with just 41% of the vote, effectively tied with Trump’s 42%. The campaign refused to give speaking space to a Palestinian American state representative. Ruwa Romanmanat the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The strategy failed in Michigan, where Harris lost by 80,000 votes. In Dearborn, a city with a large Arab American population, Trump won 42-40 percentGreen Party candidate Jill Stein received 15 percent of the votes. That’s a reversal from 2020, when Biden won the city 69% to 30%.

While the report primarily blames the Democratic Party, it also acknowledges challenging external factors. Unprecedented spending by special interest groups, spearheaded by Elon Musk’s $29 million contribution, has fueled a social media machine that spreads lies and disinformation about immigration, disaster relief and candidates.

As a woman of African American and Asian descent, Harris was disadvantaged by voters’ sexism and racism biases. However, the report concludes that these were not the primary reasons for his defeat.

“Pre-election report” Populism Wins Pennsylvania The Center for Working Class Politics and others have found that “strong populist and progressive economic messages” dramatically outperform messages about Trump’s threat to democracy, especially among working-class voters.

RootsAction also argues that progressive economic policies have been accepted by wide margins even in deep red states: Missouri and Alaska passed a $15 minimum wage; Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska passed paid sick leave; Seven states, including Arizona, Missouri and Montana, have affirmed constitutional rights to abortion.

The RootsAction report makes three key recommendations. First, he calls on Democrats to embrace an agenda that includes advanced issues. Medicare for AllRaising the federal minimum wage, strong union protections, aggressive anti-trust enforcement, and significantly increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

The latter calls on the party to limit corporate campaign contributions and mount an aggressive challenge to 2010. Citizens United supreme court decision It paved the way for corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections.

Third, the post-mortem says Democrats should formally disavow the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobby group and reform US foreign policy away from unconditional support for Israel, arguing that the previous stance was both “morally indefensible and politically suicidal”.

Solomon added that the motivations of the Harris campaign and DNC leadership must be understood in the context of corporate donors and consultants who feel threatened when the status quo is challenged by insurgents such as Sen. Bernie Sanders.

He said: “The solution, much easier said than done, is to have a really big tent, to stop making young people feel unwelcome, and if you’re going to have a fight club, you need more fights and fewer clubs. The message of the post-mortem is that you can’t have a really big tent if the immediate area is perceived to be closed off, fairly accurately.”