For many Democratic voters, Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump was disappointing but not surprising, they said in interviews, agreeing that their party hadn’t done enough to talk about the economy and lamenting lingering racism and sexism.
Democratic voters in battleground states say they see many reasons for her defeat: the abbreviated campaign, a lack of economic messaging, a drift too far to the left on social issues, the war in Gaza and bias against Harris because she is a woman of color.
Trump seized on Americans’ economic frustrations while he drew young men and Latino voters, in particular, according to NBC News exit polls.
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Laytza Hernandez, 18, said that she voted for Harris but that many of her Mexican relatives voted for Trump because of his clearer message about the economy.
“They just felt like he was speaking more to their concerns,” said Hernandez, a student at Arizona State University.
Sami Khaldi, 58, the president of the local Democratic club in Dearborn, Michigan, said many in the community were “angry” about the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza and used their votes in protest. Voters in Dearborn, America’s only Arab-majority city, broke decisively for Trump over Harris, a departure from Joe Biden’s beating Trump there in 2020.
More broadly, he said, Khaldi believes the Democrats need to go further to win over rural voters. Trump made a concerted effort to campaign in solidly blue states such as New York, Illinois and California, where, he said, Democratic policies, including about immigration and crime, have faltered.
“They need to rethink their strategy by widening their base and reach out to red states, not just the blue states or swing states,” Khaldi said. “I understand these swing states are very, very important, but I think we need to build a stronger foundation.”
While Harris was saddled with having to introduce herself to voters in a shortened campaign season after Biden dropped out of the presidential race in July, her supporters acknowledged she also had to walk a fine line between touting the administration’s successes and presenting herself as a change candidate.
“She needed more time,” said Luis Muza, 20, a Latino and Democratic voter in Milwaukee. “If she had more time, it would have been a much closer race.”
Symone Sanders-Townsend, a former senior adviser on the Biden campaign who hosts MSNBC’s “The Weekend,” said Harris “left it all on the field” as she crisscrossed the country ahead of Election Day.
But Sanders-Townsend said that as she spoke with Democratic strategists and officials in swing states such as Pennsylvania, many expressed dismay at the perception that Harris’ campaign seemed focused on issues that weren’t necessarily pertinent to voters more concerned about inflation and their finances.
One particular attack ad by the Trump campaign stuck out, Sanders-Townsend said: It featured Harris saying in the 2020 campaign that she would support giving trans inmates access to gender-affirming care and a narrator declaring, “Kamala is for they/them.”
“The question that some of these voters had, according to the strategists on the ground, said, ‘Hey, if that’s what they’re focused on, they’re not focused on me,'” Sanders-Townsend said. “Some of the soul-searching is about how can the message break through. Because the idea that Democrats don’t have an economic agenda that speaks to some of these working people, which is not true, but do the people feel it is the difference.”
MJay Hawkins, a student at Arizona State University, said it seemed like the Harris campaign may have focused too much on “things that people are not comfortable with.”
“So they chose Trump,” Hawkins said, “because they presented him as a Christian in a way that he’s going to stop people with gay marriages and all of that stuff.”
For some Democrats, the possibility that Harris, a Black and South Asian woman whose victory would have been historic, could have become president wasn’t lost on them. Her ability to peel off more white female voters — who have traditionally supported Republicans — amid larger concerns about women’s access to abortion care and reproductive rights was noteworthy, although some Democrats worry that the electorate still isn’t ready for a female president, much less a female president of color.
“I was really praying that she would get it,” said Deborah McKinnon, 68, a Black Democratic voter from Pittsburgh. “And then I was thinking, when [Hillary] Clinton was running, for some reason, society didn’t want a female to win, so that also came to my mind this morning because she’s a female. Regardless of race, they didn’t want her to win.”
Gary Tate, another Black Democratic voter in Pittsburgh, agreed that gender was most likely a factor in an election in which Trump managed to lure more young men to the polls.
“No one’s ready for a woman president,” Tate said, adding that he liked Harris’ stance on abortion rights.
Harris’ loss can’t be understated, said Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, a national organization supporting women of color in politics, which she started after Trump’s 2016 win. Both Black women and men voted overwhelmingly for Harris, according to an NBC News exit poll, and Allison said Democrats can’t afford to lose their base at a time when other demographic groups are shifting Republican.
One in 3 voters of color went for Trump — the best performance of any Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush in his 2004 re-election effort — the exit poll found.
“It just underscores that Black women are the most loyal Democrats, and they were the power behind Kamala Harris’ campaign,” Allison said. “The country could learn a lot from what we’ve done.”
John Park, 37, a Black Democratic voter in suburban Atlanta, said that as a warehouse worker for an automotive company, he initially liked Trump’s “pro-America” approach. But he snapped back toward Harris after he listened to an episode of Steve Harvey’s radio show in which Harvey pointed out that convicted felons couldn’t vote but that now a candidate with a felony conviction had another opportunity to become president.
Park blamed Biden for not having stepped aside earlier. “He didn’t trust her when she was beside him,” he said.
The Rev. Luis Cortés, who leads Esperanza, a Philadelphia nonprofit organization that provides services and advocates for Latinos, said Trump did something Harris didn’t: He “tapped into men’s psyche” after “very little was done for that population in the inner cities of our country, for Black and Hispanic men.”
He said it seemed as if Harris didn’t have the same interest in economic development — and apparently the controversy in recent days about a racist joke made about Puerto Ricans at a Trump rally failed to galvanize some Latinos to support Harris, instead.
“So they were open to a conversation with Donald Trump and his leadership,” Cortés said, “and obviously that conversation gave them more hope with Trump than it did with Harris.”
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