The leaders of Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign are starting to acknowledge that the fundamentals of the 2024 race for the White House favored President-elect Donald Trump all along.
“The headwinds were just too great for us to overcome, especially in 107 days,” Harris campaign Chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon told the Washington Post in a representative postmortem. “But we came very close to what we anticipated, both in terms of turnout and in terms of support.”
What they were unable to do, however, was win a single battleground state or the popular vote even after replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Many explanations of the election outcome that seek to absolve Harris of responsibility for her defeat subtly make the case against her candidacy in the first place. As Biden’s vice president, she would have to do more than other Democrats to distance herself from the incumbent administration, if it could be done at all.