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How ‘Trump threat to democracy’ weapon backfired on Kamala Harris – Firstpost

TCI BureauBy No Comments12 Mins Read
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The contrast couldn’t have been starker. Hope had turned into despair and excitement into dullness.

In the last two months, Kamala Harris shattered the attendance records of her rallies one after another—17,000 in Greensboro (North Carolina) in September and 23,000 in Clarkston (Georgia), 30,000 in Houston (Texas) and 75,000 at The Ellipse (Washington D.C.) in October.

On election night, however, gloom engulfed the Democratic Party. The vice-president’s (V-P) alma mater, Howard University (Washington D.C.), the venue for the election night watch party where she was scheduled to speak, was deserted after her speech was cancelled.

In a stunning and historic comeback, the 45th POTUS has become the 47th president-elect, smashing late President Stephen Grover Cleveland’s 132-year-old record of two non-consecutive White House terms.

“I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honour of being elected your 47th president, and your 45th president,” Trump, flanked by his family members and V-P-elect JD Vance and his wife Usha, said in his victory speech in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Pundits and public polling got it wrong

Poll pundits, polling companies and the media, which depends on their predictions, all got it wrong, declaring the 60th presidential election an 
extremely tight contest with Trump and Harris either tied or marginally ahead of/trailing each other nationally and in the battleground states.

Opinion polls 
can get it wrong—like in 2016 and 2020.

In 2016, all opinion polls, excluding the UPI/CVoter poll and the University of Southern California (USC)/Los Angeles Times, correctly predicted Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote but overestimated her lead size. Around 88 per cent of national polls overstated her support among voters.

On Election Day, BBC showed Clinton leading Trump by 48.0 to 44.0 percent, HuffPost Pollster 47.3 to 42.0 per cent, The New York Times (NYT) 45.9 to 42.8 per cent, RealClearPolitics 46.8 to 43.6 per cent and TPM Polltracker 48.8 to 43.9 per cent. However, the results showed Clinton beating Trump by 48.2 to 46.1 per cent.

In 2020, 529 national presidential polls were conducted, including 66 by 38 pollsters between October 21 and November 3. Ninety-three per cent of national polls overstated Joe Biden’s support among voters, the largest polling error in more than 40 years, when support for Jimmy Carter was overestimated by 6 per cent.

Among polls conducted in the last two weeks before the election, the average signed error on the vote margin was too favourable for Biden by 3.9 per cent in the national polls and 4.3 per cent in statewide presidential polls, according to an American Association for Public Opinion Research report evaluating the 2020 polls.

The Trump juggernaut smashed every prediction—even by the crème de la crème of forecasters. He won all the swing states and became the first Republican to secure the popular vote in 20 years since George W Bush in 2004.

Famous American statistician and poker player Nate Silver had predicted the results in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 presidential election and was highly accurate in the 2012 and the 2020 White House races.

Hours before this year’s voting, Silver’s forecast showed Harris narrowly edging out Trump in 40,012 out of 80,000 simulations (50.015 per cent of possible outcomes) against Trump’s 39,988 simulations (49.985 per cent) though he called it a “pure toss-up”.

However, Silver, who founded FiveThirtyEight and now runs a Substack, 
took down his prediction model in the middle of the election night realising it wasn’t “capturing the story of this election night well”. According to his model, Harris had a 53 per cent chance of beating Trump.

On Election Day, Silver tweeted that luck would decide the winner.

Renowned American historian Allan Lichtman, known as the ‘Nostradamus of US elections’ for correctly predicting the results of every presidential election since 1984, except in 2000, was again wrong.

On voting day, he tweeted: “Mark my words… The Keys will be right again!”

Lichtman also predicted that Harris would beat Trump by a razor-thin margin, per his 13 Keys prediction system, which considers factors like the economy, foreign/military failure or success, charismatic incumbent, uncharismatic challenger and others. If five or fewer factors are false, the incumbent wins.

However, the day after the election, he tweeted: “My prediction for this presidential election was wrong. I own up to it.”

But why Harris got it all wrong?

The contrast between Trump and Harris was glaring during the campaign. He’s the only former president to have been indicted in four criminal cases of which he was convicted in one and the only serving president who was impeached twice.

Trump led Biden before the president exited the race due to his party’s pressure. Harris’s arrival was a massive wave that swept the Trump campaign, causing jitters.

In the most historical somersault in approval ratings and the fastest and biggest coalescence around a new candidate around three months before the election, Harris injected hope and enthusiasm into her party, which had lost steam due to Biden’s pathetic ratings, the disastrous debate performance and embarrassing gaffes.

Harris smashed fundraising records: $36 million in the first 24 hours since she picked Minnesota governor Tim Walz as running mate and more than $81 million in the 24 hours and $200 million in the first week since Biden’s exit. The July donations were a staggering $310 million, more than double the $137 raised by the Trump campaign. By October, more than $1 billion had been pumped into the Harris war chest.

Yet the Trump tsunami swept the Democratic Party sinking the last sliver of hope for Harris.

Where did the Harris campaign go wrong?

Poll experts and analysts and the American media have started dissecting Harris’s failure with the economy, particularly inflation, and immigration stated as the main reasons for Trump’s win. Undoubtedly, they were the big deciding factors. Some Democrats even 
blamed Biden for the rout. Several media outlets said that Harris avoiding interviews in the first half of her campaign was also responsible for the loss.

However, the biggest factor that derailed Harris’s path to victory was something else.

Exit polls showed that democracy was the biggest voter concern, followed by the economy.

An 
NBC News exit poll showed that democracy mattered most to 34 per cent of voters, economy 31 per cent, abortion 14 per cent and immigration 11 per cent. Around 75 per cent felt that democracy in the US is threatened and the country is on the wrong track.

An 
Edison Research exit poll found that democracy mattered the most to 34 per cent of voters with 73 per cent saying that it was under threat.

A 
CNN exit poll showed similar results with 34 per cent of voters saying democracy was the main concern, followed by the economy at 32 per cent. Moreover, 73 per cent said that democracy was threatened and the same percentage were angry or dissatisfied with the way things were going in the US.

Democracy wasn’t the top voter concern in opinion polls but Americans still felt it was under threat. The final nationwide 
NYT/Siena College poll, conducted from October 20 to 23, showed the economy as the top voter concern at 27 per cent, abortion and immigration at 15 per cent each. The state of democracy, on which Harris had been blasting Trump, matter only 7 per cent to voters—but 76 per cent felt that democracy was under threat.

Similarly, an 
August NYT/Siena College poll found that the economy and immigration were the first and third most important issues at 22 per cent and 13 per cent, respectively, and democracy only seven per cent.

However, there were enough signs showing that Americans were dissatisfied with the state of democracy, felt that the country was headed in the wrong direction and elected representatives didin’t represent them properly.

A March 2024 Associated Press-NORC Center 
poll found that 53 per cent of Americans believe America was a poorly functioning democracy. A January 2024 Gallup 
poll showed that only 28 per cent of Americans were satisfied with the way democracy was working, sharply down from 61 per cent in 1984.

A February 
Pew survey found that 66 per cent of Americans were dissatisfied with how democracy was functioning Satisfaction with how the US democracy was working had decreased significantly since the last time this question was asked from 41 per cent in 2021 to 31 per cent in 2023.

A big reason for the dissatisfaction with democracy was that 83 per cent of ordinary Americans felt that politicians are disconnected from them. As of April, 
only 22 per cent of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right “just about always”—in 2023, the trust factor was lowest in Pew’s seven decades of polling at 16 per cent.

Americans also felt that the country is on the wrong track. An 
October IPSOS poll found that 60 per cent of registered voters found that the economy was headed in the wrong direction, 65 per cent felt the same about the immigration policy, 70 per cent on the cost of living and 72 per cent on national politics.

A 
YouGov survey in the same month found that 65 per cent feel that the US was on the wrong track. Moreover, 79 per cent of voters who thought that the American way of life was bad and needed to be restored to a better way it used to be wanted to vote for Trump. Besides, 71 per cent of Americans who believed that the American way of life was good and should be kept the way also wanted to vote for him.

Harris failed to gauge the voter’s mood and sense the undercurrent flowing against the Democratic Party.

Voters felt that democracy was under threat under the Biden-Harris administration_._

What backfired for Harris was her later criticism of Trump being a “threat to democracy”. Initially, she avoided Biden’s core argument that Trump was an existential threat to democracy. However, her tactical mistake was to fall back on her boss’s argument in the campaign’s final leg.

Harris called Trump “unhinged and unstable” after his former chief of staff John Kelly told the NYT that the former president praised Adolf Hitler. During a CNN town hall event, she replied, “Yes” when asked if she believed Trump was a “fascist”.

In her final speech to her supporters, on The Ellipse—from where Trump asked his supporters to “fight like hell” on January 6, 2021, resulting in the US Capitol riot—on October 29, Harris portrayed herself as the unifier and Trump as the divider.

“Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other. … intends to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him. People he calls ‘the enemy from within’. This is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better,” Harris said. “This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power.”

Harris couldn’t attack Trump on the economy and immigration while he hammered her continuously on these two major issues. Therefore, from her initial message of hope and joy, Harris was back to using Biden’s futile tactic of raising fears of another Trump presidency.

While trying to court Independents and moderate Republicans by highlighting the ‘danger’ Trump posed to democracy, she shot herself in the foot.

For the time in American history, 
more Independents voted than Democrats in a presidential election accounting for 34 per cent of voters compared to 32 per cent Democrats and 34 per cent Republicans. Worse was Trump improving his support among Independents by four points from 41 per cent in 2020 to 45 per cent in 2024 while Harris got 4 per cent less votes from this bloc compared to Biden in 2020 (54-50 per cent).

Harris failed to realise that voters, especially Republicans and moderates, already knew everything about Trump and the US Capitol attack. Her Ellipse speech was devoid of any concrete plans and only peppered with the risks of Trump 2.0.

The voter, particularly the undecided, was looking for a change—a different future for the US outside Biden’s shadow.

Harris offered nothing and put the nail in her campaign’s coffin when asked during an interview on ABC’s _The View_on October 8 what she would have done differently during Biden’s four years. “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done,” she said.

On the other hand, Trump offered leadership and change. A 
CBS News 
exit poll showed that the ability to lead (30 per cent) and to be someone who can bring needed change (27 per cent) were the top two candidate qualities for voters. On leadership, 65 per cent of voters believed in Trump and only 34 per cent in Harris. For 73 per cent of voters, change was most important and Trump could deliver it.

The NBC exit poll showed that the ability to lead and bring change mattered 30 per cent and 28 per cent, respectively, to voters in deciding for whom to vote.

The anti-establishment feeling was again reaped by Trump, who won in 2016 using the same game plan.

In December 2023, Trump said, “Joe Biden is 
not the defender of American democracy; Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy” referring to his four indictments and the alleged weaponisation of the justice department and the federal justice system. In a series of campaign rallies, he said that Biden was a “
threat to democracy”.

Harris abysmally failed to get the message the message—and Trump turned the tables to blow away her chances with her weapon of choice.

The writer is a freelance journalist with more than two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.



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