A flawed candidate or a doomed campaign?

Nearly a month ago, Kamala Harris appeared on ABC’s The View in what was expected to be a friendly interview designed to pitch herself to Americans wanting to know more about her.

But the sit-down was quickly overshadowed by her response to a question about what she would have done differently than incumbent President Joe Biden: “Nothing comes to mind.”

Harris’ response — which became a Republican attack ad — underscored the political headwinds her jumpstart campaign failed to overcome in its decisive loss to Donald Trump on Tuesday.

Publicly, she conceded the race late Wednesday afternoon, telling supporters “don’t despair.”

But examining where she went wrong and what else she could have done will likely take longer as Democrats start pointing fingers and asking questions about the party’s future.

Harris campaign officials were quiet in the early Wednesday hours, with some aides tearfully expressing what they had expected would be a much closer race.

“Losing is unfathomably painful. It’s hard,” Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in an email to staff on Wednesday. “This will take a long time to process.”

As a sitting vice president, Harris was unable to break away from an unpopular president and convince voters that she could deliver the change they were looking for amid widespread economic turmoil.

Biden’s baggage

After Biden withdrew from the race following a disastrous debate performance, Harris was anointed at the top of the ticket, bypassing scrutiny of a primary without a single vote being cast.

She began her 100-day campaign by promising a “new generation of leadership,” rallying women around abortion rights and promising to win back working-class voters by focusing on economic issues, including rising costs and housing affordability.

With just three months until Election Day, she generated a wave of initial momentum, including a flood of social media memes, a star-studded endorsement list that included Taylor Swift and a record-breaking donation windfall. But Harris couldn’t shake the anti-Biden sentiment that permeated much of the electorate.

The president’s approval rating has consistently hovered around the low 40s during his four years in office, while some two-thirds of the voters say they believe the US is on the wrong track.

Some allies have privately wondered whether Harris remained too loyal to Biden in her bid to replace him. But Jamal Simmons, the vice president’s former communications director, called it a “trap,” arguing that any waiver would only have given Republicans another line of attack for disloyalty.

“You can’t really run from the president who chooses you,” he said.

Harris tried to walk the fine line of addressing the administration’s record without overshadowing her boss, demonstrating an unwillingness to break with Biden’s policies while also not publicly doing so promoted during the campaign.

But she then failed to make a compelling argument for why she should lead the country, and how she would deal with economic frustrations and widespread concerns about immigration.

About 3 in 10 voters said their family’s financial situation was falling behind, up from about 2 in 10 four years ago, according to data from AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 U.S. voters conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Nine in ten voters were very or somewhat concerned about the price of groceries.

The same survey found that 4 in 10 voters said immigrants living in the U.S. illegally should be deported to their countries of origin, compared to about 3 in 10 who said the same in 2020.

And while Harris tried to spend much of her campaign underscoring that her administration would not be a continuation of Biden’s, she failed to clearly outline her own policies, often sidestepping issues in lieu of perceived failures to be addressed immediately.

Fight to build on Biden’s support network

The Harris campaign had hoped to rebuild the voting base that made Biden’s 2020 victory possible, winning over key Democratic constituencies of black, Latino and young voters and making further gains among college-educated voters in the suburbs.

But she underperformed among these key voting blocs. She lost 13 points among Latino voters, two points among black voters and six points among voters under 30, according to exit polls, which could change as votes are counted but are considered representative of trends.

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who lost the 2016 Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton and the 2020 primary to Biden, said in a statement that it was “no big surprise” that working-class voters were leaving the party.

“First it was the white working class, and now it’s also Latino and black workers. While Democratic leaders defend the status quo, the American people are angry and want change,” he said. “And they’re right.”

Although women largely threw their support behind Harris and Trump, the vice president’s lead did not exceed the margins her campaign had hoped her historic candidacy would reach. And she was unable to realize her ambitions to win over suburban Republican women, losing 53% of white women.

In the first presidential election since the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion, Democrats had hoped her focus on fighting for reproductive rights would deliver a decisive victory.

While about 54% of female voters voted for Harris, this fell short of the 57% who supported Biden in 2020, according to exit poll data.

Making it about Trump had the opposite effect

Even before she was catapulted to the top of the ticket, Harris had tried to frame the race as a referendum on Trump, not Biden.

The former California prosecutor relied on her law enforcement records to prosecute the case against the former president.

But her nascent campaign chose to set aside Biden’s core argument that Trump posed an existential threat to democracy and prioritize a forward-looking “joyful” message about protecting personal freedoms and preserving the middle class.

In the final stretch, however, Harris made a tactical decision to once again highlight the dangers of a second Trump presidency. He called the president a “fascist” and campaigned with disgruntled Republicans fed up with his rhetoric.

After Trump’s former White House chief of staff John Kelly told the New York Times that Trump spoke approvingly of Adolf Hitler, Harris made comments outside her official residence describing the president as “unhinged and unstable.”

“Kamala Harris lost this election when she focused almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump,” says veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz. said Tuesday night.

“Voters already know everything about Trump – but they still wanted to know more about Harris’ plans for the first hour, first day, first month and first year of her administration.”

“It was a colossal failure of her campaign to focus the spotlight on Trump rather than on Harris’ own ideas,” he added.

Ultimately, the winning coalition Harris needed to defeat Trump never materialized, and voters’ loud rejection of Democrats showed the party has a deeper problem than just an unpopular president.

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher provides insight into American politics and its global impact in his biweekly lecture US elections unspun newsletter. Readers in Britain can sign up here. Those outside Britain can sign up here.