At this point, Kamala Harris’s defeat in the 2024 presidential election is overdetermined. Indeed, even her loss’s overdetermination is overdetermined.
At this point, Kamala Harris’s defeat in the 2024 presidential election is overdetermined. Indeed, even her loss’s overdetermination is overdetermined.
Before Election Day, I joined other observers in noting that the election’s outcome would be viewed retrospectively as the inevitable culmination of various contributing factors. Had Trump gone down to defeat, it would have been the unsurprising conclusion of a campaign waged by a one-term president dogged by allegations of corruption and saddled with a felony conviction. But Harris lost, and that, too, was the only possible outcome given the degree of voters’ dissatisfaction with the administration in which she served and her almost preternatural lack of political talent. Everything is predestined in hindsight.
And yet, while all the environmental and candidate quality issues certainly matter, there was also an intangibly off-putting element to Harris’s approach to that campaign that was hard to put into words. Fortunately, in one of her more ludic moments, Harris herself put her finger on it in last night’s interview with outgoing Late Show host Stephen Colbert:
“There are some people who are born or grew up believing, ‘I’m gonna be president, I want to be president.’ That wasn’t me,” she chuckled. “I knew I wanted to serve — I knew that.” At this point, Harris went off on a tangent about the opacity of public life that made little sense. But Colbert grokked her meaning. “I’m hearing you don’t want to be a part of the fight anymore,” he pressed quizzically. “Oh, absolutely not,” Harris insisted. “I’m always going to be part of the fight.”
That should not reassure Harris’s fans. Perhaps she only intimated her disinterest in occupying the Oval Office to project false modesty, but the admission contained a grain of observable truth. After all, she ran for the office as if she didn’t want it.
By the late summer of last year, Harris’s conspicuous refusal to subject herself to probing interviews had become a liability for her campaign. Indeed, by mid-September, she had only just begun to expose herself to probing inquiries “if you look closely.” It wasn’t until mid-October that she sat down for a genuinely adversarial conversation with Fox News’s Bret Baier, which only revealed the degree to which she needed practice. Trump held 21 public campaign events in September. JD Vance hosted 14. By comparison, Harris headlined just 13 events. Tim Walz, a paltry seven. That pace continued into October, when “anxious” Democratic operatives began to fret over Trump’s ubiquity and the contrast it struck with the Harris-Walz ticket’s “risk-averse” approach, which ensured that the Democratic Party’s candidates were far less visible.
They say that it’s best practice for candidates to “run scared,” and Harris did just that. But she seemed more afraid of success than failure. Whether her campaign’s caution was due to insecurity or lethargy, it conveyed to voters that she just wanted it less than Trump. And the voting public tends to want their presidents to relish the role — or, at least, not actively resent it.