I have written in an accompanying essay that no Democratic candidate could have won the 2024 presidential election – no matter how good the candidate or how well run his or her campaign.  So the fact that Kamala Harris’ campaign was so awful makes no difference.  She wouldn’t have won even with a terrific campaign.  But I think it’s worth pointing out what a bad candidate she was and how misguided her campaign was so that neither she nor the high-priced consultants and campaign strategists she employed ever work in this town again.

Kamala Harris ran for the presidency of an imaginary country.  She ran a joyful campaign that might have registered in that imaginary country, but the United States is an angry country, and her campaign was out of sync and out of tune with the people of this country.  Repeatedly, she would site some awful thing that Donald Trump had said or done – or that she attributed to his supports – and follow that by saying:  “That’s not who we are.”  She couldn’t have been more wrong.  As the election results proved, that is exactly who we are.  She imagined that we are a “good country” when we’re not.

Throughout her campaign – but more so toward the end – her appeal to voters and her stump speech boiled down to this:  Trump is bad.  This was Hillary Clinton’s losing message in 2016 and was Joe Biden’s as well before he ended his 2024 candidacy.  But after nine years of constant exposure to Donald Trump, the American people knew everything about Donald Trump.  They knew he was bad.  That’s what they liked about him.  Harris never offered a positive vision for the country – never explained that she understood the American people and their struggles and pain – and never said anything about what she would do as president to improve the lives of the millions of people who can’t afford food and rent, and who see no better future for their children and grandchildren.  She claimed that the election was a referendum on Donald Trump.  It wasn’t.  It was a referendum on the elites and institutions that Americans see as responsible for their misery, shame, and hopelessness.

Damon Linker wrote this in The New York Times:  “Ms. Harris ran for president as a conservative aiming to preserve, protect, and defend the country’s bipartisan political establishment against the anti-system furor that’s been rising for many years in the electorate and that is the fuel behind the MAGA movement.  The problem is that there simply aren’t enough voters in the mood to celebrate the establishment and its works.”  Exactly.  What most voters believe is that the establishment Harris defended – its elites, its institutions, its orthodoxies —  is what has stripped them of their dignity and hope.

Amazingly, Harris, running to be America’s first female president, took women voters for granted.  She based her appeal to women solely on abortion rights – even though as president there would be nothing she could do to roll back the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.  She ignored and never addressed all of the other issues which concern women – like the economy, education, gun control, health care, immigration, and the environment.  In the end, she actually underperformed by 4 percent nationwide Joe Biden’s 2020 results with women voters.  Joe Biden did better with women voters than Kamala Harris.  How’s that as a measure of how awful her campaign was?

Here’s one more to prove the point:  The Biden administration was extremely unpopular.  Joe Biden had an approval rating of 36 percent.  75 percent of the country felt that the country under Biden was going in the wrong direction.  In an appearance on The View, Harris was given the perfect opportunity to put distance between herself and the unpopular Biden, and show that as president she would bring real change to people’s lives, when asked what she would have done differently than Biden during the previous four years and she chirped:  “Nothing comes to mind.”  That statement told voters all they needed to know in order to reject her.

The people responsible for the Harris-Walz 2024 campaign should never work in this town again.  But here’s something we know about the Democratic Party establishment:  They will.