ELECTION REFLECTION
If you have an appetite for another presidential campaign post-mortem, read on. GOP claims of a mandate notwithstanding, Vice President Harris would now be president-elect had she gained just under 230,000 more votes in the three “Blue Wall” states. While her top campaign aides insist that she ran a “pretty flawless campaign” and attribute her loss largely to the way people felt about the economy and the country’s direction, she might have won had she not ceded to Donald Trump two issues that voters consistently rated as top-priority: the economy and immigration.
On the economy, Harris could have taken a page out of Karl Rove’s playbook to challenge Trump, as Rove did to war hero John Kerry in 2004, on his greatest perceived strength: his image as a business titan. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig document in their 2024 book “Lucky Loser,” Trump was far more successful playing a business mogul on “The Apprentice” than being one in real life.
Buettner and Craig show how, before landing his heavily scripted TV role, Trump burned through more than $400 million of his father’s wealth on a lengthy string of failed investments. They describe how “The Apprentice” production team created Trump’s fictional image as a genius businessman while disguising his persistent confusion and incompetence. Most critically, they explain that it was the $427 million Trump earned from NBC for his starring role, not his business acumen, that rescued him from economic ruin, enabling him to cover prior business losses, monetize his new persona through lucrative licensing agreements and endorsements, and secure millions in financing for new ventures. Harris left this low-hanging fruit on the table.
Trump’s campaign repeatedly reminded voters how great the economy was when he was president and, despite his widely-panned economic platform, claimed that he’d make it great again. Well, Trump may have been adjacent to a strong economy but, once again, he didn’t earn it so much as inherit it from President Obama. Trump’s best year of job growth didn’t beat any of Obama’s last three years and, when he took office, inflation was just 1.3%, a rate he didn’t beat until his bungling of COVID crashed the economy. This was low-hanging fruit that VP Harris left on the table.
On Election Day, I was a volunteer driver for Milwaukee’s Souls to the Polls program. While navigating that hyper-segregated city’s blue collar North Side, I witnessed plentiful signs of the economic hardship that has persisted for Black Milwaukeeans for so many decades, despite having Democratic presidents in office for 20 of the past 32 years. It wasn’t hard to imagine why I saw very few Harris yard signs, and why the promise of representation – electing another Black president – didn’t generate enough enthusiasm for her campaign.
On immigration, as Voces de la Frontera CEO Christine Neumann-Ortiz said in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel interview (11/8/24), Harris should have offered a positive message on the value immigrant workers bring to our economy. Her campaign also failed to combat Trump’s claims (e.g., those nasty postcards that flooded many mailboxes after Labor Day) that her “amnesty plan for illegals” would destroy Social Security and Medicare when it’s actually Trump’s plan for mass deportations that threatens those programs by robbing them of workers paying into the system.
The Harris campaign could also have highlighted the impact of Trump’s harsh sanctions against Venezuela, imposed despite prescient warnings from his Department of Homeland Security that they’d stoke a surge in Venezuelan migration, which they did. Inexplicably, VP Harris also failed to highlight her successful initiatives (“Call to Action” and “Central America Forward”) that, by addressing its root causes, achieved major reductions in migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, fulfilling her early 2021 assignment from President Biden. She could also have acknowledged the pleas of local officials, in border states and beyond, and promised federal aid to communities struggling to serve the migrants they’ve been receiving.
On a somewhat related note, Ms. Neumann-Ortiz told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the Democrats took the Latino vote for granted, waiting far too long to engage in Hispanic voter outreach. In contrast, the GOP opened a Hispanic outreach center on Milwaukee’s South Side earlier in 2024 and, according to the Journal Sentinel, it was at that site where, in a late-October visit, Senator Ron Johnson told the assembled crowd that, despite what they may have heard, there would not be massive deportations under Trump. While Harris won the majority of Milwaukee’s Latino vote, Trump narrowed his gap vs. 2020 through a campaign that appears to have outworked the Democrats.
We’ll never know if avoiding any of these strategic mistakes, or having a platform that offered greater hope of improving day-to-day living conditions in Milwaukee’s Black and Latino neighborhoods, would’ve made enough of a difference. With the very difficult hand she was dealt, VP Harris needed to run a near-flawless campaign in order to win. Unfortunately for our country, that didn’t happen.