Analysis: Harris gave hope to Democrats, but a whirlwind run ends in crushing loss

When Vice President Kamala Harris took the reins of the Democratic Party just over 100 days ago, it was the latest triumph in a political career that has been marked by both reversals of fortune and history-making breakthroughs.

After years when she was at times dismissed as the misstep-prone understudy to an unpopular president, Harris - the first Black and Indian American woman nominated for the presidency - rose on a wave of left-wing enthusiasm after replacing President Joe Biden atop the ticket in July. She erased former president Donald Trump’s lead in the polls, drew a billion dollars in donations and became the coconut-themed avatar of a party that suddenly dared to nourish hopes of keeping the White House.

Those hopes came crashing down on Tuesday night, when she suffered a resounding loss to Trump. While many of Harris’s supporters had braced themselves for a tight election that could swing either way, the magnitude of Trump’s rout was jarring: By Wednesday morning, the former president had swept five of the seven battleground states and appeared on his way to cinching the last two once votes in those places were counted. Trump was also on pace to win the popular vote, the first time a Republican nominee has done so in 20 years.

For Harris, who is no stranger to setbacks, it was a devastating defeat. But it was also a stinging verdict for the American left, which for the second time in three presidential elections has seen its standard-bearer rejected in a contest marked by dark strains of reactionary populism.

Harris always faced long odds as Biden’s successor, struggling to separate herself from an administration that oversaw dramatic increases in inflation and illegal immigration - two issues that were hugely potent against Democrats on the campaign trail. In the weeks and months ahead, experts will no doubt parse many lessons from the extraordinary campaign of 2024, which included two apparent assassination attempts, the late withdrawal of a nominee and a white-knuckle home stretch in which polls showed a race that was essentially tied.

For Democrats, those lessons are likely to be somber.

Harris was a flawed but fitting champion of the liberal coalition that has arisen against Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement: A multiracial child of immigrants and a career public servant, she has always combined left-leaning ideals with pragmatic governing instincts, and she ran a presidential campaign imbued with reverence for America’s democratic institutions.

But in the end, she came up short against a 78-year-old felon and former reality television star who assailed those same institutions as corrupt. She was the second woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket - and the second to lose to Trump, a White man who ran a campaign marked by brazen appeals to nativism, racism and misogyny.

The pain of that defeat - and of its implications for both Harris and her party - were still being absorbed by Democrats on Wednesday as Harris addressed her supporters in a speech that sought to strike a hopeful tone even as members of the audience openly wept.

[Takeaways: A decisive Trump victory in a nation still deeply divided]

“The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for, but hear me when I say the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting,” Harris said. “We will continue to wage this fight in the voting booths, in the courts and in the public square. And we will continue to wage it in quieter ways, by how we live our lives.”

The moment’s bitterness stands in contrast to Harris’s beginning in politics, when she ran as a change agent against an unpopular district attorney in San Francisco. In that 2003 race, Harris - an up-and-coming prosecutor - defeated her old boss, Terence Hallinan, surging in the home stretch of a campaign in which she consistently trailed in the polls. One of her most memorable ads was a mailer that depicted the faces of San Francisco’s previous DAs - all White men - and a simple statement: “It’s time for a change.”

Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, was quickly picked out as a rising political star. In 2010, she was elected California attorney general. Once again, her opponent was a White man - Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, a Republican - and the race was extraordinarily tight. Cooley prematurely declared victory as votes were tallied on election night, but Harris regained the lead as mail-in and provisional ballots were counted, eventually winning by less than a percentage point.

In 2015, Harris ran against weak opponents for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Barbara Boxer (D), easily winning. In Washington, she drew admiration for bringing her prosecutorial acumen to bear on the Trump administration’s nominees. Her pointed questions to Brett M. Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing and former attorney general Jeff Sessions became viral moments.

She harnessed that energy in 2019, when she launched her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination with a speech attended by more than 20,000 people in Oakland, California. But Harris struggled to sustain her initial support in a field of two dozen contenders, and in the process she embraced a number of far-left positions that in recent months have come back to haunt her. With her campaign in disarray, she withdrew from the race in December 2019, before a single primary vote was cast.

Her journey to the White House was revived by Biden, the successful Democratic nominee, who had vowed to pick a woman as his running mate. Together they defeated Trump, but as vice president, Harris got off to a rough start.

She bungled a high-profile television interview about the administration’s actions on the southern border, and her office was troubled by a string of staff departures and a whisper campaign about her alleged ineptitude as a manager. Many Democrats came to believe she was not the party’s heir apparent.

Those doubts persisted well into this summer, even after Biden came under pressure to step down from the ticket following a disastrous debate performance against Trump that reinforced voters’ concerns about his age and mental acuity. When Biden obliged and bowed out on July 21, many Democrats, unconvinced of Harris’s mettle, argued for a “mini-primary” to select a new nominee.

Once again, Harris overcame her skeptics. Biden endorsed her, and within 40 hours of his departure - after a marathon spell working the phones to shore up support among party leaders - she became the party’s presumptive nominee. In a series of electric, albeit scripted, public appearances, she laid to rest many doubts born of her sometimes rocky record as a campaigner and inspired millions of people to once again see the political star power that had first distinguished her in California.

Harris’s perennial weaknesses as a candidate did not disappear, although she often succeeded in mitigating them.

She has always struggled with tough questions from reporters. For much of the campaign she avoided news media interviews. She changed course in the later weeks of the campaign, making appearances not only on outlets such as CBS, CNN and NBC, but also on Fox News, where she sparred with anchor Bret Baier in a performance that thrilled her supporters even as it was panned by her detractors. Throughout the campaign, her critics attacked her for failing to articulate a clear set of policy priorities beyond the immediate need to defeat Trump.

But she also contended with a steady stream of acerbic - and, often, identity-based - attacks from her Republican opponent, who extended a long history of using derogatory and inflammatory language toward women, Black people and Latinos.

Trump accused Harris of hiding her Black heritage for much of her career and identifying as Black only for political expediency. (Harris has always identified herself as Black, and she attended Howard University, a historically Black institution that served as the site of her watch party Tuesday night.) Trump called her “a low IQ individual” and made a point of mispronouncing her first name.

Harris, for her part, did not dwell extensively on her identity or the trailblazing nature of her candidacy. But many of her supporters hoped she could assemble a diverse coalition - stretching across both racial and political divides - to overcome the devotion of Trump’s MAGA movement.

By the final days of the campaign, that coalition included both former congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, an anti-Trump Republican, and Puerto Ricans incensed by a racist joke made at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. It included celebrities such as Taylor Swift as well as former president Barack Obama, who exhorted Black men to support Harris, saying he suspected sexism was behind the ambivalence that some of them felt toward the Democratic nominee.

It was a coalition, ultimately, that did not deliver - and that showed conspicuous signs of weakening as Black and Latino men defected to Trump. This was one more bitter pill for Democrats, and for Harris, who launched herself in public life 20 years ago by promoting change to political systems that had long excluded these groups and who spent the last three months promising voters “a new way forward.”

Harris tried, not always successfully, to describe that different future. She also embodied it. And when the ballots were counted, a majority of Americans sent a clear message that they desired something else.