By Joseph Cunningham
The White House. Photo by Danny Thomas, EyeEm, Getty Images
We are now three months into Donald Trump’s election, and every day feels like a reality TV show. Things moved so quickly that people didn’t even have time to process how we got here. Apart from Trump using independent media, he successfully captured a younger voter base and maintained his original one. What else lead to this crushing defeat that we need to learn from?
The Democratic campaign was a tragedy from almost start to finish. Even with a universally poor opponent like Trump, Biden’s approval ratings only fell below 45% from 2022 until he left office in 2025, having a low of 36 just before his drop out of the race. From the start it felt as if the Democrats had no motion and no drive, relying on people to remember what the previous Trump administration felt like, while also failing to remember the past four years of Americans struggling under their own administration.
When Biden finally did drop out, it felt like a breath of fresh air to many. Kamala Harris brought in millions of dollars over the next week, breaking records with the $200 million she received in donations. It was very clear the people were excited for something different. She then went on to pick one of the most progressive people among the Democrats to be her Vice President: Tim Walz, a man who worked great with unions, fought for protections for LGBTQIA+ and made historic investments in education in Wisconsin.
However, instead of using this golden opportunity to move away from the ever-unpopular Biden administration, the Harris campaign went for a different approach. Whether she wanted to or was told to by her advisors, suddenly Harris was flip-flopping on policies she had stood on in the past, such as fracking and immigration policies, while also seemingly allowing the party to drop talks on student loan forgiveness. All while in the process of significantly neutering her VP candidate. It became impossible for him to message around his partner’s goals, doing all of this with hopes of grabbing the median voter. Instead, Dems were simply reaffirming to people what Republicans have said all along is true, and that voters should vote for them. Worst of all, she never made that push away from Biden, continuing the avid support for Israel and the Biden administration’s foreign policy decisions.
The few good things the campaign was promising or did were tucked away deep within her website (or just did very little to advocate for). Everyone knew she was going to attempt abortion rights, but not exactly how. The Biden administration hadn’t done anything about protections so far. They barely attempted at all to campaign on price gouging out of fear of sounding like a “socialist”. Despite grocery chains making record-breaking profits, 67% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck and 76% of Americans believing that affordability is too high and that the government should do more to combat corporations that unfairly raise prices on consumers in order to lower the costs for millions of Americans.
Even if Trump hadn’t managed to use the manosphere and lies for his personal gain, the Democrats still would’ve lost due to their inconsistency. The Democrats’ purpose is to be the alternative to the right-wing Republican party, and their constant pivot towards the center-right loses millions of voters.
Data from:
https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race/kamala-harris/expenditures?id=N00036915
https://news.gallup.com/poll/329384/presidential-approval-ratings-joe-biden.aspx