Even before Kamala Harris conceded the 2024 election to Donald Trump on Wednesday, the Democratic infighting over their loss had begun.
One line of criticism was directed at the Harris campaign. Some strategists argued she should have done more to distance herself from an unpopular Joe Biden. Others criticized her for being too cautious, or that she made the mistake of ”trying to run without scrutiny.”
Claims like this are difficult to evaluate. It’s hard to know how a different campaign might have turned out. But another approach is simply to ask: What was Harris’ campaign able to accomplish? And what did it fail to accomplish?
One take is that Harris’ entrance to the race and the initial days of her campaign eliminated the Democrats’ biggest liability – perceptions of Biden’s mental and physical fitness for a second term in office. And that quickly turned Trump’s age and mental fitness into a disadvantage for his campaign.
But at the same time, the Harris campaign was unable to alter voters’ underlying pessimism about the direction of the country and the economy. Those headwinds ultimately were too much for the Democrats to overcome.
Those patterns emerge from the GW Politics Poll, which I direct with colleagues at George Washington University. Since the summer, we’ve conducted a panel survey, interviewing the same 1,795 registered voters three times over the course of the campaign. Our first wave was in early June, before the first debate and before Joe Biden dropped out of the race. The surveys were conducted by YouGov.
How we did our research
In the June survey, like in other polls, we found that voters were doubtful that Biden was up to the task of serving as president. They were more confident that Trump was.
For instance, we asked respondents how well various phrases described Biden and Trump. Just 39% said the phrase “has the mental soundness to serve effectively as president” described Biden “quite well” or “extremely well.” Forty-eight percent said the same about Trump.
An even smaller share – 33% – agreed that Biden was “in good enough physical health to serve effectively as president.” That number was 54% for Trump.
These were of course the concerns that drove Biden from the race. And the Democratic Party’s move to put Harris at the top of the ticket had exactly the intended effect – this erased voters’ doubts about whether the Democratic candidate could do the job.
When we asked this panel of voters those same questions in September, after Harris had become the Democratic nominee, the numbers were flipped. Sixty percent said Harris was mentally sound. And 81% said she was in good physical health, more than twice as many who’d said the same about Biden.
Views of Trump’s physical fitness were unchanged, but his mental soundness number had dropped to 50%. Just like that, the Democrats had jettisoned their nominee’s greatest liability and had turned it into a problem for Trump, an advantage that Harris held into the third wave of our survey in October.
Voters remained pessimistic about the U.S. economy
But what the Harris campaign could not do was dislodge the feeling among Americans that the country was headed in the wrong direction and that the economy stunk.
In June, two-thirds of respondents (67%) said the country was on the “wrong track.” In September, it was 63%. By October, people weren’t feeling any better, and 64% still agreed with this statement.
Economic perceptions were similarly stubborn. Even as inflation was easing, the Fed was cutting interest rates, and a number of economic indicators were looking up, those realities had little effect on the prevailing vibes.
In June, a majority of respondents (51%) said the economy was getting worse. By October, that number had come down only slightly, to 45%. The share of respondents saying they were worse off financially than the year before was 42% in June and 40% in October.
Not surprisingly, Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to hold consistently dim views during the course of the campaign. But one particular challenge for Harris was that independents sounded a lot more like Republicans than Democrats on these questions. For instance, in the October survey, 80% of independents said the country was on the wrong track, and 58% said the economy was getting worse.
Maybe another candidate or a different campaign strategy would have made Americans feel better about how things were going. We don’t know.
But it’s never easy for an incumbent party to shift the mindset of voters who think things are going badly – especially when the challenger is hammering away to reinforce those perceptions. Just ask George H.W. Bush, who lost his 1992 reelection bid in the face of voter anger about an economy that was reasonably strong.
In 2024, it seems plausible that Democrats faced an electorate whose views about the state of things were always going to be hard to reverse, regardless of the candidate or campaign.
