There are 1,000 convoluted theories floating around on social media that purport to explain why Donald Trump won the presidential race. But some Democrats and people on Kamala Harris’s campaign have concluded that one very significant reason is a straightforward one: It proved disturbingly difficult to persuade undecided voters that Trump had been a bad president.
Internal testing in all the battleground states over the course of many months yielded a result that unnerved the campaign, according to a senior Harris campaign operative who has seen the data. It was this: Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency—even if they saw these things negatively—were his fault.
This was the case on two of the biggest issues in the campaign—the 2020 economic crash and the demise of reproductive rights, the operative told me. The result: The good pre-Covid economy during the Trump years largely defined undecided voters’ impressions of him, and no message about his first term could persuade them to the contrary.
To be clear, this assessment does not mean voters are to blame. Rather, one culprit here might be President Biden. Because he stayed in the race too long, undecided voters viewed the post-Covid status quo and the very real pain of inflation only through the prism of their dislike of Biden, which blotted out hopes of attuning them to arguments about Trump’s culpability in all of it, the operative said.
Some Democrats believe that the leading pro-Harris Super PAC, Future Forward, failed to spend enough of its enormous budget on advertising early on that might have reminded voters of the horrors of the Trump presidency. That perhaps allowed him to slowly rehabilitate himself and edge up his favorable numbers while Democrats weren’t looking.
“There was a calculation among Democrats after 2020 that Trump was disqualified and wouldn’t be back,” Democratic data analyst Tom Bonier told me. “That evolved into a calculation that he would be disqualified by his legal troubles and could end up in jail. Democrats undeniably failed to disqualify him. The result was that by the time the Harris campaign started, it was too late.”
Trump did this in part by shrugging off specific national cataclysms that voters disliked and were undeniably a direct result of his presidency, and Harris campaign internal data illustrated how successfully he did this, the campaign operative notes.
For instance, the campaign regularly tested messages—with undecided and only softly committed voters in the battleground states—about the country’s massive hemorrhaging of jobs during 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The disaster was made far worse than it had to be by Trump’s pathological refusal to take it seriously.
But these swing voters did not hold Trump responsible for the job losses. “People gave him a total pass because of Covid,” the operative says.
“There was frustration inside the campaign that voters turned the massive job losses into a non-issue,” added a second Democratic operative privy to internal data. The same thing happened with undecided voters’ views of Trump’s efforts as president to cut Social Security programs: Voters didn’t believe he had done that, making it harder to make the case that he’d do so again.
And even on abortion, in all this testing, voters didn’t hold Trump responsible for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, something Trump openly boasted about during the campaign.
That’s because they didn’t believe Trump himself was sincerely anti-choice. “They didn’t find him personally responsible for the fall of Roe,” the first operative said, adding that these voters thought “he’s ambivalent” about abortion, perversely enough, because many didn’t think he had “core principles.” Perhaps partly as a result, a sizable subset of voters who supported robust abortion rights voted for Trump.
The result of all this was that these voters associated Trump’s first term with the economy before Covid, which they understandably remembered as a time of lower prices, and nothing else. “We needed to make the case that Trump was a failed president,” the Harris operative told me. “But by the time we got to Biden getting out and Harris being the nominee, that cake was too baked.”
None of this means there weren’t other big reasons for the outcome or other failures by Democrats. The loss was broad, as The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein explains: The whole electorate shifted toward Trump in all types of counties; Harris maintained Democratic strength in affluent, educated suburbs but slipped a bit even there relative to Biden; she didn’t put up good enough numbers with women; and Trump gained among Latinos and non-college educated whites.
Much of this, as Brownstein notes, was driven by deep unhappiness with the status quo among these groups. While reproductive rights and the threat posed by Trump both weighed on voters’ choices, it wasn’t enough to offset that deep dissatisfaction.
A lot of factors contributed to this, undoubtedly. Incumbent parties across the world have been falling like dominoes, in part due to the deep trauma many societies experienced in the aftermath of Covid, which was then exacerbated by inflation everywhere. As Zach Carter writes at Slate, Trump’s “raw anger” resonated with this dissatisfaction, even as Democrats failed to sufficiently harness voter emotions for their own ends.
Indeed, one might add that Trump’s vicious attacks on democracy and his authoritarian threats might have simply coded him to some swing voters as an outsider and disrupter of the status quo once again—despite having been president once already—just as he came across in 2016. Only this time, this posture exploited a level of dissatisfaction with a more hated status quo than anything voters saw in Obama’s comparatively placid and successful second term.
But surely a key part of this is that Trump was permitted to rehabilitate himself and his presidency relatively unchallenged, after running the economy into the ground and presiding over countless needless Covid deaths, then inciting a violent coup and facing an array of serious criminal charges. Trump and his media allies launched years of propaganda designed to erase 2020 from voters’ memories entirely while hammering Biden’s recovery as a catastrophe despite it actually proving a largely successful one, which Trump will now undoubtedly take credit for as president.
All throughout, this effort from Trumpworld met little resistance from Democrats and woefully inadequate scrutiny by the news media. That the unpopular Biden remained in the race so long—keeping voters focused on him as the target of blame for inflation and the awful post-Covid hangover—may have further enabled Trump to shake off association with those national wounds, slowly rewrite the story of his presidency and burnish retrospective approval of it.
“One of the peculiar things of this campaign cycle was the fact that Biden got the blame for Covid,” GOP strategist Mike Madrid, a critic of Trump, told me. “He had to deal with the residual mess of it: the economic crash, the inflationary pressures, the societal pressures. People don’t even remember that as a Trump phenomenon.”
All this amounts to a truly shocking failure that deserves its own reckoning, one that Democrats must learn from and never allow to happen again.
