When the smoke had cleared from the election, it appears a number of events, factors and circumstances doomed the Harris-Walz team and created a perfect storm against what for many would have been an historic triumph for electoral politics with the first Black woman presidency.

Vice President Kamala Harris was nearly 2 million votes behind the tally of President Joe Biden in 2020 in key Democratic counties. She was behind hundreds of thousands of votes in the big cities like Detroit and Philadelphia in battleground states.

Harris got 72 million in 2024 compared to Biden’s 81.2 million in 2020. Trump got 74.2 million in 2020 and 75 million in 2024. Nearly 10 million Democrats went missing.

One on-the-ground campaign worker for Harris was shocked by the lack of enthusiasm even from Black women voters in and around bigger cities, who would say their vote won’t make a difference, according to a report in The New York Times.

There’s been a fair amount of criticism that Biden didn’t get out of the race with enough time to let Harris establish herself, get more media exposure and have time for people to get to know her, being somewhat of a low-profile vice president. But Harris also limited time with legacy media and while she did a few interviews, even with Fox News, it was too little too late.

Harris was caught in the anti-incumbent mood that experts say swept democracies around the world, but she also did not have a messaging strategy to combat that. She actually ran away from Biden’s significant accomplishments — bipartisan infrastructure, chips manufacturing, COVID payments, green energy investments — in a way that leaves one scratching their heads. Of course Biden’s approval rating in the upper 30s was nothing to be connected to, even if it was an unfair rating for all he had accomplished.

The message of threatened democracy also seemed to wear thin, especially when the Trump team again flooded their friendly media with charges against Harris-Walz as democracy’s threat, framing the Harris democratic nomination as a sort of interparty coup. Some of that stuck and hence added to the low turnout.

Media observers say the Trump messaging to just flood the airspace with one crazy thing after another left legacy media reeling and advocacy media flooding the zone.

While inflation had moved to near 2% a year, voters knew how high prices remained from pre-pandemic levels. It’s something voters observed every day and outweighed other things less observable, like threats to democracy or even abortion rights.

While many saw Tim Walz as the ideal vice presidential candidate with a strong narrative, it turns out he probably did not get the boost from white males — or young white males — the Harris ticket was looking for, despite his hunting and “Dad in plaid” credentials. The hopeful Walz candidacy ran into the reality that vice presidential candidates often do not make a difference.

Had Harris chosen Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, she may have won Pennsylvania, but that would still not have been enough to win in Wisconsin and Michigan and get the electoral votes needed.

Harris ran into the historic events of the deep escalation of a Mideast War and was challenged to explain her position to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian voters in battleground Michigan and elsewhere. They likely didn’t vote or voted for a write-in or third-party candidate.

While political observers criticized Trump for having no “ground game” with resources on get out the vote poured into battleground states, he didn’t need that. He had millionaires and billionaires who, through a recent federal court case, could invest directly in get out the vote campaigns tied to one candidate. Elon Musk invested some $175 million alone.

While media attention focused on the newness of the Harris-Walz ticket, that attention wore off with every Trump news conference. And certainly Trump got attention after two assassination attempts.

The election results showed many new truths about the American electorate, many of which the Harris-Walz strategy could not, or at least did not, anticipate.

The Free Press (Mankato, Minn.)