It’s not racism that cost Kamala the election

‘It’s the economy, stupid’ – the Clinton campaign was right about what wins votes. It’s still true today

So trapped are they in their own shrinking and crumbing echo-chamber that Leftists are in danger of profoundly misdiagnosing the true reasons for Donald Trump’s remarkable electoral victory, with the obvious result that they will fail to analyse correctly what they need to change about themselves in order to avoid similar future defeats.
The Left – on both sides of the Atlantic – instinctively believes that Kamala Harris lost because the United States is an irredeemably sexist and racist country, essentially an ugly place that needs to be saved from itself through their progressivist nostrums. It was put perfectly by a student at Howard University in Washington – Harris’s alma mater – who whiningly told Radio 4’s Today programme that the sole reason for Harris’s defeat was that Americans weren’t ready, that is were too bigoted, to elect a black woman.
This analysis plays so perfectly into the anti-American assumptions often found on the Left that it will prevent them from learning the real lessons of what happened. One of them is that for all that Trump is an appalling narcissist, easily the most narcissistic candidate of the campaign was Joe Biden. He and his wife knew perfectly well that he was in no state to be president for another four years, yet still he ran.
Further, this election was never going to be about abortion, identity politics, or bringing joy “through the light of a billion stars”, or anything other than what all elections are always about – the economy. Trump was associated with good times and Harris with bad, however unfairly in either or both cases. The issue of illegal immigration played straight into the sense of unfairness felt by the American working classes, in a country that has no difficulty in defining what working people are.
If America was a fundamentally racist and sexist place it would not have elected Barack Obama and then re-elected him; it would not have 25 female senators and 126 Congresswomen. The problem was not Kamala Harris’s race or sex, it was her kumbaya attitude to politics, the speeches that read like they were written by AI, her refusal to set out a detailed plan for governance, and above all that look of coming failure that she could not shake off, reminding the electorate of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, and above all Hillary Clinton.
A white male Democratic candidate, who had longer than a hundred days from nomination to election day and wasn’t umbilically connected to Bidenomics, would probably also have lost to a Trump who had survived two (or possibly three) assassination attempts and who projected optimism, patriotism, can-do capitalism, and who was enthusiastically supported by a businessman whose company had just caught a returning rocket with a pair of chopstick gantries. (How J D Vance must be relieved that Elon Musk was born in South Africa and so can’t stand in 2028.)
Kamala Harris’s accusation that Donald Trump was a fascist was a particularly low moment in the campaign, and confirmation that she was clutching at straws. The ‘F’ word should not be used in democratic political discourse about anything that has happened since 1945, unless it is specifically directed against organisations – such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood – that have genuine ideological and historical connections to fascism and the Nazis. Otherwise the lexicon is cheapened for when the real fascists come along, and democratic politicians are left looking like the boy who cried wolf.
The Democrats are constitutionally incapable of spotting that their own tone of bossiness, obsession with race and gender and class, of being, as Bret Stephens of the New York Times has memorably put it, “a party of prigs and pontificators”, will continue to bring them defeat. Several of those characteristics can of course be seen in the British Labour Party too, although admittedly Labour is far better at self-analysis and self-criticism, with people like Pat McFadden and Peter Mandelson always expertly feeling the party’s pulse in a way that the Democrats seem incapable of doing.
If losing the electoral college by, likely, 312 to 226 does not wake up the Democratic Party, then losing the popular vote by around 50.9 per cent to 47.6 per cent certainly ought to. But it won’t; the days of Democratic presidential candidates focusing solely on the issues that concern ordinary Americans are over. Let’s hope they don’t recognise that anytime soon.