The End of Kamala Harris’s Campaign

Kamala Harris's bid for the 2024 Presidential election ended late Wednesday afternoon in the Yard of Howard University, her alma mater, in Washington, D.C., where the Election Night party had disbanded inconclusively hours before. It was eighty degrees and beautiful outside, T-shirt weather in November. In front of Frederick Douglass Hall, a sizable crowd gathered again on a grass lawn. Many were Howard University students, but there were also a number of locals who wanted to "be a part of the little bit of hope that we have left," as an attendee named Joanna Blotner, who lived in the neighborhood, told me.

"I just wanted to see her," a Howard computer-science major named Jacob Robertson said. " I just wanted to see what she has to say."

Few of the people I spoke with blamed Harris for the loss. "I do wish Biden had stepped down sooner," Christine Frye told me. "I do wish the Harris campaign had some more concrete policy proposals, especially when it comes to child care and maternity leave in the country, family paid leave." Like other attendees, she came to witness some history and see the end. "I can't imagine how difficult this is for her," a D.C. resident named Bryan Hum told me. "I just wanted to show our continued support that she's not alone, even in these moments."

Now that Donald Trump has won , it seems worth remembering that, until July 20th, when Joe Biden ended his reëlection bid, the former President's return to office had seemed inevitable. Kamala Harris's hundred-and-seven-day campaign might be seen, in the long term, as a glitch in a race that had perhaps been decided for many voters months earlier. The energy, especially among committed Democrats, that followed Harris's nomination—and the tens of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of millions of dollars in donations it generated—now appears to have been a mirage of uplift for the Party's base that failed to win over sufficient numbers of voters who were on the fence.

Harris had held her first campaign rally in a high-school gym in a suburb of Milwaukee on July 23rd. The utterly giddy mood of the rally was enhanced by its improbability. Less than a week had passed since Trump's victorious nomination at the Republican National Convention in the same metro area; the Vice-President's candidacy had been so abrupt that a pop-up tent outside the venue still had Biden's name on it. That visit to Wisconsin marked the first time that voters saw Harris walk out to the triumphant strains of Beyoncé's "Freedom"; the first time that they heard the slogan "We're not going back." I observed, in an I wrote about the event , that the tide of good will would be hers to squander, but this was a campaign event that had been hastily thrown together. One might have expected her rallies to have evolved. Instead, they calcified.

Over the three and a half months that followed, as Harris crisscrossed the swing states, she gave speeches that tended to be highly scripted, consistent, and formulaic. Many of the phrases from the suburban-Milwaukee speech, when she'd had only a few days to prepare, still formed the core of her remarks. At events where one might have anticipated that she'd expand her message, especially the series of huge, star-studded get-out-the-vote rallies toward the end of the campaign, she remained committed to her talking points: "When we fight, we win"; "Hard work is good work." Her policy proposals to address price gouging and support first-time home buyers, entrepreneurs, and people caring for elderly family members were enticing but piecemeal. Her promise of an "opportunity economy" did not seem to acknowledge the depth of the systemic economic challenges facing the middle and working classes.

Yet Harris almost always held the attention of the room. She had good comedic timing and natural charisma. It was not a problem with her delivery. It was a problem with content—there was rarely a moment of rhetorical specificity or material detail. Her refusal to run on her identity as a Black and South Asian woman meant that there was a certain withholding of her own experience. She also avoided specific references to ordinary people and their problems. I often thought of "A More Perfect Union," Barack Obama's speech about race in March, 2008. In her campaign, Harris never attempted to give a speech of such ambition. In late October, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Michelle Obama delivered an indelible speech about reproductive rights at a Harris rally. Harris's own remarks about reproductive rights, given at a rally in Houston in which Beyoncé appeared the night before, were rote and unmemorable. I thought that maybe I just cared about the writing because I'm a writer. But the vacuity and mass-produced quality of Harris's speeches seemed intentional, a lowest-common-denominator strategy designed to avoid alienating any particular demographic.

When you travel a lot, as a reporter who follows a campaign does, you become acutely aware of the consumer value of consistency, the idea that your coffee will taste the same and that your airline won't change its boarding routine. The Harris campaign, in the scripted nature of its speeches, and Harris's avoidance of off-the-cuff interviews for the first several weeks, seemed to follow the same logic: there would be no wild surprises. But this carefully managed formula gave a sense of fragility to the entire enterprise, a feeling that if the wrong thread were pulled the whole thing might start to unravel. Rallies were energized and crowded and fun, with great music, but Harris rarely said anything unexpected at them, so they failed to generate much of an echo beyond the arenas in which they took place. Other speakers at Harris rallies, whether local business owners or students or Samuel L. Jackson, often followed the same script, with only a few personal flourishes to give their words some local flavor. The same was true of Harris's running mate. The Vice-Presidential campaign trail canned Tim Walz's personality and turned him into a caricature of a dad who speaks only in sports metaphors.

At nearly every Harris rally I attended, whether at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago or at an arena in Savannah, Georgia, a lone protester would stand up in the middle of Harris's speech and call for an end to American support of Israel's bombardment of Gaza. The unease of the crowd every time this happened was palpable. (In Kalamazoo, the audience started booing over a protester. Two men in suits, evidently security, rushed up the steps from the floor of the arena where the protester was standing, held campaign signs up over him as if he could be camouflaged, and led him out.) Harris would typically respond by saying something along the lines of "We need to end this war and bring the hostages home," which only served as a reminder that the Biden-Harris Administration had not managed to do so. Regardless of the extent to which this mattered electorally, it mattered in the rooms in which Harris spoke, where her supporters were asked to ignore the dissonance between the ideals of freedom and democracy in her speeches and the reality on the ground in Gaza.

As Harris made a bid to appeal to the center, there were many moments in the campaign that rang hollow: when she said, while representing the Party that has aimed to present itself as a leader on climate change and gun safety, that she would not ban fracking, or asserted that she kept a Glock, telling Oprah that "if somebody breaks in my house, they're getting shot." Then there were her appearances with the anti-Trump Republican and former congresswoman Liz Cheney and the pride with which Harris received the endorsement of her father, the Republican former Vice-President Dick Cheney, one of the architects of the Iraq War.

As the campaign came to a close, celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and Tyler Perry lined up to endorse Harris. But in an election that was probably decided on the sense of precarity experienced by many Americans—that a stable career, a secure home, and affordable child care are increasingly elusive; that financial ruin is an accident or illness away—these famous figures did not help the Party reassure a wide swath of voters that it understood what they cared about and needed to hear.

At Howard, as we waited to hear Harris's concession speech, I asked a few people what they thought the campaign should have done differently. "I've been door-knocking since I was seventeen," Joanna Blotner told me. "Since 2010, there is a consistent message of just not feeling like votes matter, like anything that happens in Congress or in D.C. has an impact.... So when you talk about democracy being on the line, there's no resonance. They don't see democracy working."

But, for some of the young people there, Harris's efforts would not be forgotten. "I honestly feel like she did as much as she could do," a Howard freshman named Maya Blackston said. "I think that, in a way, we kind of failed her as a country."

"If she was given more time, I think it could have been way different," her friend Nya Young chimed in. Blackston said that she would miss seeing Harris on television. "She has such a bright, vibrant energy," she said. "It's really sad that we're not gonna get that, we're actually going to get the complete opposite."

Harris took to a lectern flanked by American flags twenty-five minutes after 4 P.M., almost on schedule and without a booster to introduce her. The phones went up in the Howard Yard to record the moment. For the last time, Harris reiterated her message of enthusiasm and joy, her stump-speech line that "we all have so much more in common than what separates us." The campaign slogans were modified to the new reality, I almost couldn't believe I was hearing them once again. She said, "When we fight, we win," adding, "But here's the thing, here's the thing: sometimes the fight takes a while." She ended with a new image, the adage that "only when it is dark enough can you see the stars." The campaign of platitudes concluded with greeting-card sentiment: "Let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars," she said. "The light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service." With that, the crowd dispersed, the American flags were lowered and folded, and, as I walked out through the many security barriers surrounding Howard, a campaign bus with its "New Way Forward" signage was being driven away.