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Monday, November 11, 2024

Why Harris Lost

Many others have offered myriad explanations for how Trump defeated Harris. Some think Harris lost because she didn't appeal enough to women. Some argue that Biden stayed in the race too long, and it doomed Harris because she didn't have enough time to win. Some say it was trans issues. Some say it was inflation. Some even say that Trump voters were duped by a disinformation bubble.

Here are a couple rundowns of reasons from Vox and AEI. I find this explanation closest to my own view, and below, I explain it more comprehensively.

I'm a long-time proponent of the median voter theorem. The concept is more simple than the name. The idea basically is that to win an election, a candidate needs to win a majority of the votes, and to win the majority of the votes, that candidate has to win the vote of the median voter--the voter exactly in the political center of all voters. The candidate who wins that voter, generally by staking positions closest to them, wins the election.

The story of 2020-2024 is that in 2019 Harris was pretty far to the left, and lost the primary. Biden was pretty close to the center and won it. In the general election, he campaigned as a perfect centrist. However, once he became president, he shifted to the left and stayed there. When Harris took over, she moved up to, but not beyond where Biden governed, which left Trump much closer to the center than Harris, so Trump won.

In 2020, Joe Biden ran as a moderate

The 2020 Democratic primary featured candidates spanning the entire Democratic party, from Sanders and Warren representing the far-left to Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar representing less far-left. And of them, Biden had the most experience, name recognition, and political power.

Once he won the nomination, he campaigned on ending the pandemic, but never said how. He was ambiguous on fracking. He thought Trump's immigration restrictions were too restrictive.

The Brookings Institute: "Joe Biden appealed to the center of the electorate across party lines. He did 10 points better than Hillary Clinton among Independents, and he doubled her showing among moderate and liberal Republicans...If the Democratic Party is regarded as going beyond what the center of the electorate expects and wants, Democrats' gains...could evaporate."

The BBC: "Biden stuck with a centrist strategy, refusing to back universal government-run healthcare, free college education, or a wealth tax. This allowed him maximise his appeal to moderates and disaffected Republicans during the general election campaign."

Biden won independents by 9 points--52 to 43, when Clinton had only won them by 1 point in 2016.

Joe Biden barely won his election

Even with all the benefits of running against one of the most singularly despised candidates in decades, a pandemic roiling the economy and the culture, civil unrest, record-setting fundraising, Biden only barely defeated Trump in the electoral college. Biden won three states by less than 1% of the vote--Georgia (0.23%), Arizona (0.30%), and Wisconsin (0.63%). Combined, Trump lost by a total 42,918 votes.1

Votes are still being counted in the 2024 election, but at the moment, Harris's easiest path would have needed to swing Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to have won the election. She would need to swing 255,000 votes. The differences in margin are 1.2% (PA), 1.4% (MI), and 0.8% (WI). Not quite as close as 2020.

Biden Moved Left

Once in office, President Biden swiftly moved left. He issued executive orders "at a record pace," signing more executive orders in his two days than any other president signed in his first 30. His executive orders were not just undoing President Trump's work, or meant to address the pandemic, but showed that he was "taking steps Democrats have long demanded on immigration, the environment and racial justice."

In his initial flurry of executive actions, Biden required masks on federal property, extended foreclosure and eviction moratoriums, froze student debt collection, revoked the permit for the Keystone Pipeline, cancelled other energy rules created under the Trump administration, and pulled back on immigration enforcement. While many of these were demanded by Democrats, even the ones that were arguably centrist positions at the time, came to represent a immoderate president.

In February, Biden indicated he was more beholden to the teachers' unions than science when he waffled on re-opening schools. The head of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky indicated it was safe to re-open schools, but teachers unions scoffed, and the Biden administration fell in line and called for more funds before they could re-open.

In March, Joe Biden nominated Lina Khan to be an FTC Commissioner, notably, not the chair. Lina Khan was notable for writing a very famous article calling into question the application of anti-trust law to the current slate of American tech companies, most prominently Amazon, because they served as platforms that gave their products away for free, so the conventional approach of using price increases to prevent monopolies wasn't reliable.

She went on to work for other Democrats, and was considered a talented but pretty far-left expert on anti-trust in the digital age. Many Senators thought being a commissioner was acceptable given it was the President's prerogative, and the FTC could have three Democrat-appointed commissioners. One of them being more progressive was unobjectionable. However, immediately after she was confirmed with bipartisan support, she won confirmation in a 69 to 28 bipartisan vote, President Biden named her the chair of the FTC.

"Her appointment was a victory for progressive activists" according to the New York Times and was "hailed by many Democratic lawmakers." Elizabeth Warren said "With Chair Khan at the helm, we have a huge opportunity to make big, structural change..." The Vice President of NetChoice said she would make the independent agency more political. In office only briefly, she embarked on a aggressive agenda to push the FTC firmly in the progressive direction.

This episode symbolized Biden's move from moderate campaigner to aggressively progressive president. No one expected he would put Lina Khan in change of the FTC, even when she was nominated for commissioner. The change was a shock not only because it was unexpected, but it was unprecedented for a President to have misled Senators and the public on his intentions. In addition, while the business world had strongly supported Biden's campaign, their support of him surely wavered with such an anti-business Democrat put in charge of the FTC.

These are just two early-on instances of his lurch to the left, especially as compared to how he campaigned. There were many more. There was Merrick Garland going after parents who were concerned about what their kids were being taught, labelling them as terrorists; there was the student debt relief which he had avoided during his campaign and steered clear of, but then decided to pursue unilaterally despite previous arguments that it was unconstitutional. He tried to require masks on planes and vaccines for workers. Both of which failed in court. Both of which he continued to pursue despite their unpopularity. He always sided with unions and decided he'd be the first president to stand in a picket line. He discontinued natural gas exports. He tried to apply the protections in Title IX, which was meant to prevent discrimination based on a person's sex, to trans students. Biden also moved to aggressively reduce the number of gas-powered cars and replace them with EVs and his administration briefly contemplated banning gas stoves before it went public.

Biden was so committed to not enforcing the border, he wouldn't enforce his vaccine mandate for illegal immigrants even though he did for travelers. He flew illegal immigrants all over the country though he did his best to keep it quiet. He created an app so that illegal immigrants could bypass the border altogether and schedule their entry via airplane. Lastly, when there was a misunderstood photo of the border patrol and a border crosser, he immediately sided with the immigrant and never apologized for his mistake.

Also remember that the Build, Back, Better agenda was originally another multi-trillion dollar package for which many Democrats tried to expand the definition of infrastructure to include their economic agenda.

The result of all of these individual items and moves was that Biden was perceived by many, on the left, and the right, and the center, to be the most left-wing president of the last fifty years. People compared him to FDR and he basked in it.

Biden's Approval Rating Suffered

Source: 538

The other, more significant, consequence of Biden's policy portfolio was an approval rating that danced around 40% for most of his presidency. It's well-known, that his approval rating plummeted after the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. It reached its lowest point in July of 2022, almost a year later, and just before the Chips and IRA bills passed in August. He enjoyed about six months of approval in the low 40s, before it started dropping again. From December 2023 up until his disastrous debate, his approval was slightly below 40%.

Harris Ran as Biden

While many people think Harris ran as a moderate, to be more precise, Harris ran at the exact point on the ideological spectrum that Biden governed. The illusion of being a moderate was created because she shifted her policy stances from where they were in 2019 (confiscating guns, in favor of trans surgeries, opposition to fracking, in favor of Medicare for All), up to but never beyond the positions Biden held in 2024. While she renounced her previous, left-wing positions, she often didn't provide a detailed policy proposal of her own, but when enough detail was provided, she it would perfectly match Biden's policy.

Her response to every question regarding immigration policy was to support the Lankford Immigration Bill which Biden had supported, but did not have support of enough Republicans to pass. She never proposed or accepted any measure that wasn't part of that bill. On Israel/Gaza, she used the same language and answers Biden gave, that there needed to be a cease-fire and the hostages needed to be returned. There was no daylight between her and Biden on any issue.

Despite many opportunities, Harris refused to stake a position closer to the center than Joe Biden on any issue. She famously told The View and Stephen Colbert that she wouldn't do anything differently than was done by Biden. She adamantly refused to move closer to the Center than Biden governed, and that put her to the left of the median voter.

Donald Trump Ran as a Pretty Moderate Republican

Meanwhile, President Trump ran pretty close to the center. It surely doesn't seem that way because of the parts of his campaign that the media chose to highlight, but he is the least conservative president in decades on abortion, saying he does not want a national ban and he's not sure about Florida's six week ban. On immigration, probably his rightest-leaning issue, he supports deportations, but so do 51% of Americans. It flew under the radar, but Trump also indicated that he wanted to give citizenship to any immigrant who gets a degree in the US, which is surely popular.

One can also consider the outcomes of the Senate elections. Which states flipped? West Virginia, where a Democratic Senator, while a thorn in Democrats' side, eventually agreed to the Inflation Reduction Act, which sealed his fate. Montana and Ohio's Senators lost resoundingly, both red states with moderate Democrats who had won before but voted with Biden on everything. Voters are tolerant of moderates to an extent, but that tolerance was exhausted by Biden's governance.

In the end, Trump ran much closer to the center than Harris, and Harris lost because of it.

Footnotes

1 This would have ended up an electoral tie, which Trump would have won in the House.