In a major rebuke to the Biden-Harris legacy, millions of voters who supported Joe Biden in 2020 did not throw their support behind Kamala Harris in this year’s election. Harris, who once rode a wave of Democratic enthusiasm, was handed a resounding loss by Donald Trump, with the Republican projected to sweep the key swing states and take the popular vote.
As votes continue to roll in, Harris trails far behind Biden’s 2020 total. She currently holds just under 68 million votes—more than 13 million fewer than the 81 million votes Biden claimed in 2020. Trump, on the other hand, is close to his 2020 tally, showing that the loyalty of his base held strong, while Harris faced a massive drop-off.
One has to wonder why Harris couldn’t retain Biden’s base. The Democrats have been quick to throw out every excuse in the book. Some, like Republican National Committee spokesperson Madison Gesiotto Gilbert, find it ironic, questioning why Harris saw such a sharp decline in support given the Democrats’ claims of her “Obama-like” appeal. “How could you see such a huge vote differential in just a short four-year period?” Gilbert mused, highlighting how Harris’s so-called “historic candidacy” didn’t even muster a fraction of the energy they’d hyped it up to be.
Of course, some on the left are pushing a familiar line—blaming so-called “misogyny” for Harris’s poor showing. Danielle Vinson, a professor at Furman University, pointed out that some voters still struggle to see a woman as capable of leading on national security and foreign affairs. Naturally, Democrats find it easier to point fingers at voters than to address the lackluster policies that drove them away.
Many who voted for Biden in 2020 ultimately decided that they couldn’t stomach four more years of inflation and economic instability, even if it meant voting Republican or just staying home. Biden and Harris oversaw some of the highest inflation rates in recent memory, and voters, from the working class to small business owners, felt the squeeze. University of Michigan’s Jonathan Hanson noted, “Voters have felt economic pain…they’re taking it out on Biden and Harris.”
Dearborn, Michigan—a city with a strong Arab-American population that voted overwhelmingly for Biden in 2020—flipped for Trump this time around, according to the Detroit Free Press. Harris’s lack of support in Dearborn illustrates how Biden and Harris’s foreign policy blunders impacted voters even at home, particularly their tone-deaf approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In her concession speech, Harris attempted to rally her party by telling supporters, “The outcome of this election is not what we wanted… But hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.” But let’s face it, all the flowery speeches in the world won’t change the fact that the Democrats now have some serious soul-searching to do.
The bottom line is Harris’s defeat highlights a harsh reality for the Democrats: rhetoric about “historical firsts” and identity politics isn’t enough to mask bad policies.