Kamala Harris looks exhausted – and nowhere close to understanding why she lost
The bumbling amateurishness that so defined Kamala Harris’s failed presidential campaign appears to have already seeped into her next political act. After laying low – Obama-like – in Hawaii, the vice-president re-emerged yesterday in a baffling video released on the Democrats’ X account, apparently part of a misguided attempt to boost the morale of her devastated fan base.
Rather than looking refreshed from her holiday, Harris looked worn-out – and she sounded it, too. In her first public appearance since her concession speech on Nov 6, Harris seemed bleary-eyed and out of focus. She also resorted to the simplistic and confusing homilies made (in)famous on the campaign trail, declaring “don’t you ever let anybody take your power from you. You have the same power that you did before November 5, and you have the same purpose that you did. And you have the same ability to engage and inspire”.
Harris is already being touted for a possible run for governor of California in 2026. If so, she desperately needs to work on her delivery. In yesterday’s video, it was so lacking in coherence – or even rationale – that some viewers questioned whether she was even sober.
At this point, does it even matter?
Sober-thinking is clearly greatly needed among the Democratic establishment right now, which still seems to believe that it was the campaign itself – and not the party’s flawed candidate – that led to Donald Trump’s triumph. During an appearance on the Pod Save America podcast, broadcast yesterday, former Harris staffers Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter deployed Harris-levels of “word” (if not thinking) “salad” to exonerate her from being the architecture of her own political demise.
“The truth is, we really thought this was really a very close race,” O’Malley Dillon, the Harris campaign chairman explained, as if Harris and her team were the victims of faulty polling rather than a bad candidate. Plouffe went on to complain that Trump’s approval ratings were “frustratingly high” – as if they hadn’t realised how Trump’s popularity might work against Harris when she ousted Joe Biden from the candidacy.
If this sounds silly and sophomoric – that’s because it is. Harris didn’t lose because the polls betrayed her or because her challenger was more likeable. She lost because she never really made a clear case to the American people for voting for her beyond her race and gender – or not wanting Trump back in the White House. The inability of her handlers to recognise this – weeks after the election – reflects the myopia and delusional thinking that cost Harris the presidency.
The Democrats do not need to focus on what made Trump so popular – they need to drill down on what made Harris so unpopular. Her failed border policy. Her far-Left stances on gender ideology. Her unwillingness to directly engage with the press – including a possibly campaign-killing decision not to appear (like Trump) on the Joe Rogan podcast.
Mostly, the Democrats need to finally accept that most voters – even those committed to the identity battles the Left holds dear – are far more interested in quality education, affordable groceries, and an end to America’s drug crisis. Even the hardest-core progressives cannot focus on challenging abortion restrictions if they’re too busy clipping coupons to afford milk. Such demands become that much harder when that milk is locked inside market coolers to prevent it from being shoplifted by fentanyl addicts.
Americans don’t need Kamala Harris to help them feel better about her defeat. They need to feel better about the root causes of that loss – including the state of the economy. Trump managed to tap into these feelings and is running with them all the way to the Oval Office. For Democrats to stand a chance of booting Republicans from the White House in 2028, they need to stop telling Americans how to feel — and ask them why they feel the way they do.
David Christopher Kaufman is a columnist for the New York Post