As the 2024 presidential election ended with a win for Donald Trump, many voters are reflecting on why Kamala Harris’s campaign ultimately fell short. Facing off against Trump, who secured 312 electoral votes to Harris’s 226. Harris lost all the key battleground states that were crucial for a Democratic win. Although Harris stepped into the race with only a few months to prepare after President Joe Biden’s withdrawal, many argue that her campaign’s strategy missed the mark, especially with working-class and undecided voters. While she effectively rallied younger, progressive demographics around issues like abortion rights and climate change, her campaign struggled to connect on economic issues and resonate with working-class Americans.
Despite having to pull off a campaign in a few short months, Harris was able to get tons of celebrity endorsements, including Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Billie Eilish, and Oprah. While these celebrity endorsements were great for attracting younger progressive voters, they did not appeal to older and working-class voters. The Harris campaign’s focus on abortion and reproductive rights was a huge win in securing votes from younger women and resonated with people. Based on information from the Pew Research Center, 85% of Democrats say that abortion should be legal. One of the most popular ads came out about a month before the election, sharing Hadley Duvall’s story of her abortion. Duvall was abused by her father and became impregnated by him, and had to get an abortion. She is now an activist for women’s reproductive rights.
While these endorsements appealed to some voters, it was not enough to secure the working class. The Harris campaign spent over $1 billion dollars focusing on ads in battleground states. Harris focused on and emphasized abortion rights and the future of democracy. While these are important issues, it does not appeal to all types of voters.
Trump appeals to working-class people because he talks directly to them in his speeches, something the democratic party often fails at. Due to inflation, the economy has become one of the biggest issues that voters care about. The biggest mistake that the Harris campaign could have made was failing to emphasize Harris’s plan to help fix the economy. People are struggling to live, students can’t afford houses, and grocery and gas prices have skyrocketed. While the Harris campaign highlighted key issues like climate change and women’s reproductive rights, it was not enough to have voters believe she would fix the state of the country. This left working-class voters feeling abandoned by the Democratic party. In recent years more working-class voters have become more right-leaning as the Democratic party has strengthened their base of financially secure college students and graduates. Based on this educational divide alone, an exit poll shared that 55-42% of voters with college degrees voted for Harris. The Democratic party’s base is becoming more upper-class and urban/suburban, making it not bode well for future elections. This shift of working-class voters even led Republicans to win their first popular vote in nearly 20 years.
This is a huge loss for Harris and the Democratic party and it will be harder for them in future elections to win blue-collar and working-class voters. In order for Democrats to come back into power, they need to listen to the working-class people. They need to have better communication with the public on how exactly they are going to fix the issues that Americans care about.
