It is not ugliness that defeats Kamala Harris. There is a certain fairness hidden behind this explanation for the decisive victory of the Republican Party, which has led to the installation of Donald Trump once again in the White House.
This is the same impartiality with which the Harris-Walz campaign was conducted for months. Faced with an ‘unexpected’ defeat, America’s Democrats and other politicians around the world would do well to introspect. What, really, was the problem?
It’s easy to use feminism to explain Trump’s victory over two women in less than a decade. What’s easily forgotten here is the fact that he was recruited on the Huff to replace Joe Biden, who was certain to lose to Trump. An afterthought. Democrats were eager to fight the anti-incumbency but approached it from the wrong end.
A guilt temptation
Harris was used by his party as guilt-inducing fodder in the 2024 presidential election, and his defeat has important lessons for everyone. First and most obviously, you can’t guilt-trip voters into unconditionally supporting them. The Harris-Walz campaign doubled down on making undecided voters feel guilty about even considering change. There was a complete lack of self-awareness on the part of campaign designers and ideological Democratic voters that their policies had anything to do with popular discontent. Or they knew and smuggled it out armed with weapons of mass crime. This smoke caused shock.
The most obvious example of this is the Democrats’ tone-deafness around the war in West Asia. In a year marked by relentless anti-war campaigns and demonstrations, Democrats considered Dick Cheney their trump card. George W. Cheney’s appalling attitude as Bush’s vice-president left a legacy of violence and human rights abuses in the US and military intervention by every other country. Harris’ claim to peacemaking fell flat in the face of such crude irony. Depending on how frustrated or angry they were, anti-war Democrats sat out the election, cross-voted Trump, or voted for a third option to mark their dissent.
Thick cosmopolitanism
In the domestic domain of immigration, political scientists’ adaptation of the theory of ‘thick universalism’ did not serve to secure them a second consecutive term. The theory argues that when people perceive their group’s guilt for harming people living in distant nations, they engage in global helping behavior. The inherent limitations of the principle, as demonstrated by Nicholas Faulkner, and the revelation of the hypocrisy of the Democrats ensured that voters rejected their guilt-tripping political campaign. This may partly explain why a substantial diaspora cohort turned to Trump.
But Democrats were relying on misguided dissent with blame. Unfortunately for them, this strategy backfired. Scholars Gunn and Wilson have proposed that collective crime, an important political tool, is often mitigated by defensiveness. The Democratic Party has forgotten that just as attacks on personal identity make people defensive, people do not want to react defensively when their social identity is threatened. Calling voters racist and sexist before, during and after the vote, Democrats prompted a surge of defensiveness among many demographic groups.
No one knew about Kamala
Kamala Harris campaign raised and spent more money than Donald Trump, but what happened? Political messages barely escaped the rhetoric of ‘save America from Trump’. Faced with high inflation rates, American voters felt invisible as this ‘Save America’ campaign offered no concrete policy measures. Republicans are guilty of running a similarly simple campaign, but they had the anti-incumbency on their side. Memories of Trump’s previous presidency were hidden, and that helped him. Trump’s campaign counted on the fickleness of public memory and bet on people’s ability to forget the past while thinking about ongoing concerns.
Team Harris, on the other hand, weaponized memories of America’s broken past to make this election right to right historical wrongs. Psychologists warn that people do not respond well when confronted with their own problematic actions. Political scientist Yunbin Chung proposed in the context of East Asia that national identity affirmation “can be used as a way to disarm the defensiveness inspired by recognizing one’s country’s faults, which may trigger further social reactions”. However, Democrats failed to put a positive spin on American identity in a bid to confront its racial history.
Competitive Defensiveness
Add to that the Biden administration’s unwavering support for Israel, despite growing anti-war voices even within the rank and file of the Democratic Party, and we’ve got a game of competitive defensiveness all around. The leadership and the voters stopped listening to each other.
To attribute this defeat to a mere misogynistic mistake is to oversimplify matters. Thus Democrats want to continue playing the blame game without a shred of introspection.
(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based writer and academic.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal views of the author