Democrats’ blunders and Kamala Harris’ foibles in 2024 US presidential elections

In their desperate attempts to retain power, the US Democrats wielded two-edged swords at each step of their battle. The swords effectively did cut both ways, but ended up hurting the wielders even more. First, they overreached their bounds by their relentless efforts to focus on how to destroy an opponent that was perceived as a “threat to democracy.” They did this in cahoot with sympathetic left-leaning media that focused more on repeated talking points than on feedback from the public.

In so doing, they effectively split the country into two along sharp partisan lines. On one hand, there were people who swallowed their rhetoric hook, line and sinker while, on the other hand, many were appalled by such attacks. To give more effect to the labelling, name-calling or stereotyping, the Democrats went on overdrive, bringing up an assortment of legal cases against Donald Trump in the failed expectations of weakening his resolve to continue with his ambition to return to the White House and to discourage people from voting for him even if he remained in the race. That, in effect, would have given the Democrats  an electoral advantage.

At this point, it became clear that the Democrats were operating in an echo chamber, preferring to listen to only what they wanted to hear. And their sympathetic media played that role effectively. Perhaps a slight indicator of their wrong approach was reckoned with when people started to openly show sympathy for Trump after his indictments. When President Joe Biden made a rather disappointing outing during the only one debate he had with his Republican challenger, influential Democrats thought it a smart move to quickly replace him by presenting another candidate for the general elections. This brought in Vice President Kamala Harris who did not have to undergo any party primary. And this is where their blundering took a completely new turn. By this singular action, the party has demonstrated an anti-democratic streak and set up new precedent, bypassing a key democratic process of narrowly selecting rather than voting a party representative for elections through a party primary.

Meanwhile, the left-leaning media, rather than pointing out, calling out and condemning this “coup,” decided to overlook the egregious error and chose to strongly defend the decision. Moreover, the Democrats missed it on messaging. Rather than appealing to the voters and owning up to shortcomings in their government’s performance, they chose rather to talk down on critics, insulting those who disagreed with them and brazenly denying their failures. They focused more attention, energy and arguments on a personality than on policy issues that matter more to the voters as was evident in the pattern of the votes all across the country. Their initial reaction to the crushing defeat was to find fault with certain blocks of voters, effectively playing up the race argument.

Their pollsters did them a lot of disservice as single issues of strong appeal to a narrow spectrum of voters were escalated as issues of national priority. For instance, in a country facing rising inflation under the incumbent Biden-Harris administration, their media handlers led Harris to erroneously campaign more strongly on optional issues of abortion and LGBTQ rights than on immigration crisis, inflation and weak economy which matter more to a wider spectrum of individuals and households, irrespective of party affiliation.

The polls since the emergence of Kamala Harris as the Democratic party’s candidate were more on steroids than true depiction of reality as she started out on high polls figures and rode on those figures until reality began to dawn on them. It was apparent that those polls were more of publicity stunts as election results would eventually prove. The Democrats were not wanting in semantics. They had a word for everything that is not congruent with their social and political ideologies. Disinformation was their usual word quickly deployed to counter anything they did not agree with, even if true. The false sense of a ‘tight race’ between Harris and Trump must have lulled the former to somnolence and must have further fueled her arrogance in her fixation on Trump-bashing rather than clearly laying out what she wanted to accomplish if elected president. She failed to make any convincing argument on how she would do anything differently if she was elected.

Many of the superficially explained policies were direct opposites of what she campaigned to do in her aborted election bid of 2019. In essence, she moved across a wide policy landscape from extreme left to the right within weeks in what many discerning voters must have regarded as mere pandering for momentary electoral expediency and a joke. The initial decision by Harris’ handlers to shield her away from direct engagement with the press did much harm, particularly for a candidate that needed all the public appearances she could do to get herself into public consciousness.

Added to this was the difficulty she had in distancing herself from Biden’s failed policies as a co-traveller in the governance journey in the current administration. Moreover, she betrayed her poor understanding of government policies as she was not articulate in answering policy questions. She actually ducked and dodged in responding to direct questions, telling rather long and winding stories or anecdotes repeatedly instead. She made poor showing in those unscripted interviews and speeches she had to do without teleprompters. Her seemingly excellent performance in the ABC news-anchored debate with Trump raised doubts about her real quality when compared with her many other subsequent media engagements when eventually she began to talk to the press.

The Democrats were obviously under strong delusions that huge donations automatically meant a lead performance in an election. They ignored many other issues having nothing to do with campaign donations as Harris’ campaign raised more money than Trump’s during the 2024 presidential election. Remarkably, it took in over $1 billion in the less than four months campaign period following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race. It turned out that the humongous funds raised by the Democratic party for their presidential candidate were no magic bullet as Harris, in a crushing defeat, lost to Trump in the presidential election. Worse still is that her campaign ended up with $20  million in debt.

In retrospect, it was possible that Harris, even if she still lost eventually as she did, would have had some stars to her crown if she had succeeded in winning at least one of the hotly contested swing states.

While the Democrats and Kamala Harris count their electoral losses, it may help if they truly reflect on their obvious errors that galvanised their loss and raised the magnitude of their defeat. Rather than continuing the blame game, the Democrats need to truly introspect and become realistic in their judgments. The persistent onslaught against Donald Trump and the erroneous determination to crush him by any means possible was the Democrats’ number one undoing. The legal persecution — rather than weaken Trump — actually helped him and made the Democrats look bad. Rather than concentrate on the affairs of the state, disproportionate time, attention and funds were devoted to Trump’s prosecution. And because of their ivory-towered arrogance, the Democrats did not gauge the public’s reactions to Trump’s prosecution correctly. The complicit media also helped to amplify this flawed perception as the Democrats operated under the illusion that an outsized support from the propaganda and partisan activism from the mainstream media was needed to win the election.

As the Democrats tried to ignore or downplay the strength or enormity of the impacts of their policy failures under Biden, the complicit media — choosing rather to live in denials — helped to explain them away. They even went further to attack, denigrate, vilify and disparage anyone and those who hold different opinions or beliefs that are not in alignment with their own. As the career politicians and failed presidential candidate and her cronies smart over the electoral loss, will they now begin to get real in their engagement with the electorate and people of America?

Will the complicit media that helped to exacerbate their losses now review their actions and come to terms with the urgent need to redeem their battered image which has gone down with Harris’s electoral loss? Will they now learn to stop acting on a false belief that they know better than the public and that they are necessarily the custodians of the truth? Will they retract their many defences of errors and their pushback against inconvenient truth, especially when it did not align with their fixated ideological stance? It is my opinion that the same mistakes will still be repeated by the Democrats in the next election if they think they can make a headway by using the same playbook that failed them miserably lately. It would then mean there is a collective insanity in their camp if they think of achieving different results by using the same hackneyed and faulty methods of engagements. The same applies to their friendly media that desperately need to overhaul and launder their image which they have traded for Democrats’ anything-goes political tactics that have just handed them a monumental defeat on November 5.