Ross Douthat, Bill Kristol Talk Harris’ Campaign Failures at Harvard Event

Conservative political commentators Bill Kristol ’73 and Ross G. Douthat ’02 said Vice President Kamala Harris failed to articulate a cohesive argument against Donald Trump during a post-election debrief panel hosted by the Harvard Center for American Political Studies on Thursday.

The panel also featured Brookings Institute Senior Fellow William A. Galston and was moderated by Harvey C. Mansfield’ 53, a prominent conservative professor of Government who retired from Harvard in 2023.

During the panel, Douthat — an opinion columnist for the New York Times and former Crimson Editorial editor — said that there is a “pretty simple story” to tell about the 2024 election results: President Joe Biden’s failure to follow through on his “central promise was to restore normalcy.”

“When administrations fail to deliver on their promises, they almost always lose the next election,” Douthat said.

Douthat said that Harris came into the campaign as a historically unpopular vice president. When she became the candidate after Biden stepped off the ticket, Douthat argued, her approval rating rose “despite nothing about her actually changing.”

“It turns out that all you have to do is tell the Democratic base that they ought to like someone and they’ll just start liking her,” he said.

“But for some unaccountable reason among the general public, ‘Kamala: you already like her’ was not the brilliant pitch it seemed to be,” Douthat added.

Galston said Harris cycled through three insufficient theories of the case during her campaign: focusing on reproductive rights to “mobilize an army of concerned women,”; drawing a contrast between her “decency” and Trump’s “indecency,”; and finally, making the case that Trump poses a threat to democracy.

“I happen to believe that there’s a lot of substance to that argument,” Galston said. “But here’s the problem: there is a mountain of political science evidence to the effect that for people who feel hard pressed economically or insecure physically, democracy is a luxury good.”

Kristol, an editor-at-large of the Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative website, said that the Democrats’ lack of emphasis on economic populism also stifled Harris’ campaign. Going forward, he said the party’s “big intellectual task” will be figuring out what the “right kind” of economic liberalism looks like for their party.

“The Democrats had to be moderate, and they couldn’t look left-wing in that respect, and they were scared of looking too populist in a certain way,” Kristol said. “They probably did the worst of both worlds.”

In contrast to Harris’ campaign, the panelists agreed, Trump was able to pull together a wide-ranging coalition, wildly overperforming among men but drawing on working-class voters of all demographics.

“Class and gender trumped race and ethnicity, and when it came to a showdown between class and gender, class trumped gender,” Douthat said.

And Kristol added that Trump’s “underrated” showmanship was a key factor in firming up his appeal.

“Donald Trump leaning out of a McDonald’s window is an act of political iconography that didn’t have any parallel on the Democratic side,” Kristol said. “If he is a fascist, what a fascinating way of sort of muting his fascist.”

“Like, how can you be a fascist if you’re serving peoples’ fries?” he added.