Journalists Say Harris Lost Due to Economic Issues at Harvard IOP Forum

After a dramatic shift toward Donald Trump in the electorate in Tuesday’s presidential election, Democrats are entering the post-mortem phase of Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed campaign for the presidency.

At a “What Happened and What Comes Next?” panel hosted by the Harvard Institute of Politics on Thursday, three political journalists agreed on a single reason above all others for that rightward shift: the economy.

The panelists — IOP Fellow Eugene Scott, who moderated the event, and Washington Post national reporters Maeve Reston and Dan Balz — said that a higher cost of living was consistently the top concern of voters they interviewed in swing states.

As the country moved away from the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic under President Joe Biden, inflation shot upward, even as many other economic indicators remained strong. The jump in prices – the greatest since 1981 — and Biden’s inability to immediately rein it in has proved a consistent source of public discontent with his administration.

“I had so many conversations with people remembering this sunny, positive economic climate under Trump,” Reston said.

“A vote for Trump is not about ‘I love him.’ There were multiple people we talked to who said ‘I cannot feed my kids’” — which ultimately proved more important than any other issue, Scott said.

Democrats, meanwhile, largely failed to acknowledge that the economy had taken a turn for the worse since then, Scott argued. “Democrats kept saying the economy is great, the stock market is great, unemployment is low,” he said. “That is not a response to those issues.”

The panelists also argued the results showed cracks in demographics that Democrats had come to rely on, such as Latino voters.

Though people of color voted heavily Democratic in the Obama era, Tuesday’s election threw the belief that they would always hold with the party into doubt.

“Younger Black Americans have watched the election of Barack Obama and a lot of Black officials around the country,” Balz said.

This election, “their sense was ‘Our lives haven’t really gotten better,’” he added. “So, ‘Do we trust the Democrats?’”

The most notable change for many was a major rightward shift in the Latino vote, which voted in significantly higher margins for Trump than four years ago — although the majority still voted for Harris.

“Mexican men shifted in a significant way to support him in this election,” Balz said, calling it a “further realignment of the electorate.”

Whether the shift was specific only to Trump, or the beginning of a newly-formed swing constiuency, it will certainly have “profound consequences for the Democratic party,” Balz said.

During a question and answer period, Dwight Hutchins — a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group and a member of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Dean’s Council — asked the panel how Trump’s criminal record and allegations of sexual assault ultimately did not prevent him from ascending to the presidency for a second time.

“How do you get four votes when that is your resume?” Hutchins said.

“I don’t think Democrats consistently have the moral claim that they think they do,” Scott responded. “Secondly, there are individuals who are not as offended by racism and sexism as I am.”

Underlying some of the harder political analysis of Thursday’s panel was an acknowledgement that plain sexism against Harris also may have played a significant role in her loss.

Reston and Scott said they had both encountered voters who worried whether Harris “has what it takes” or wouldn’t be able to deal with the pressures of the presidency as a woman – a sexist criticism often levied against female politicians.

With the presidency and Senate now safely in Republican hands — and a real possibility that the House of Representative could follow — Balz said the Democratic Party would be in a reduced state for the time being, calling it “a period of self-reflection and criticism.”

“There are a lot of people out there who felt that the Democratic Party just doesn’t understand where they’re coming from,” he said.