Kamala Harris’s team repeatedly warned the public that her supposedly deadlocked presidential contest against Donald Trump would last for days. In the end, the former Republican president secured his victory over the Democratic vice president not seven full hours after the polls closed on most of the East Coast.
By the morning it was clear Harris had lost all seven swing states, including Nevada, where Democratic presidential nominees had won from 2008 on. Harris was the second Democratic presidential candidate in three elections to lose the Electoral College to Trump. She’s also the first to lose the popular vote against him, and it’s not exactly close. At press time, Trump has beaten Harris by a staggering 5 million votes out of more than 143 million cast. Moreover, Republicans are projected to win the Senate majority with a decisive edge while maintaining House control.
Already the circular firing squad has emerged among devastated Democrats, with Obama consigliere David Plouffe blaming retiring President Joe Biden for withdrawing from his presidential reelection barely 100 days before polls closed. The Clinton camp leaked that Slick Willie had warned Harris’s campaign to respond to Trump’s advertisements about Harris’s support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for prisoners.
All these critiques capture some of the causes plaguing Harris’s campaign. Yet any Democrat running as a de facto incumbent was doomed from the start for one simple reason: 2024 really was all about the economy, stupid.
Voters concerned about the economy flock to Trump
In Edison’s exit poll of 10 key states, more than two-thirds of voters said the economy was “not so good or poor,” with Trump winning 70% of that pessimistic majority. Nearly half of all voters polled said their personal financial situations were “worse today” than four years ago. That’s more than the 42% of voters who said they were worse off during the 2008 election at the height of the Great Recession. Trump won 81% of this voter group. Fewer than a quarter of overall voters said that inflation caused them “no hardship at all.” And Trump won the overwhelming majority of the 75% of voters who said that inflation caused them “severe” or “moderate” hardship.
The widespread disgust with the economy wrought by the Biden-Harris administration fueled the outstanding demographic realignment that carried Trump to a quick victory. Some seven in 10 Latinos rated the economy poorly, and 85% said inflation had caused them severe or moderate hardship. Two in five Latinos said the economy was their most important issue, 8 points more than the general electorate. Trump, of course, posted the best Republican performance among Latinos in the party’s history, winning 45% of Latinos overall and a majority of Latino men outright.
Trump, who had also lost the majority of voters making fewer than $100,000 in 2020 to Biden, won a plurality of those voters against Harris, who by contrast won six-figure earners by 9 points, reversing Trump’s 2020 lead with the wealthy. Trump also won 56% of voters without college degrees, a 6-point improvement from 2020. Harris’s margin of support among nonwhite voters without a college degree plummeted by 16 points from Biden’s 2020, with more than a third of all nonwhite, non-college-educated voters supporting Trump in 2024.
The trend lines aren’t exactly telling a subtle story. Harris won the wealthy, the educated, and the elites who admit they weren’t punished by the worst inflationary crisis in 40 years by better margins than Biden did. She even slightly improved among Boomers, a demographic disproportionately insulated from inflation thanks to stock market holdings and cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security.
By contrast, the young workers bankrolling the same Social Security they will never see retirement checks from moved 13 points toward Trump relative to 2020. In other words, Trump won the astounding majority of voters who had never experienced radically excessive inflation before and decided they detested it.
On the margin, Democrats likely lost some votes with Biden referring to half of the country as “garbage” for supporting Trump. They likely lost a decent share with the party’s decision to replace the democratically elected nominee with a wildly unpopular affirmative action hire who hadn’t even won a single primary vote during her failed bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. But really, Democrats doomed themselves when they made the radical gamble that in the trade-off between price stability and full employment, they would go all in on overheating remaining post-2020 unemployment out of existence with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and $1.2 trillion Inflation Reduction Act, both bills consequentially passed with Harris as the swing vote in the Senate.
The economic elite’s decision to claim that Biden’s multitrillion stimulus of an economy already rapidly and organically recovering from the artificial stagnation wrought by pandemic lockdowns wasn’t motivated by their lie that it didn’t risk triggering excess inflation. Rather, the economic establishment remained bitter over then-President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus in response to the Great Recession, legislation Keynesian economists, and Biden as his vice president, maintained was far too modest and actively obstructed the speed of the recovery.
In offsetting the risk of slower job gains, the White House triggered a 20% increase in overall prices in just four years. Real disposable income per capita, which rose by 12% over four years of Trump’s first term, fell by more than 4% under the Biden-Harris administration. Because inflation disproportionately punishes those who spend more of their incomes on necessities and renters are still priced out of homeownership, inflation is almost always regressive. The specific inflation manufactured by Biden and Harris hit the lowest quintile of earners 20% harder than the richest.
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Furthermore, Biden and Harris chose to sacrifice the earnings of nearly everyone to more quickly bring the unemployment rate down from 6% to 4%. For reference, that 2% of the 2021 labor force amounted to just 3.2 million people already bankrolled by special COVID-19-era taxpayer-funded unemployment. Biden chose to prioritize just 1% of our population over the wages and savings of the rest of the 99% of the country.
For whatever years voters spent in the aftermath of 2008 pretending our greatest economic crisis was income inequality or underemployment, the entire country found out the hard way that no macroeconomic factor matters more for the masses than price stability. The moment Democrats and the lying economists cheering them on decided that full employment mattered more than a stable dollar and strong wages, the 2024 election was likely already doomed for Harris.
