Why Kamala Harris lost US presidential election even after making history

In a meeting with one of America’s most powerful unions in September at its Washington headquarters, Vice President Kamala Harris said she’d protect union jobs and workers’ livelihoods better than Donald Trump.

But leaders of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, long staunchly allied with her Democratic Party, appeared unconvinced. When Harris argued that her Republican rival was no champion of the working class, the union bosses grilled her, questioning whether she and President Joe Biden had done enough for union workers, according to a Teamster leader who recounted the September 16 meeting to Reuters. Within days, the union publicly embarrassed Harris by declining to endorse a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1996.

In the wake of Harris' loss of the 2024 presidential election, her tense exchange with union leaders underscores a critical failure of her campaign: connecting with working-class voters anxious about the economy and high prices.

Following Biden’s dramatic withdrawal just months before Election Day, Harris threw her campaign together as if it were an airplane being built while in flight, her advisers told reporters. The 60-year-old former prosecutor and US senator pressed a case that Trump was a threat to democracy and women’s rights, while promoting a populist economic platform and reproductive freedoms.

Her entrance upended a race that her party had looked set to lose. She made history as the first woman of colour at the top of a major party ticket. She triggered a surge in enthusiasm, broke fundraising records – raising $1 billion in less than three months – and drew endorsements from celebrities ranging from pop star Taylor Swift to actor and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But Harris’ campaign ultimately failed to overcome deep-seated voter concerns about inflation and immigration – twin issues that opinion polls showed favoured Trump. Her loss underscores a profound shift in American politics over the past decade as blue-collar voters have turned increasingly Republican – a trend Trump appears to have accelerated.

Harris also struggled to counter another Trump-era trend: a torrent of misinformation unprecedented in modern US elections. An avalanche of misrepresentations and falsehoods about her record was spread by the former president and amplified on right-wing websites and media, including conspiracy theories on issues ranging from migrant crime to voter fraud.

When asked by Reuters during the race about misinformation amplified by Trump, his campaign officials typically either repeated the falsehoods or did not respond to requests for comment.

By late Wednesday, Trump had won 294 electoral votes to Harris’ 223, with several states yet to be counted. In her concession speech, she told supporters, many of them in tears, not to give up even in their disappointment. "Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn't mean we won't win," she said.

This account of how Harris lost is based on Reuters interviews with Harris campaign staffers, White House officials, Democratic Party advisors and close allies.

It was always going to be a heavy lift. The US has only elected one president – Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 – who wasn’t a white man. As the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, Harris had risen higher in the country’s leadership than any other woman.

The only other woman to get as close as she did – Hillary Clinton, defeated by Trump in 2016 – staked her candidacy in part on becoming the first female president. In the wake of Clinton’s loss, Harris resisted putting her identity at the centre of her campaign, said close aides and advisors. Instead, she tried to galvanise voters on issues that mattered to women and Black voters in the election – from abortion rights to middle-class tax cuts and housing affordability.

But those messages struggled to break through at a time when many voters were fixated on rising consumer prices during the first three years of the Biden administration.

“Despite fairly strong economic growth, especially after a major global pandemic, most Americans weren’t feeling like they were getting ahead economically,” said Melissa Deckman, a political scientist and chief executive of Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan research firm. “The Harris campaign did not necessarily do a good job of explaining how her policies would help the middle class, or at least that message wasn’t really resonating with a lot of voters.”

Democrats coalesced behind Harris with astonishing speed, locking up her party’s nomination within two weeks, excited by her potential to flip the generational argument on Trump. Two decades her senior, Trump had successfully cast the 81-year-old Biden as a frail and confused old man. She would turn that on its head, many Democrats hoped.

Still, the Harris campaign believed her signature issues – reproductive rights and Trump’s divisiveness – would energize a coalition of women, Black voters, young Americans, independents and “Never Trump” Republicans, sweeping her to the White House.

For the first time in Biden’s presidency, he handed a decisive issue entirely to his vice president. She went on the road, speaking forcefully on a subject that played an outsized role in helping Democrats stave off an expected bloodbath in the 2022 congressional elections. After the midterms, with the Democrats having held the Senate and swung to a slight minority in the House of Representatives, Harris was now seen as a viable future leader in the party.

Still, even after Biden stepped aside, concerns lingered among some top White House aides over the former San Francisco district attorney’s political skills – including a perception that she hadn’t made a mark as VP, her short-lived campaign for the 2020 Democratic nomination and her limited experience courting conservative voters in battleground states. Some also questioned whether she could overcome the long history of racial and gender discrimination in the US.

After securing the nomination, Harris initially put many of those concerns to rest. She revitalized a beleaguered Democratic campaign, attracting record-high funding and a groundswell of support. She soon moved ahead of Trump in the polls, a sign she was sparking enthusiasm among voters, particularly among women. Trump had previously been seen as the front-runner, partly based on his perceived strength on the economy after several years of high inflation under Biden.

She aced her first big test – a September 10 televised debate against Trump.

As Harris’s team prepared for what would be her only in-person face-off with Trump, they focused on ways to unnerve the former president and draw attention to his frequent falsehoods on policies, according to several aides involved in the preparations. Harris holed up in Pittsburgh with advisers and conducted mock debates for the prime-time showdown, the aides said.

The strategy paid off. Harris appeared to get under her rival’s skin during the debate. She pressed Trump on the economy, Ukraine, healthcare, the January 2021 Capitol riots and abortion, leaving him rattled and struggling to respond.

Fundraising spiked: Her campaign said it raised $47 million in the 24 hours after the debate. Most voters thought Harris had won, polls showed. Trump shot down offers for another debate, claiming he’d already beaten her.

On the campaign trail, Harris mocked Trump’s debate performance, including his comment that he had “concepts of a plan” to replace a federal health care law. As she gained in polls, Harris’ campaign believed she was opening up states that had been out of reach for Biden, including North Carolina, where the president had his narrowest loss against Trump in 2020 and where she was drawing even in the polls with Trump.

‘It could cost us the election'

North Carolina was the scene of her next big test, the late September Hurricane Helene, one of the deadliest storms to hit the US in the last 50 years. The storm shifted focus from messages at the foundation of Harris’ campaign to the handling of the disaster by the Biden-Harris administration.

It hit just as her lead was narrowing. Trump went on the attack, criticising the Democratic administration’s response to the disaster and tying it to his strongest issue, immigration. As the death toll rose and swathes of North Carolina lay devastated, Trump amplified and spread falsehoods, including a claim that Harris spent disaster-assistance money on housing illegal migrants.

In response to a recent request for comment by Reuters about false claims about how disaster funds were being used, the Trump campaign repeated accusations that money had been spent on housing migrants in the country illegally.

Harris cut short a campaign swing and flew to Washington on September 30 for a briefing on Biden’s emergency response. On her plane, three staffers sat on the floor, ripping apart briefing books, replacing the pages with new notes, a Reuters reporter witnessed.

As the race tightened through October, and polls indicated a toss-up, alarm spread among Democratic strategists.

They focused on shoring up the so-called Blue Wall of Democratic states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Eight years ago, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton, he breached the Blue Wall by winning all three states, each by less than a percentage point. In 2020, Biden won them back. Holding the Blue Wall now was Harris' best path to the White House, the strategists reasoned. But they had a problem: Michigan and the Gaza War.

Michigan’s large population of Arab Americans and Muslims helped cement Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Trump turned off many of these voters in his first term, in part by banning immigration to the U.S. from a number of Muslim countries early in his tenure.

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