Donald Trump won because Kamala Harris is Joe Biden, but worse

Donald Trump has won the presidency again – and with convincing effect.

In the coming days and weeks, commentators will spill a lot of ink trying to make sense of this result. Members of the mainstream media must grapple with the fact that a seemingly disgraced, twice-indicted and convicted felon – often derided as a fascist and racist – has been re-elected president. Additionally, he achieved great success with minority communities, significantly improving his results in various states and is currently projected to win the popular vote. Make no mistake: This is a significant victory for someone who is not only considered unelectable, but also completely evil from every elite media institution in existence.

Experts trying to understand how Trump could have achieved this unthinkable comeback will focus on his message, his themes and his campaign strategies. You will examine the aspects of Trump that make him so attractive to many Americans. But they may be overlooking the single factor that contributed most to Trump's victory: not a positive vote for the candidate, but rather a negative endorsement of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Simply put, Harris was a disastrous candidate. Admittedly, she had a tough job as she replaced the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee – President Joe Biden – at the eleventh hour. But keep in mind that Biden has historically been unpopular. He reached his lowest point with an approval rating of 38 percent, making him the most unpopular president in 70 years. Part of this disapproval was due to his advanced age and apparent cognitive decline, and in this respect Harris was an automatic improvement.

But the fundamental mistake of the Harris campaign — the one that secured Trump's reelection, no matter how unlikely it seemed to elite tastemakers — was assuming that a simple candidate swap would be enough. That was completely wrong. Biden wasn't just unpopular because he was too old to be president. He was unpopular because American voters didn't like his policies. On the issues voters cared about most – the economy, inflation and immigration – majorities of voters clearly preferred Trump over Biden, long before the June debate that doomed the incumbent president's candidacy. Voters fondly remembered the Trump economy and blamed Biden's policies for worsening inflation.

After Harris was installed as the candidate, she had the opportunity to perform a reset. While she always found it difficult to distance herself from the administration in which she served, she had every opportunity to pressure Biden and distance herself from his policies. She could have criticized his economic setbacks, his foreign policy – which was particularly unpopular in the necessarily victorious state of Michigan – and his border program.

Just a month ago when she performed The viewthe hosts asked Harris if she would have done anything differently than Biden. Your Answer? “I can’t think of anything.”

That was an incredible mistake. The American people could not possibly have signaled more strongly that they wanted a change – a fundamental break – with the Biden administration's inflation policy. Harris didn't run away from these guidelines: she co-signed them.

In fact, there are several reasons why Harris might have been a worse candidate than Biden overall. It's true that Biden's rapidly deteriorating mental health made him a likely loser in the 2024 election. But at least Biden has a track record of success in previous elections. Harris' only foray into the national presidential campaign ended disastrously with her early exit from the 2019-2020 campaign. That came after she took a series of toxically unpopular progressive positions, many of which she was forced to abandon over the last four months. This made her a decidedly weak candidate; Say what you will about Biden, but he had the good sense not to anger Pennsylvania voters by supporting a fracking ban.

Harris has never deviated from Biden's lead or acted as if she embodied real political change. Their pitch was: Biden's second term, overseen by a younger and more capable person.

Not only did this pitch fall short of expectations, it fell far short of expectations. That's because voters wanted to separate themselves from both Biden And its inflation policy.

Whether Trump can keep his promises and restore the country's future remains to be seen. One thing is certain, however: the decision to suddenly and dramatically install Harris as the Democratic nominee – without changing the Democratic Party's underlying policy agenda – will be viewed as a stupid mistake. Americans don't want Biden, but they don't want Bidenism either. Harris was more of the same.