Inside the Kamala Harris Blowout: A Reckoning for the Democratic Party

By: Donald V. Watkins

Copyrighted and Published on November 7, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris made her concession speech at Howard University in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.

An Editorial Opinion

I left the Democratic Party after George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in November 2020.  I formally moved to political independent status in January 2001. I am now a registered independent who lives, works, and votes in California.

Since 2001, I have seen the Democratic Party become increasingly disconnected with mainstream American voters.  The only bright spots in the party’s future occurred when Barack Obama was elected as president in 2008 and 2012 and Joe Biden was elected in 2020.  Both men won because the GOP presidents they defeated had mismanaged the economy in 2008 and a global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

On November 5, 2024, Americans witnessed a blowout of epic proportion in the race for president.  It was a total and decisive rejection of Vice President Kamala Harris's candidacy for president. Even though Harris raised and spent $1 billion in campaign donations, this money bought her no credibility with a majority of American voters.

Anatomy of a Blowout

What went wrong for the Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party on Tuesday night?

First, Harris and fellow Democrats in Washington spent far more time sucking up to universally-despised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his U.S. political allies than they did in winning over working-class voters in America.

Second, Harris had no plan to fix an economy that no longer works for struggling and stressed-out working-class voters. If she did, Harris spent little time talking about it on the campaign trail.

Third, Harris was Joe Biden’s designated border czar for nearly four years.  Yet, she had no credible response as to why America’s southern border remained wide-open while she worked on reforming the administartion's immigration policies.

Fourth, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have joined the ranks of wealthy celebrities.  Working-class Americans no longer revere them as they once did when the Obamas were a financially struggling couple who chased and achieved the American dream in a spectacular way.  

Whenever politicians come into the presidency as financially broke but committed ideologues for working-class Americans and become rich after they leave office, they lose whatever broad-base appeal they once enjoyed with the struggling working-class voters they left behind.  We watched Bill and Hillary Clinton experience this same diminished voter appeal. 

Donald Trump gets a pass on this enrichment factor because he came into the presidency in 2017 as a very rich American and left as one in 2021.  Furthermore, Trump’s enrichment did not spring from any financial value derived from his political position.

Fifth, celebrity endorsements turnoff working-class and independent voters.  Celebrity endorsements remind these voters that the Democratic Party elites rejoice in rubbing shoulders with celebrities and not working-class voters.  It is the celebrities who get to hang out at White House VIP parties, not working-class voters.

Sixth, the 2024 election results proved that Democrats knew absolutely nothing about the core values of Hispanic-Americans.  If they did, Donald Trump would not have won the votes of a majority of this block of voters.

Seventh, Kamala Harris sounded like she was a creature of ChatGPT articial intelligence.  Everything she said on the campaign trail was (a) carefully scripted for a targeted audience and (b) barked out from a teleprompter.  To this day, I do not know what core values Harris holds dearly in her personal belief system.

Eight, Democratic public officials at all levels of government stopped delivering tangible economic benefits to working-class voters a long time ago.  Now, they offer a steady diet of hip social media photo ops and meaningless babble as political pacifiers for struggling working-class voters who are thirsty for practical solutions to everyday quality of life problems.  For example, when was the last time you heard a Democratic mayor of one of the 15 most dangerous cities in America offer an effective solution for curbing the skyrocketing violent street crime that plagues his/her city?  

Inside Our “No Endorsement” Decision

During the last week of September, my group of California-based independent voter influencers had access to private polling data that suggested Harris would lose Trump in a blowout.  According to our polling data, Harris’s margin of defeat in the six swing states was greater than our block of undecided independent votes in those states could bridge. 

Armed with this data, we decided to make no endorsement in the presidential race.  Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos followed suit.

Can the National Democratic Party Rebound from Tuesday’s Defeat?

Can the National Democratic Party rebound from Tuesday’s humiliating defeat? Not with party elites like the Obamas, the Clintons, Mark Cuban, Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, and a string of bandwagon celebrities serving as drum majors for the party’s national campaigns.  Tuesday night's election results showed Americans of all political stripes that the time for these Democratic drum majors on the national political scene has apparently come and gone.

The Democratic Party must overhaul its leadership class.  This requires a top-to-bottom cleanout. 

If the party is not capable of such a cleanout, Democrats will cease to exist as a national political force.  Democrats will become the party of politically irrelevant state and local public officials who dot the landscape in the growing number of “Red States.”