Donald Trump, the President-elect of the United States, is a once-in-a-generation political talent. His victory against Kamala Harris will be attributed to a wide range of factors. Pundits will hyper-analyse margins, cross-tabulated by gender, ethnicity and race, and each explanation will be more or less accurate because a single reason isn’t enough to interpret the scale of his win. 

Regardless of whether one has a favourable view of him, Trump’s continued dominance has to be attributed to his sharp populist instincts, an unparalleled grasp of the media and information landscape in the US, and a charisma that has only expanded his Republican base instead of turning people away – as many had originally expected.

But why did the Harris campaign fail, just months after jubilation over her replacing Joe Biden? 

Over the last week, I had joined a team of canvassers for Kamala Harris in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to get a sense of what Harris’ level of support was on the ground. 

An underwhelming Harris rally in a swing state

Pennsylvania has been a major swing state which has turned Republican a second time for Trump after he won it the first time in 2016. 

Since it was the eve of the election, the goal of the canvassers was to knock on doors of reliable Democrat voters based on voter registration and other data. This was supposed to be an outreach to the base of the party encouraging them to turn out to vote. So I was intrigued by the fact that the only individual in this targeted outreach effort who supported Trump was a senior Black man – something I had not expected because of the perception that the Black population overwhelmingly votes Democrat. 

As a swing state suburb, there were political signs on several homes in that neighbourhood. The Trump homes had far more signs than Harris homes, and some Harris voters we talked to sounded nervous about the level of enthusiasm in their rival supporters.  

On Monday, Kamala Harris came to Pittsburgh to address the penultimate rally of the entire campaign. The rally was large, estimated to be 15,000-strong. The audience consisted of mostly Democratic party faithfuls who one might think of as the ideological base of the party – young women and men, and older white women. My previous experience of an American political rally was one by Bernie Sanders in San Jose, California during his 2016 Democratic primary election campaign. Compared to the electric energy of that rally, this one was quite unenthusiastic. The reception Harris received felt underwhelming – a sentiment shared by some other rally goers I spoke with. The key difference between that 2016 Bernie rally and this one was that in Pittsburgh, the audience was not there for Kamala Harris. They would have been there for any other candidate as well because they wanted to support their party’s candidate. 

What was worse for the campaign was that Harris did not seem excited for Pittsburgh either. A crowd that had waited for hours to see her got a 10-minute stump speech that sounded like it had been written by ChatGPT – generic, lacking substance and empty-sounding. She just did not articulate a compelling case for herself. Beyond reiterating her commitment to preserving reproductive rights of women, Harris’ speech was peppered with ambiguous promises of what her leadership and governance approach would be in contrast to Trump’s. I was surprised by the complete lack of a clear positive message for what her administration would specifically do for people. In essence, her pitch to voters was, “I am not Trump.”

A Trump rally, and a clear contrast

At the exact same time, Donald Trump was rallying his supporters in another part of town. His base of supporters had also waited for hours to see him – and he delivered a show for them like he has consistently done across his rallies in this campaign. He spoke for approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes, repeating his claims and promises and grievances. But he also brought on stage a Pittsburgh local, Roberto Clemente, Jr, son of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team legend Roberto Clemente. Clemente was a much loved Puerto Rican baseball player who died in a tragic plane crash in 1972 when he was delivering aid to earthquake-hit Nicaragua. While it is impossible to quantify the effect of bringing in the endorsement of a local cultural figure on the eve of an election, it is hard to miss Trump’s ability to weave local cultural references and connections cutting through the intense polarisation in the US. His parting message to a city obsessed with its successful American football team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, was “We’re on the one yard line…I’m giving you the ball. Go vote.”

In contrast, Kamala Harris’ rally was followed by an uninspiring performance by Katy Perry singing her old hits to a crowd that just desperately wanted to get out of the rally ground to get home. As I was trying to get out of the rally venue, I heard an unhappy attendee exasperated, “I think we came to the wrong rally.” One pro-Palestinian protestor even had to be escorted out of the rally during Harris’ speech – a protester who might even have supported Harris had she expressed even a slight departure from President Biden’s approach to the conflict in the Middle East.

The difference in strategy

The Harris campaign went all in on appealing to “centrist” voters who they believed would be put off by Trump’s personality and criminal record. This strategy’s success hinges on their base remaining intact. This general election campaign theory of chasing after ‘independents’ by cloaking oneself in a faux independent guise has been commonly espoused by both parties in the past. 

In a bid to win former Republicans from the George Bush era, Harris infamously touted endorsements from Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney, the man who is said to have pushed the US into the Iraq war of 2003. Harris’ young anti-war base, Muslim and Arab base was not even considered by the Harris campaign as she went to three swing states with Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney. Trump immediately latched on to the hypocrisy of it, and appealed to Arab Americans and Muslim Americans to vote for him. Harris took her base for granted, depressing their turnout. And those former Bush Republicans who she was trying to win over - they didn’t materialize either.

Donald Trump has successfully won two out of his three elections by following a different model. His approach was to double down on expanding his base and ensure they turn out in large numbers to vote for him. The result of this election shows that through a 10-year campaign, he has been able to induct entirely new sections of voters into his base. 

Trump also promised the moon to his voters: cheaper gas, cheaper electricity and auto insurance premiums cut by 50 percent without any concrete roadmap explaining how any of it would happen. It almost did not matter to the average Trump supporter whether he will make good on his promises. What mattered was that Trump addressed their grievance around the unaffordability of cars and the energy to power cars, a key pillar of the American dream. 

Trump has successfully built a personality cult in which his most committed supporters may not care about his policy or ideological positions. He can say whatever he wants and get away with it because his supporters believe he is merely a triaging agent who is always trying to figure out and espouse the most popular position at a given time. He showed he could be dogmatic, hypocritical and persuadable all at the same time, as evidenced by his extraordinary ability to build coalitions of people with diametrically opposite interests. He would say whatever his target voters and donors wanted to hear. 

At a private event, he promised corporate tax cuts to his billionaire supporters, and on Joe Rogan’s podcast he promised to eliminate all personal income taxes for ordinary Americans. He promised Jewish Americans that he would back Israel’s mission to “finish the job” in Gaza while speaking with an Israeli media outfit, and while addressing a rally in Michigan (a state with a large Arab population), he stood alongside Imams and Muslim community leaders promising peace in the Middle East. He accused “illegal” immigrants of being a scourge on America across all of his platforms, but also promised a tech podcaster that “legal” immigrants from the same countries would get automatic green cards if they graduated from US colleges. He characterised the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v Wade protections for abortion as his achievement, while also telling women voters that US states can now protect their right to abortion if they so wanted. He promised to impose tariffs on foreign-made goods when addressing joblessness in former manufacturing hubs, while also promising to reduce the cost of essential items. After years of being anti-electric vehicle (EV) to pander to automobile industry workers who saw the rise of EVs as the harbinger of manufacturing automation, Trump also managed to assuage the bankroller of his campaign, the world’s richest man and founder of EV-behemoth Tesla, Elon Musk. 

Poll can’t be reduced to identities

Democrats have often called Trump a racist, xenophobic and authoritarian leader for over nine years now, and the section of his base that likes him for those reasons has been firmly in his corner for multiple election cycles now. But this time he has made impressive gains among the purported targets of his racism and xenophobia – Muslims, Latinos, Blacks and Asians. So it would be inaccurate to reduce this election to one of identities as exit polls have borne out. 

Democrats were complacent in believing women would go out of their way to vote against Trump because he had brought about the end of the US’ protections for abortion through his Supreme Court appointments. In fact, Democrats also cynically believed that adding abortion referendums to the ballots of swing states would bring them additional women voters who would turn out to vote in favour of abortion. They did vote against abortion bans across states – red, blue and purple. But some of those same voters also voted for Trump instead of Harris.

When Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for President, there was widespread relief and jubilation that perhaps the Democrats could still beat Trump with a new face. Everyone in the Democratic elite fell in line to endorse her. One important figure who had expressed initial concern about the Democrat’s prospects was Bernie Sanders who had challenged Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary and almost succeeded. Holding off his endorsement of Harris initially he had warned, “We can win this election and defeat Donald Trump, but we need to make sure that the vice president is listening to the working class of this country, to the progressives as well. These are not radical ideas and I would very much hope we get specificity.” 

Bernie’s advice to get specific was more or less ignored by Harris and Bernie was relegated to the sidelines and not used much through the campaign to rally his own working class base. Instead of offering a concrete alternative vision for the country, different from that of both Trump and the current President Biden, Harris’ final message to voters was about “saving democracy”. 

This US election is another reminder to democrats around the world (not the Democratic party members, but those who believe in the idea of democracy) that when an authoritarian demagogue figures out how to be popular, “saving a democracy” means different things for different people. After all, how can you “save a democracy” from a popular candidate when democracies are fundamentally popularity contests? 

Democracies around the world have shown they are unable to guard against populist authoritarianism without an opposition that has got its act together. The biggest fallacy that modern democrats have sold themselves on is that preserving democracy must be an end in itself for all those who live in a democracy. Democracy is not preserved by voting for those claiming to protect democracy, it is preserved by offering a credible alternative. The social contract in a democracy is for the democracy to serve people, not the other way around. 

Disclaimer: The writer studied public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and has been part of several Aam Aadmi Party election campaigns.