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If you went into the voting booth Tuesday with the face-value data from the polls, you thought Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were neck-and-neck in a nail biter on Election Day. Once the dust settled and the votes were being counted, however, it was clear that Donald Trump had a landslide win on his hands. How did the sitting Vice-President end up finishing so poorly on a day that started with her this close to a promotion to the most important job in the free world?
Democratic strategist Melissa DeRosa says there were signs it would be a long night at Harris campaign headquarters, if you knew where to look. Speaking on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program, she said there were telltale signs of an embarrassing finish for Harris, but even she was surprised by some of the data.
“It was not looking good,” DeRosa told Berman and Riedel, “A Democrat, in order to win nationally, the Electoral College, has to consistently poll at plus-three or more nationally, and every poll either had them tied or him slightly ahead or her slightly ahead. And so, just based on the numbers alone, it looked like we were headed for this fate. Now, what I didn’t see coming was the massive inroads Trump made with Latino voters and with young voters. I mean, Trump reshaped the Republican voting coalition last night in a way that I think few people truly predicted.”
Latino voters weren’t the only demographic with whom Harris failed to resonate. “She never defined herself. She never defined a clear agenda. They attempted to run a playbook that was based on first vibes and, you know, sort of vagueness, and then ‘I’m not him,’ which, the ‘I’m not him’ mantra works in 2020, when he was in the White House and it was a referendum on the past four years. But when you are the incumbent, the election is always a referendum on you, and in poll after poll people said they did not like the direction of the country and they felt more economically secure, they felt safer internationally, geopolitically, when Donald Trump was in office. And, she never was able to separate herself from Biden.”
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