Record low approval of the current Democratic administration. Two assassination attempts against the Republican presidential candidate. A shift in the Democratic candidacy that replaced one weak contender with another. Even the election day weather forecast - rain and storms in Pennsylvania and the Midwest (yes, the rain falls on everyone's shoulders, but the motivation to go out and vote for their favorite in inclement weather is radically different for supporters of the two main candidates ).
Or in other words: everything was drawn for Donald Trump to win. The only question that remained unanswered on the eve of the election for the 47th president of the United States was whether the Republican would take advantage of the favorable confluence of circumstances. His previous two appearances in the same race, in 2016 and 2020, made it clear that he has enough electoral support to defeat a weak Democratic candidate and lacks the popular vote to overcome a viable opponent.
And even with her rise as a presidential candidate to replace the incumbent in the White House, Kamala Harris faced two main problems.
The first was that, in her capacity as acting vice president, she belonged to an unpopular administration that, midway through its term, had driven the country to extremely high inflation in the consumer basket of American citizens and had failed to deal with the migrant pressure on the US-Mexico border. That is, the lives of Americans in the last four years have become more expensive and more dangerous. From here, Donald Trump bet on exactly these two messages, which he repeated throughout the campaign (and any other politician in his position would do the same).
The second problem facing Kamala Harris was her excessive ideological load, which made her difficult to digest and acceptable for independent voters and electoral fringes. If to outside observers Trump seemed more radical, to Americans it was not necessarily so. The tension between independent voters and Kamala Harris was also evident in that they often diverged in their priorities: while her campaign rhetoric focused on issues such as abortion and democracy, independent voters had more pragmatic priorities (such as income and security). In the partial local elections in 2022, the topic of abortion managed to "stumble" the then red wave, reducing it to a simple victory, but this time it failed to abort the success of Donald Trump (and the looming one of Republicans throughout Congress).
The result of these two ontological problems of Kamala Harris - her participation in a current unpopular administration and her ideological profile - made it so that American citizens saw in her person more of the already disliked too; they also saw something that corresponded more to radicalism than to pragmatism.
As a result, on the night after the election, Harris' electoral breakthroughs began to show in the first results from the East Coast. The weak mobilization of Democrats was first seen in Virginia and Florida. In the Old Dominion, she won against Trump by a margin nearly double that of Joe Biden against the Republican four years ago. Meanwhile, in the Sunshine State, Harris trailed Trump by as much as 13%, and four years ago, Joe Biden lost to the Republican there by three times that margin. So what we learned from the East Coast results was that Kamala Harris didn't mobilize enough Democrats and the fringe. It was the East Coast that was enough to show that she had already lost the 2020 contest with Joe Biden, that is. Harris underperformed the incumbent White House chief of staff in the last presidential election. This was confirmed by the exit polls, which indicated that she was lagging behind Biden's presidential results both in the suburbs and in rural areas, but not just in a single region of the US, but on a national scale.
Then gradually the results of the first contested states started coming in.
Those in the Sun Belt (Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona) showed Harris performing dramatically under Democratic standards among key ethnic groups such as Latinos (her support among African Americans also declined, but he not as sensitive as that in Hispanics). Perhaps the most notable change in the behavior of a specific electoral group compared to the election four years ago concerns that of Latino men - from a 23-point difference in favor of Joe Biden to an 8-point advantage for Trump now.
Results from the Rust Belt (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) also showed a negative trend for the former California prosecutor, but in another electoral segment - that of white low-skilled voters, among whom Joe Biden was more successful in 2020. than was the case for both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024.
What do these Sun Belt and Rust Belt results mean?
Kamala Harris tried to "catch" both poor whites in the North through economic populism and ethnic diversity in the South through identity politics. But she failed to achieve it, at least not on the scale she needed. Donald Trump's Sun Belt and Rust Belt victories demonstrate just that: of the two chairs Kamala Harris tried to sit on, she actually fell to the ground.
The Democratic presidential nominee also performed poorly in another key and major category. It's about women in general, whose support for Harris is less than that registered by both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. From here we get at least a partial explanation for the fact that women in the suburbs they were more likely to prefer the Republican to the Democrat (by a 3% margin). But if there is a positive evolved electoral behavior for Harris, it is again related to women, but to specific segments of them. One time, among white women, among whom she outperformed Clinton and Harris, but still lost to Trump. The second time, among white college-educated women, among whom she demonstrated a score greater than that of Clinton, Biden and Trump. Despite the latter, Kamala Harris receives weak support in almost all significant constituencies.
But if the rain falls equally for everyone, Kamala Harris will no longer be hiding from it in the White House.