In the 2024 presidential election, Americans were given a choice between President-elect Donald J. Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. After Trump’s victory, many people and news outlets questioned what went wrong. What went wrong was that the average American was forgotten in Harris’s campaign. Her loss magnified that the Democratic Party neglected its base of working class and young voters.
Harris’s failure to address the concerns of Americans living paycheck to paycheck under the Biden Administration contributed to her loss. During her campaign she voiced her proposed economic reforms to create an ‘opportunity economy.’ However, when Harris appeared on The View she was asked if she would have done anything differently than President Joe Biden during his term. She responded, “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” a sound bite that pushed away moderate voters who were not pleased with Biden’s current fiscal policy.
While Harris promoted policies that would curb inflation and the cost of living, she was unable to connect with working class Americans as effectively as Trump did. The Trump campaign ran off of the emotions of Americans feeling overworked and underpaid by running advertisements connecting Harris to Biden’s unpopular policies. Trump convinced the working class to look past Harris’s proposals and made them feel alienated by the Democrats.
After the election, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders posted on X, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
Although Democrats have traditionally run on labor rights, they failed to get this message across in 2024. Biden claimed that he has run “the most pro-union administration in American history,” but the organizations were unimpressed with his campaign. For example, the leader of the Teamsters Union spoke at the Republican National Convention. Once Harris launched her campaign, she tried to win back hesitant union members. In one instance, she praised the large-scale dock workers strike in October according to politico.com, but her efforts failed to close the gap.
In the end, according to usatoday.com, Trump improved his margin for voters without a college degree by nine points compared to 2020, a phenomenon analysts have called the “diploma divide.” Since these voters make up a large portion of the working class, they’ve disproportionately suffered the effects of recent inflation contributing to his popularity among that group.
Although Harris’s campaign was much shorter than Trump’s, her narrative failed to resonate with the demographics she claimed to fight for.