’Identity Politics’ Isn’t Why Harris Lost
She ran an inclusive, unifying campaign—but lost to an aspiring autocrat.
THERE’S BITTER DISAGREEMENT within the Democratic party and on the broader American left over Donald Trump’s shockingly decisive defeat of Kamala Harris. There are many explanations for Trump’s victory, and they tend to mirror the political prejudices of those who propose them: Harris didn’t appeal to the working class. She wasn’t progressive enough. She was too progressive. She didn’t distance herself from President Biden’s economy (which is quite good, despite the pervasive belief that it’s awful). She didn’t go on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
There are good reasons for Democrats to be self-critical. Harris under-performed Biden among key demographics including black men, Hispanics, and young voters. Large swaths of the working class have migrated toward the GOP. Former swing states like Ohio and Florida are now dark red, and Trump won every battleground state. It’s clear that the Democratic party needs to rethink its coalition—old assumptions about demographic trends inevitably favoring the Democrats have proven to be unfounded, and Trump gained ground among nearly every category of voters.
The role of identity in this election is a major focus for Democrats. Trump built a stronger multiracial coalition than many thought possible, challenging basic assumptions Democrats have made for decades. The boxes voters check on the census have less influence on their politics than Democrats thought. Democrats have long appealed (some would say “pandered”) to voters based on presumed identitarian grievances, but that strategy won’t work forever.
And yet, some still criticize Harris for imagining she could run a campaign that didn’t appeal to identity politics. “Obama’s coalition feels like an aberration,” writes Tressie McMillan Cottom in the New York Times, “and it is time for us to accept that American politics is identity politics.” Despite all the available evidence, this argument assumes that the identitarian essentialism that voters increasingly reject will always be a powerful political force. Cottom continues: “Try as some might to bury the salience of race, class and gender to political life, identity still matters.”
Other critics of Harris blame her defeat on too much identity politics, as if she was a raging progressive scold screaming “racist” and “misogynist” at every available opportunity. But she did the opposite. Although there’s some truth to the claim that the general perception of the Democratic party as too “woke” played a role in Trump’s re-election, this explanation has its own flaws. For one thing, Harris ran as a centrist and offered a universalist message that generally didn’t get bogged down in identitarianism. For another, Biden trounced Trump amid what has aptly been described as the “great awokening” in 2020.
Identity politics, like so many other political divides in the United States, was subordinate to a much larger development. A cultural and political chasm has opened up between Americans who still care about the integrity of their democracy and those who do not. We have entered an age of political nihilism in which our traditional conceptions of ideological and identitarian conflict must be abandoned. This election was about the identity of the United States as a whole, and it didn’t tell an inspiring story.
ONE OF HARRIS’S POLITICAL LIABILITIES was the impression that she’s an opportunist whose views are based on political expediency instead of core principles. During the 2020 Democratic primary, Harris joined many of her fellow candidates in embracing a long list of progressive causes. She supported Medicare for all. She described Trump’s effort to build a wall on the southern border as “un-American” and a “medieval vanity project.” She wanted to ban fracking. She expressed sympathy for the “defund the police” movement. But once she was at the top of the ticket, she reversed each of these positions.
But voters didn’t penalize her for moving to the center—they penalized her for what they saw as inauthenticity. They didn’t trust that her centrism was genuine.
Progressives like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders assume that working-class Americans—whether white, black, or Hispanic—have moved away from the Democratic party because it hasn’t made the tax system fairer or adopted the right industrial policies. But much of the growing contempt for the party among multiracial working class Americans is cultural. Many Hispanics are furious with Democrats for neglecting border security, and they’re well aware of Harris’s inconsistent record on immigration. Just 4 percent of Hispanics have used the progressive gender-neutral term “Latinx” to describe themselves, and 75 percent who’ve heard the term say it shouldn’t be used. There are also cultural fissures within the Democratic coalition on issues like gender identity—while 61 percent of Democrats say a person’s gender can be different from the sex assigned at birth, this proportion falls to 33 percent for black Americans.
The Trump campaign spent tens of millions of dollars on ads attacking Harris on transgender issues, which would conclude with lines like “Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you.” Perhaps the best-known of these ads was one which drew attention to Harris’s statement during the 2019 primary that she would support the use of taxpayer dollars to fund gender reassignment surgeries for immigrants in prison. It was easy to dismiss these ads as a strategic mistake—at a time when Americans are worried about the state of the economy and other “kitchen table” issues, did it really make sense to emphasize a seemingly marginal front in the culture wars? The answer is yes—each element of the transgender prisoner ad addressed one of Trump’s top issues: immigration, crime, and the vague sense among many Americans that the Democratic party’s “woke” fixations have little to do with their lives.
This isn’t a fair characterization of the party, and the ad was a demagogic distraction (the Bureau of Prisons reports that there have been a grand total of two approved gender-related surgeries for prisoners). But the ad worked because it addressed a genuine sentiment among voters, including voters that the Democrats desperately needed to win over. In this sense, those who attribute Harris’s loss to identity politics are correct.
Trump’s massive gains among Hispanics demonstrated that there is a new political reality in the United States. His performance among other major demographics like black men tells a related story—those who believe demography is destiny in American elections are mistaken. This fact undermines the racial essentialism from both the left and the right.
Identitarians on the left insist that “people of color” are permanent victims of pervasive structural racism in the United States, but many don’t feel that way. Trump’s bigotry was on display every day, but diverse voters looked past it (or believed it didn’t apply to them) because they have other concerns. Meanwhile, many Trumpists argue that Democrats only want mass migration because Hispanics and other diverse voters allegedly vote the same way. Beyond the ugly conspiracism and prejudice behind this belief, its underlying assumption is becoming less credible every day.
IN A RECENT INTERVEW on Fox News, Free Press editor Bari Weiss accused Harris of running a radical identitarian campaign that alienated most Americans: “It turns out that running on these extraordinarily niche issues like gender fluidity or defunding the police” made Harris seem “profoundly out of touch to ordinary Americans.” One of the main reasons Fareed Zakaria cited for Harris’s defeat is the “dominance of identity politics on the left.” Sanders says a key reason for Trump’s victory is that the Democratic party has become the “party of identity politics.” In a postmortem about the election, the political scientist Yascha Mounk argues that left-wing identitarianism was one of the most “consequential vulnerabilities of Kamala Harris’ campaign”:
While running for the Democratic primaries in 2019, she wedded herself to a slew of identitarian positions that happened to be deeply unpopular. Sensing that the political winds had shifted, she did not reprise her flirtations with the idea of defunding the police or decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But neither did she have the courage to explicitly call out the ideological foundations for these deeply unpopular positions. . . .
If it’s true that the “identitarian vision of the world” that has “gained tremendous influence” on the left was one of the Democrats’ biggest vulnerabilities in 2024, why wasn’t this vulnerability even more decisive in 2020? The George Floyd protests swept the country in the summer of 2020, just a few months before the election. This was a period when journalists were being fired for offenses like publishing editorials that claimed “Buildings Matter, Too” (a reference to riots that were taking place in many cities); monuments were being defaced and removed (some of which were racist, while others weren’t); and public shaming was rife.
Trump exploited these developments. In 2019, the New York Times released its 1619 Project—which presented the story of the United States as a tale of little more than endless racial oppression. The creators of the project even argued that they aimed to reframe the nation’s “true founding” as the moment the first slaves landed in the country. It wasn’t long before Trump announced his 1776 Commission, which called for “patriotic education” and denounced “distorted histories.” He fused his attacks on left-wing identity politics with his law-and-order message. On July 4, 2020, he proposed that “people who damage or deface federal statues or monuments will get a minimum of 10 years in prison.” He decried a “radical ideology attacking our country . . . under the banner of social justice.”
This year, Trump once again relied on anti-woke demagoguery to attack Harris, but he had much less to work with than he did in 2020. There were no images of Minneapolis burning. Black Lives Matter is long past its cultural apogee. The primary which suggested that wokeness had made significant inroads in the Democratic party was half a decade ago. While Harris had been swept along with the woke political current before her primary campaign ended in 2019, her 2024 campaign was focused on building the broadest tent possible. She preferred not to mention her race, and unlike Hillary Clinton, she didn’t emphasize that she would make history as the first female president.
Harris delivered a universalist message that intentionally avoided identity politics. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked her about Trump’s accusation that she “happened to turn black” for political reasons, she responded: “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.” She was similarly dismissive of the idea that she was a “DEI” hire in the Biden administration. She didn’t just avoid rhetoric about defunding the police—she embraced her record as California attorney general and constantly presented herself as a tough-on-crime candidate: “I’m the only person on this stage,” she said during the only debate with Trump, “who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings.” So Weiss had it exactly backward when she accused Harris of “running on” defunding the police.
Let’s say Harris had taken Mounk’s advice and challenged the “ideological foundations for these deeply unpopular positions” like “defund the police” or decriminalized border crossings. This would likely have made the election an even bigger disaster for her. It would have reminded voters of the Democrats’ focus on those issues in 2019, and it would have forced Harris to relitigate an internal party feud that most Democrats have already moved past. The idea of calling out the “ideological foundations” behind the progressive turn in 2019 is even worse—Harris should not have wasted time educating voters about the evolution of postmodernism and intersectionality. She had about 100 days to build a campaign—there wasn’t time for an academic seminar about identity politics.
THE ELECTION MAY HAVE TURNED OUT differently had Biden accepted his role as a transitional president earlier and given his party the time it needed to select the best possible candidate to defeat Trump. The Democrats could have chosen a candidate who didn’t share Harris’s baggage from the 2019 primary, and who could have made a cleaner break with the party’s brief but hard turn toward identitarianism. But this doesn’t change the fact that Harris did her best to run as a centrist. She didn’t lecture Americans about their bigotry. She deftly navigated Trump’s endless race-baiting. When Bret Baier tried to trick her into calling Trump supporters stupid during a Fox News interview, she replied: “I would never say that about the American people.”
But it wasn’t enough. Over the next several years, we’re going to hear all about how the Democratic party was punished for its condescension toward “ordinary Americans,” who were pushed toward Trump by the arrogance of “coastal elites,” wokeness, and so on. Journalists will once again parachute into small Midwestern towns and ask the inhabitants why Trump was more capable of speaking to their needs and concerns than Harris, but this time they won’t explore just the attitudes of non-college educated whites—they will include interviews with Hispanics and black Americans who decided that Trump deserved another four years as the most powerful man on earth.
But the old narratives about the Democrats’ contempt for the working class and their racially divisive politics don’t apply to this election. The argument that Americans are in so much economic pain that they had to vote for Trump doesn’t hold up: Unemployment is just over 4 percent, the stock market was hitting all-time highs before Trump won, and inflation has plummeted from a peak of over 9 percent to 2.4 percent. The “soft landing” that many economists thought was impossible—in which inflation comes down precipitously without triggering a recession—is on the tarmac. American growth has sustainably outpaced other advanced democracies. The evidence for the strength of the Biden economy will be even clearer once Trump returns to office and immediately starts taking credit for it.
Americans don’t care about any of this. They don’t care that the Biden administration handled a global economic crisis about as well as anyone could have hoped. They don’t care that Harris ran an inclusive campaign and refused to condemn Trump supporters. While Biden defeated Trump by over 7 million popular votes in 2020, Trump just became the first Republican to win the popular vote in two decades. His performance improved in all but one state, and he dominated among voters who were concerned about major issues like the economy and immigration.
It’s possible Trump will have complete control of the United States government when he takes office in January—the GOP already took the Senate, and it has a good chance of retaining control of the House. A conservative Supreme Court recently ruled that the president is immune from prosecution for crimes that could be construed as official acts. The federal court cases against Trump are winding down.
Americans have decided not to hold Trump accountable for attempting to steal an election, standing by while his supporters breached the Capitol and hunted down public officials, and filling our public discourse with despicable language about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” or the “vermin” who oppose him politically. They don’t care that he’s threatening to go after the “enemies from within” with the full power of the United States government—perhaps even the military. They don’t mind that he practices his own brand of grievance-soaked identity politics, which tells Americans that immigrants are killing them, stealing their jobs and votes, and destroying the country.
It would be comforting if Harris lost the 2024 election because she ran a divisive campaign that pitted Americans of different backgrounds, races, and genders against each other. If that were the case, defeating Trumpism would be a simple matter of more strategic communications and the traditional job of coalition-building. But it isn’t the case.
Americans didn’t elect Trump because they were offended by the Democrats—they elected Trump because they like him. They know everything they need to know about Trump. He has been broadcasting his cruelty, hatred, and self-obsession into every American home for nearly a decade. He has demanded the termination of the Constitution to remain in power after losing an election. He has promised to be a dictator on day one. He says his next term will be all about “retribution” against his fellow Americans.
This election was about identity after all—an American identity which has become more tolerant of authoritarianism and less committed to democracy over the past decade. As Trump’s opponents try to figure out why they were defeated and how they can resist him over the next four years, they need to confront the dark reality about who we have become as a nation.
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