The identity speech promoted by Kamala Harris was a failure and she said little about the problems that afflict the entire American population
Contra’s victory in the elections on the 5th brought clear results. For the first time since 2004, when George W. Bush beat John Kerry in the wake of the so-called “war on terror”, a Republican candidate surpassed a Democrat in the popular vote. The victory in the electoral college was also notable, with 312 to 226. The logic that gave Trump a wide advantage weighed heavily on voters. Outside the White House, it is easier to point out the errors of the current government and gain support. The comparison of current years with the period before 2020, when the challenger was the challenged, was also seen favorably by the public.
But what stands out most about the Republican’s victorious campaign was his ability to adopt popular agendas and use them against , whose platform was, once again, focused solely on the “existential threat” promoted by Donald Trump. Let there be no mistake: the former president was convicted of sexual abuse, criminally convicted for making up payments to a porn actress, he is known for explicitly misogynistic statements, he was prejudiced when he suspended the entry of citizens from seven Arab countries claiming that tourists could being terrorists, frequently makes xenophobic statements involving illegal immigrants in the country, alleging an alleged correlation of crime, and is being investigated for the attempted coup d’état when trying to reverse the result of the 2020 elections.
For the voter, however, little of this matters. The decisive factor was the pocket. Inflation is not even that big, with the consumer price index closing in September at 2.4% in the last 12 months — a similar value to February 2021, a month after Joe Biden arrived in the White House. Unemployment, down slightly in October, reached 4.1% of the population. Still, Trump managed to use rhetoric to convince the electorate that the country is experiencing serious economic problems and needs urgent changes. It is an indisputable merit of the candidate, who knew how to find the right tone of speech to infiltrate the middle and lower classes, winning a crucial vote for the dispute.
The situation was clear: while Donald Trump was roaming the swing states convincing voters that the economy is bad, that the cost of living has risen and that the United States suffers from serious structural problems that the Democrats have not been able to resolve, Kamala Harris chose for seeking to exploit his rival’s rejection. But even that didn’t work. Data from the Edison Research exit poll shows that the identity discourse promoted by Harris was a failure. The Democrat had just 8% more of the female vote than Donald Trump — in 2020, Biden had 15%. Among Latino men, Biden had a 23% lead against the Republican in 2020, but four years later, Trump led the group with 10%.
If that wasn’t enough, Kamala Harris also failed among black voters, with just a 56% advantage among men. For comparison, in the same group, he had 69 percentage points more than Trump in 2016, while Biden had 60 in 2020. The speeches by important names in the party after the defeat show that the Democratic Party is detached from reality. Despite the shorter campaign time that Kamala had compared to Trump, little was debated about the problems that affect the entire American population — albeit in an unequal way depending on the social, ethnic or gender level. This left room for a billionaire businessman to grow among the working class.
It is almost as if Harris and her allies had practiced a kind of electoral denialism, omitting from their speech what is most visible in everyday American life and seeking to bring to the top of the list of priorities what was never, in fact, a consensus among the population. A lot can change in four years — or even in less time, with legislative elections in 2026. But, certainly, the defeat at the polls indicates that Democrats need to recalculate the route to maintain political competitiveness in the United States.
*This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Jovem Pan.
