Kamala Harris Was a Fundamentally Strong Candidate
Harris closed a double-digit support deficit but just ran out of time.
By Ryan McGreal.
825 words. Approximately a 2 to 5 minute read.
Posted September 25, 2025 in Blog.
Some personal reflections on the US 2024 presidential election now that Kamala Harris’ memoir has come out (disclosure: I haven’t read it yet):
Joe Biden lost the election for the Democrats. Kamala Harris was a fundamentally strong candidate who closed a double-digit support deficit and almost won it back, but she just didn’t have enough time to succeed.
Most candidates have years to plan a presidential run. Harris had hours. Literally hours. Yet she hit the ground running and pulled together a damned impressive campaign with a clear message. Remember how fire that first campaign ad was?
Did she make mistakes? Sure - especially in hindsight. She should have had a better answer to how she would govern differently than Biden. She should have done more media and especially more new media.
But let’s be real. Her competitor was a freaking dumpster fire of terrible news and the media still had no idea how to provide truly balanced reporting on the two campaigns, so they massively over-indexed her modest missteps.
If she had more time, she could have developed a good answer to how she would do things differently than Biden. She’d have time to sit down for more long-form podcasts. (For that matter, her running mate would have more time to practice and get reps in for the VP debate.)
Despite the impossibly short timeline and the deep intraparty agita over the whole Biden issue, Harris still managed to claw her way to a 1.5% gap in popular vote against a competitor who had been campaigning for nine straight years and had his party completely whipped.
It’s easy for commentators to saddle her with culpability for failing to close the deal by emphasizing the impact of her campaign missteps. But they were minor missteps and it is conveniently post hoc to decide they were dispositive.
I mean, the other candidate was literally raving about refugees eating people’s pets and promising to be a dictator while his running mate ordered donuts so badly that it generated an international news cycle. If campaign missteps were the problem, Trump would have been trounced.
The strongest critique is of their theory of attention. Harris optimized for avoiding saying dumb things rather than seeking maximum visibility. She leaned big on linear advertising and legacy media - though, mostly forgotten, she did high-profile podcasts like Call Me Daddy. Just not Rogan.
Would she have won if she went on Rogan? Given his politics and her lack of time to prepare for the particular quirks of Rogan’s bro culture, I can understand why they might worry that it could backfire. If she had more than 107 days to work with, she might have made a different calculation.
She was also operating at a deep deficit as the standard-bearer for the Democratic brand and narrative. Biden had abandoned the bully pulpit as president, leaving Trump and MAGA to set the cultural tone more or less uncontested for years.
As Biden’s VP, she was also effectively sidelined through a combination of the background nature of that role, as well as Biden’s steadily increasing insularity. She further missed the opportunity to raise her profile and sharpen her message in a presidential primary campaign.
When Harris abruptly became the nominee, she effectively popped up out of nowhere, as far as most Americans were concerned.
We now know that Biden should never have tried to run for re-election. Sorry, but anyone still claiming otherwise is just delusional. He could no longer perform the job, and the world finally saw this undeniably after his catastrophic debate on June 27, 2024.
Yes, he ultimately did the right thing, and yes, it is impossible for us to imagine just how excruciatingly difficult it must have been for him to give up the presidency after finally attaining his ultimate vocational dream.
Still, after the debate, he delayed for another 24 days as he tried to stave off the inevitable. Would an extra three and a half weeks have been enough for Harris to prevail? To distinguish herself, craft a sharper message, reach more voters?
We have no way of knowing, of course. We don’t live in that universe. But if starting late was good for election campaigns, I expect more candidates would start late.
Now, to be fair, if we’re running hypotheticals, we should also run the hypothetical in which Biden announced after the 2022 midterms that he wouldn’t run again and gave the party a real chance to field candidates and run a primary.
Does Harris prevail in that scenario? I have absolutely no idea. All I can say is that the crucible of such a campaign would produce a stronger, sharper, better-known candidate; and if it did turn out to be Harris, she would be running with advantages the real Harris had to campaign without.
And so I would argue that it actually supports my thesis here that Harris was a fundamentally strong candidate who simply had too many structural and temporal forces stacked against her to overcome them.