The political scientist Wilson Carey McWilliams once observed that alienation is not the loss of an old homeland, but the discovery of a new homeland that casts the former in a more dismal light. Today, the country indeed looks alien. The America many of us believed we knew now appears stranger in retrospect: The anger and resentment we may have thought was pitched at a simmer turned out to be at a rollicking boil. And one of liberals’ most cherished shibboleths from 2016—that Trumpism is a movement for aggrieved white men—unraveled in the face of a realignment that saw the GOP appear to give birth to a multiracial working-class movement. A second Trump presidency is the result of this misjudgment.
There is plenty of blame to go around, and much of it will be directed at Kamala Harris. Rightly so. Her campaign strategy was often confounding. Harris gambled on suburban-Republican support, which she tried to juice by touring with Liz Cheney and moving right on the border, a strategy that many warned was questionable. Meanwhile, in her quest to bring these new conservative voters into the Democratic fold, Harris neglected many of the voters the party has long relied on. She took far too long to reach out to Black men—despite a year’s worth of polling that said she was losing their support—and when she finally did, she had little to offer them but slapdash policies and half-baked promises. It was the same story for Hispanic men. Despite polling showing Donald Trump increasing his Hispanic support, Harris largely ignored the problem until a month before Election Day, when she stitched together a condescending last-minute “Hombres con Harris” push. As for Arab American voters, she and her surrogates couldn’t be bothered to do much more than lecture them.
The results speak for themselves: Trump won a stunning victory in a heavily Black county in North Carolina and carried the largest Arab-majority city, Dearborn, Michigan. Early exit polls suggest that he doubled his Black support in Wisconsin and won Hispanic men by 10 points. Meanwhile, Harris’s scheme to run up the score in the suburbs plainly failed to bear fruit: She underperformed Biden’s numbers with these voters. Simply put, almost nothing about the Harris game plan worked. But as easy as it is to play Monday-morning (or rather, Wednesday-morning) quarterback—and her dubious campaigning provides plenty of material to work with—the reality is that Harris was probably doomed from the jump.
The reason is that she had an 81-year-old albatross hanging around her neck: Joe Biden. When Biden got into the 2020 presidential race, he said he was motivated to defeat the man who blamed “both sides” for a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Five years later, Biden’s inability to see his own limitations handed that same man the White House once more. Nobody bears more responsibility for Trump’s reascension to the presidency than the current president. This failure lies at his feet.
Biden was supposed to be a one-term candidate. During his 2019 campaign, he heavily signaled that he would not run again if he won. “He is going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection,” one of his advisers declared. Biden himself promised to be a “transition” candidate, holding off Trump for four years while making room for a fresh Democratic challenger in 2024. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not anything else,” he said at a Michigan campaign event with Governor Gretchen Whitmer, one of those promising younger Democrats Biden was ostensibly making room for.
Of course, that’s not what happened. Scranton Joe, supposed paragon of aw-shucks decency, ultimately wouldn’t relinquish his power. He decided in the spring of 2023 to run for reelection despite no shortage of warning signs, including a basement-level approval rating, flashing bright red. He also ignored the will of the voters. As early as 2022, an overwhelming percentage of Democratic voters said they preferred a candidate other than Biden, and support for an alternative candidate persisted even as the president threw his hat back in the ring. This past February, one poll found that 86 percent of Americans and 73 percent of Democrats believed Biden was too old to serve another term, and another revealed that only a third of Americans believed that he was mentally fit for four more years.
The idea that Americans would vote for a man who they overwhelmingly thought was too old and cognitively infirm stretched reason to its breaking point. And yet Biden and his enablers in the Democratic Party doubled down on magical thinking. This was a species of madness worthy of King Lear shaking his fist before the encroaching storm. And like Lear, what the current president ultimately raged against was nature itself—that final frailty, aging and decline—as he stubbornly clung to the delusion that he could outrun human biology.
Nature won, as it always does. After flouting the will of his own voters, after his party did everything in its power to clear the runway for his reelection bid, and after benefiting from an army of commentators and superfans who insisted that mounting video evidence of his mental slips were “cheap fakes,” Biden crashed and burned at the debate in June. He hung on for another month, fueling the flames of scandal and intraparty revolt and robbing his successor of badly needed time to begin campaigning. And yet when he finally did stand down, Biden World immediately spun up the just-so story that the president is an honorable man who stepped aside for the good of the country.
He did not stand down soon enough. The cake was baked. The powers that be decided the hour was too late for a primary or contested convention, so an unpopular president was replaced with an unpopular vice president, who wasted no time in reminding America why her own presidential bid failed just a few years before. The limitations of Harris’s campaign are now laid bare for all to see, but her grave was dug before she ever took the podium at the Democratic National Convention.
Harris could not distance herself from Biden’s unpopular record on inflation and the southern border. She could not distance herself from his unpopular foreign policy in the Middle East. She could not break from him while she simultaneously served as his deputy. And she could not tell an obvious truth—that the sitting U.S. president is not fit for office—when asked by reporters, and so she was forced into Orwellian contortions. If the worst comes to pass, if the next four years are as bad as Biden warned, if the country—teetering before the abyss—stumbles toward that last precipice, it will have been American democracy’s self-styled savior who helped push it, tumbling end over end, into the dark.
