Why Kamala Harris lost the presidency in 2024
By Jack Bernard, contributing columnist
PEACHTREE CITY | Here are more reasons why Donald Trump won in 2024.
Kamala Harris is a progressive who knows the issues. She campaigned for the nomination in 2020 on those issues, pushing the progressive platform. She could have pulled back on items like single payer but put forth a specific, new more moderate agenda… even if it is not what she believes is needed per her “values.”
But in 2024, she had incompetent policy advisers who pushed her to have only two campaign themes: that Trump is a budding dictator who will destroy our democracy and Trump is the guy that took away a woman’s freedom of choice. Addressing these issues is fine and appropriate, but they should not have been the only focus of her campaign.
As identified by one source, for the voters, the top three issues in the 2020 Presidential election were health/social security (46 percent); immigration (40 percent); and inflation (39 percent). In 2024, because the Covid-19 pandemic was over, healthcare was no longer on the minds of most Americans.
But in 2024, inflation and the economy were still the top issues for 35 percent of voters. Immigration was the highest priority for another 13 percent of those polled. Together, those two reasons amount to nearly half of Americans rating these issues as their primary concerns. On the other hand, abortion and healthcare were the main issues for only 17 percent of Americans.
Therefore, when Harris was thrown into the lion’s den, she should have addressed the elephants in the room, that is, the Biden administration’s obvious failures regarding both inflation and immigration.
In June 2022, annual inflation hit a 40-year record 9.1 percent. Overall, inflation averaged an annual increase of 5.2 percent per year under Biden. Yes, many other developed nations were worse regarding inflation. And, yes, Biden did not cause petroleum costs to rise; that was the war in Ukraine. But that fact was little solace to working families who paid more for their gas and groceries. And the issue cannot simply be ignored, as the Harris campaign did, with her saying on The View program that she would have done nothing differently.
Likewise, illegal immigration has risen, although not as much as the GOP would have you believe. Exact figures are hard to come by, but from 2020 to 2022, it is estimated that an additional 900,000 undocumented workers came into the US, making a total of 8.3 million in our workforce.
Because Trump spread numerous false rumors, there has been a very negative reaction to what in the view of some economists has been a positive for our nation’s economy. Immigrants are employed in the jobs native born Americans do not want. However, the GOP has been very successful in incorrectly portraying them as criminals and economic drains. In reality, immigrants have a much lower crime rate and higher employment rates. Harris should have taken this head-on and said what people wanted to hear: that legal immigration is a positive, but that she will stop all illegal immigration (even though this is impossible). Instead, Harris generally avoided the subject and was incorrectly portrayed by the right as the “Border Czar.”
The 2024 election is over. Now the incoming President Trump appears to be even worse than the disgraceful man who lost in 2020. We can only hope that the GOP Congress will reverse course and curtail his baser instincts, as evidenced by his cabinet picks.
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