Kamala Harris’s devastating loss to Donald Trump last week was a catastrophic failure for the Democratic Party and the consultant class that has long steered its politics. Yet in the wake of her defeat, many pundits on cable news could only bring themselves to affirm how “incredible” and “flawless” her campaign had been. According to these commentators, the vice president’s campaign “far exceeded expectations,” and her stinging defeat only proved that the Democrats never really had a chance against Trump in this year’s anti-incumbent environment. The real question is not “where the Harris campaign went wrong,” one liberal columnist inveighed on X, but “where the American people went wrong.”
It is true that the Harris campaign had all the elements of a perfect campaign when measured by the standards of a Beltway consultant. There were the celebrity endorsements, the crossover support from prominent Republicans, the star-studded events in packed arenas and a candidate who carefully stuck to the centrist script crafted by the professionals. In just a few months, the Harris campaign brought in over a billion dollars, shattering fundraising records and vastly outraising her opponent.
In the end, however, all the money in the world couldn’t save the Democrats from themselves. Since Harris’s defeat, we have learned more about how the campaign plowed through $1 billion in mere months and even ended up around $20 million in debt by the end of the race. In addition to the massive spending on political ads, the campaign dished out millions to an army of consultants, from political strategists to pollsters to data analysts and digital specialists. The campaign also spent tens of millions on the celebrity-filled concerts held across swing states on election eve, plus a reported six figures to build the set for the candidate’s 40-minute interview on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast.
The campaign plowed through $1 billion in mere months and even ended up around $20 million in debt.
All of this money lined the pockets of the consultant class, but resulted in an uninspiring and formulaic campaign more attuned to Wall Street executives and Silicon Valley billionaires than working-class voters. The more we learn about the inner workings of the Harris campaign, the clearer it becomes how much influence big donors and powerful fundraisers (i.e. “bundlers”) had over the campaign and its messaging. Like Trump, who relied heavily on outside financial support from billionaires like Elon Musk, Harris had many prominent billionaires in her corner, including Mark Cuban, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg. An analysis from Forbes found that 83 billionaires publicly backed the Democratic candidate, compared to 52 for Trump (though Trump’s billionaire ultimately spent more — according to OpenSecrets, 18 of the top 25 individual donors were Republican).
From the moment Harris announced her candidacy in July, wealthy Democrats saw an opportunity to shape the candidate’s agenda. After years of growing increasingly disillusioned with the Biden administration’s more aggressive approach to antitrust, financial regulation and other economic policies, top donors began privately (and publicly) pressuring the Democratic candidate to move away from “populism” and to embrace a more centrist, pro-business agenda. Early in her campaign, Harris initially signaled that she might actually lean into a populist message when she unveiled a plan to lower costs for Americans and vowed to crack down on corporate price gouging. But this didn’t last long. As more venture capitalists and CEOs lined up behind Harris, the campaign began taking its cues from Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
In a detailed report last month, The New York Times revealed how much effort the Harris campaign put into courting business leaders, with campaign officials organizing regular meetings and calls with corporate executives to get their thoughts on policy. At least some aspects of Harris’s economic platform were shaped by these discussions, including her decision to support a lower capital gains tax rate than Biden. Meanwhile, top advisers like Tony West — Harris’s brother-in-law and chief legal officer to Uber — urged the candidate to avoid rhetoric that could be perceived as anti-business. West served as a kind of Wall Street whisperer for the campaign. He was in regular contact with Wall Street donors and reportedly signed off on all of the candidate’s economic talking points. While toning down populist rhetoric, Harris presented herself as a pragmatic problem-solver who would work across the aisle without ruffling the feathers of America’s business elite. In one of the most revealing moments of the presidential debate, Harris proudly cited a Goldman Sachs analysis of her economic platform, as if to signal how much she cared about Wall Street’s approval. It was, as the Times later put it, a “Wall Street-approved economic pitch.”
During the final leg of her campaign, Harris could be seen on the campaign trail with figures like Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban, where they warned of the existential threat posed to democracy and snidely mocked Trump for not understanding how tariffs work. During these critical last weeks, she would have been much better off holding rallies with a figure like UAW president Shawn Fain, who offered a blistering takedown of Trump at the Democratic National Convention in August, describing him as a “lapdog for the billionaire class” and a “scab.” Instead of this, during the final stretch we heard this: “In this election, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship is not an aspiration. It is our duty.” (Liz Cheney).
This kind of lofty rhetoric might appeal to MSNBC viewers and affluent suburbanites, but in working-class communities it landed with a thud. Four years ago, Biden won 55% of voters with a family income under $50,000 and 57% of those earning between $50,000 and $99,000; this year, more of these households turned out for Trump, offering further proof of a class realignment (or dealignment) in our national politics. With their message of “patriotic duty” and “country over party,” the Harris team was counting on a strong show of support from college-educated and upper-income voters, and Harris did do better with voters making over $100,000, capturing 53% of this demographic compared to 54% for Trump in 2020. Unfortunately, these voters represent a minority of the electorate, and once again it was the working-class who ultimately decided the election.
America’s billionaire class couldn’t really lose this year.
The Harris campaign’s pivot away from populism likely cost her working-class votes in must-win states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. In a YouGov-Jacobin survey released last month, various election messages were tested on 1,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania. The results were unambiguous: strong populist messaging on the economy “dramatically outperformed” other forms of messaging. On Election Day, the popularity of economic populism came through at the ballot box, particularly in red states like Missouri and Alaska, where voters supported raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and instituting mandatory paid sick leave. Had Harris leaned into economic populism and elevated surrogates like Shawn Fain instead of Mark Cuban, she might have performed considerably better in working-class communities.
The consultants who ran the Harris campaign will collect their fees and move on to their next lucrative gig or return to their C-Suite, while donors and lobbyists will now do their best to shape the economic policies of the incoming Trump administration. In an election that broke records on outside spending, America’s billionaire class couldn’t really lose this year. If Harris had won, she would have likely governed more like her corporate-friendly neoliberal predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. On the other hand, Trump has promised to go on a deregulation spree and cut taxes even further for the country’s richest individuals and biggest corporations. With Trump back in the White House, corporate America will almost certainly thrive, while the working-class that helped him get there will continue its long economic descent.
The answer to right-wing populism is the same as it was in 2016 — a genuine populist movement on the left that reignites the party’s historic commitment to economic justice and the working-class. This is no easy task. The party has become even more dependent on college-educated and upper-income voters over the last decade, and the consultant and donor classes that steered us into this disaster will no doubt resist any efforts to remake the party. In a widely shared statement after the election, Sen. Bernie Sanders expressed doubt about whether the “big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party” will learn anything from this disastrous election. If not, the only solution is to purge the party of those very interests and transform the party from the bottom up.
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