The Democrats are wise to try to conduct a “deep dive” to examine why they lost the 2024 presidential election. The Republicans would also be wise to examine why they almost lost the election as well. Even though Donald Trump did actually win the election, his victory margin was weaker than it should have been in a race against a candidate as weak as Kamala Harris proved to be.
One should not make light of President Trump’s 2024 electoral performance. He won a solid majority of the electoral vote. Moreover, he became the first Republican in 20 years and only the second Republican in 36 years to win the popular vote. His electoral vote majority made him the constitutionally legitimate president of the United States and his popular vote triumph gave him the political legitimacy which the 2016 election outcome—which gave him the electoral vote majority and the presidency, but not a popular vote victory as well—did not.
But Trump’s victory was not the “landslide” he and his supporters had said. Out of more than 152 million votes cast in 2024, Trump defeated Harris by about 2.3 million, winning 49.81% of the popular vote to Harris’s 48.34%. Trump’s 1.47% margin of victory is certainly greater than the victory margins of John F. Kennedy in 1960, Richard Nixon in 1968, and Jimmy Carter in 1976, and solid enough to discourage any attempts to challenge it. But it is not close to the 20-point victory margins achieved by Warren Harding (1920), Herbert Hoover (1928), Franklin Roosevelt (1932 and 1936), Lyndon Johnson (1964), Richard Nixon (1972), or Ronald Reagan (1980). And given both the circumstances of Kamala Harris as a candidate and the circumstances under which she became the Democrats’ presidential nominee, one would think Trump’s victory margin should have been bigger.
Harris’s credentials for both the vice presidency and the presidency were solid enough. She had served as a big-city prosecutor, the attorney general of our largest state, and a U. S. Senator before being chosen to be Joe Biden’s running mate.
But Harris had no discernible strength or following within the Democratic Party. Seeking the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, she failed to win a single delegate in a single primary before dropping out of the contest. Notwithstanding her professional credentials, she was apparently chosen by Biden to be his running mate to strengthen his support from Black voters in the wake of the George Floyd riots, as well as to reward Blacks for their support in the 2020 South Carolina primary, the first primary he had won in 3 runs for president over 32 years.
Moreover, Harris’s “anointment” as the Democrats’ 2024 presidential nominee (again, without winning a single delegate in a single primary) made her the first candidate of either party in 56 years to win a presidential nomination with no input from primaries. Former President Obama had thought that the Democrats should have some sort of primary to help formally select Harris (or possibly someone else), believing that a primary would boost the popularity of a candidate if chosen by democratic means, but that the selection of Harris by a series of conference calls among party elites would weaken rather than strengthen her in the eyes of the public. He may have been onto something. Democrat Hubert Humphrey won the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination without winning a single primary that year, and he may have lost the general election because enough Democrats were offended by how he achieved the nomination—by winning enough delegates appointed by state and city party bosses—and thus may have refused to vote for him, thereby giving the 1968 election victory to Richard Nixon (Both Nixon and Trump won their respective nominations and elections after entering and winning most of the relevant primaries).
The limited time within which Harris had to put together and wage a presidential campaign—107 days, as the title of her campaign memoir says—no doubt contributed to her failures as a candidate, but so to did her stand on the policies she had to address. Flawlessly loyal to President Biden, she had to defend his unpopular and inept economic and border control policies. And then there was the issue of whether the federal government should use taxpayers’ dollars to pay for sex-change operations for convicted criminals in federal prisons. The exploitation of this last issue by a brilliantly produced GOP campaign issue might have sealed her doom.
So with all these weaknesses—some of which were identified by the Democrats’ deep dive – it’s little wonder then, Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election. The wonder is that even in losing, she made the election relatively close. Did she have strengths not yet identified? Or did Trump and/or the GOP have weaknesses neither he nor his MAGA supporters have identified nor want to identify? Even though Trump and the GOP won the 2024 election, some sort of “deep dive” is warranted, especially with the approach of the 2026 congressional elections and the 2028 presidential election.
It’s premature to speculate on what conclusions such a deep dive might reach, but it’s not premature to think of what sort of issues should be studied and what sort of questions should be answered. Aside from asking why the 2024 election outcome was as close as it was, one should want to better understand why Trump lost the 2020 election; why the GOP underperformed in the 2022 midterms, when the projected Red Wave became a Pinkish Ripple; how the GOP can minimize projected losses in 2026 and thereby turn a predicted Blue Wave into a Purplish Ripple; and, above all, what will happen to the GOP once Trump leaves he scene: Nobody has ever had a more solid hold on an American political party as Donald Trump currently has on the GOP, but will he be able to maintain his authority once he leaves the presidency? Can he hand over his authority intact to a chosen successor? And is the MAGA cause a strength or a weakness for the GOP?
These are all questions which must be satisfactorily answered if the GOP wants to maximize its successes or at least minimize its losses for the remainder of Trump’s term and beyond. The Democrats are doing their homework. The Republicans should follow suit.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville since 1987 and taught politics and government at Tarleton for 36 years, retiring in 2023. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990-2024). He was Mayor pro-tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Stephenville
Economic Development Authority since 2018, and as chair of the Erath County Appraisal District’s Appraisal Review Board since 2015. He is also a member of the Stephenville Rotary Club, the Board of Vestry of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and the Executive Committee of the Boy Scouts’ Pecan Valley District. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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