Kamala was the wrong candidate to beat Trump
Then there was Kamala. Was she the right candidate? While her campaign hit the ground running and was slick, professional and well-funded, as noted earlier this may not have been an advantage since it seemed like so many previous establishment campaigns, designed by focus groups. Professional but also inauthentic. Kamala would not have been the Democrat candidate had there been time enough to choose another. She was an underwhelming VP and underwhelming public speaker with an underwhelming message and she had never shown that she could win on the national stage alone.
The manner of her selection, by default rather than choice, was an inescapable weakness. Trump harped on the idea that Biden had been subject to a coup and reminded audiences that Kamala had not forged her candidacy in the heat of a primary process. Had she known that Biden was mentally incapable? When had she known? Had she supported an incapable president? Had she lied and covered up for him? When did she turn on him and had she allowed him to begin a fruitless re-election campaign to run down the clock on potential rivals? It hung over her campaign along with the reverberations from Biden’s cataclysmic meltdown of a debate. Debates are in general massively overhyped, as a media heavy-weight battle, but mostly have the limited impact of confirming previously held opinions,[102] but this was different. Biden’s obvious frailty was hideously exposed.[103] Why had he not stepped aside? Had those around him including Kamala been too spineless to tell him or had they attempted to hoodwink the US people? These were easy targets for Trump.
However, didn’t Kamala have an ace to play? She was the first non-white woman to run for the presidency. That was surely a flag around which those who wanted change as well as the young, women and all those who saw a new America on the horizon, might gather. A first it seemed possible and Trump seemed rattled. Trump complained that Biden had gone and commentators observed that he seemed tired or unable to find a successful attack line on Kamala. Trump’s choice of JD Vance was widely seen as a sign of overconfidence and possibly a big mistake. The opinion polls became neck and neck and many expected Kamala to pull ahead. She was younger, smarter, more optimistic, and in sharp contrast to Trump’s relentless divisiveness she called for inclusivity. Pollster and commentator Frank Luntz pointed to a tactical error in Harris’ campaign, which had at first changed the message from Biden's, that Trump posed an existential threat to democracy, to prioritising a forward-looking "joyful" message about protecting personal freedoms and uniting all Americans. However, in the later stage of the campaign, Harris had returned to attacks on Trump and dire threats to democracy. Luntz tweeted ‘Kamala Harris lost this election when she pivoted to focus almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump.
Voters already know everything there is about Trump – but they still wanted to know more about Harris’ plans for the first hour, first day, first month, and first year of her administration. It was a colossal failure for her campaign to shine the spotlight on Trump more than on Harris’ own ideas’.[104]
Ultimately her campaign stalled as she failed to convince people that she had a big idea that might connect with their sense of insecurity and hurt. She had been chosen by Biden and anointed by the party her claim to be a change-maker simply remained unconvincing.