Could Harris Have Won If She’d Given Peace a Chance?

After an unexpected landslide victory, Donald Trump will become the 47th President of the United States and Vice President Kamala Harris won’t.

After elections there is always the temptation among the electorate to give up and check out of politics or to grandstand, based on whether your preferred candidate lost or won. This fails to recognize that politics isn’t something that occurs every four years on the first Tuesday in November. Politics happen constantly, and voting in an election is only one way that people can participate. There’s also the temptation to blame specific classes of voters for a loss, either for voting the “wrong way” or not showing up to vote at all. That’s unhelpful. Like a performer who blames the crowd for a poor performance, it’s never well received.

We should avoid being paralyzed into inaction by overanalysis, but it’s important to try to learn from the election and decipher why voters resoundingly returned Donald Trump to the White House and why Kamala Harris failed to win. It’s equally important to avoid learning the wrong lessons. It is clear that an unwillingness to adopt popular peace positions hurt Vice President Harris’ campaign and allowed President-elect Trump to again characterize himself as a peace candidate, despite his own record while in office.

It wasn’t a race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, but between going out to the polls and staying home on the couch. The couch won.

A lack of clarity from VP Harris may have been her biggest weakness. Everyone knows Donald Trump’s slogan. It’s MAGA–Make America Great Again. What exactly was Harris’? We Can’t Go Back? A New Way Forward—For the Future? Turning the Page? For the People? It was a common complaint from voters about Harris’ campaign. Voters weren’t clear on her message or positions. The one thing Harris was clear about? She wasn’t Trump. That’s been the defining position of the Democratic Party for almost a decade. American politics have revolved around the now president-elect, a man who understands there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

This lack of clarity from Harris was certainly true on issues of war and peace, most importantly the continued support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza. VP Harris consistently said far too many Palestinian civilians have been killed (as if there’s some appropriate number), but she also refused to say she’d do anything about it. She not only refused to break with Israel, but wouldn’t even publicly break with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an extreme right-wing figure unpopular with many of his own citizens as well as with Jewish Americans. This unwillingness to reach out to opponents of the genocide, even to allow a Palestinian-American state legislator from the swing state of Georgia to endorse her on the Democratic National Convention stage in Chicago, was demoralizing to a huge part of the electorate, including progressives, youth, and people of color who are the most loyal parts of the Democratic coalition.

It killed enthusiasm and motivation—and this was absolutely an election about enthusiasm. It wasn’t a race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, but between going out to the polls and staying home on the couch. The couch won. Compared to President Joe Biden’s vote total in 2020, Vice President Harris tallied around 9 million fewer votes. While it looks like President Trump only built on his 2020 total by around 1 million votes, it was more than enough to win handily. It was an election about turning out the base. While Harris took her base for granted, and on Gaza needlessly offended it, Trump threw his red meat.

On other peace issues, Harris was equally unclear. She offered no plan to end the war in Ukraine, while Trump promised to do so. Instead of proposing military spending cuts, a commitment to having “the most lethal” military in the world. Nothing on nuclear weapons. An immigration policy that adopted Republican framing on tougher border security and ignored destructive U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, the major driver of migration. This allowed Donald Trump to tar Harris with unpopular foreign policy positions. He played the dove, said he started no new wars while in office, said the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East would never have happened under his watch, and repeated his old line. “Only I can fix it.”

Her positions on other progressive issues were also murky. During her 2020 run Harris supported Medicare for All, a program that remains wildly popular with the progressive Democratic base. In 2024 she abandoned it. In 2020, the VP supported the Green New Deal and a ban on fracking, positions popular with environmentalists in the progressive Democratic base. In 2024 she abandoned them.

To say that peace issues were decisive in this election is likely an overstatement. No one issue or mistake lost Vice President Harris the presidential race. Donald Trump won every swing state. He won the popular vote. He increased his vote share in almost every state and with almost every demographic group. But the legitimate, and perceived, abandonment of peace issues by the Democratic Party, which has at least framed itself as the “more peaceful” party for the past century, did hurt Harris. It was also consistent with a major theme of the election: Trump focused on expanding out from his base while Harris tried to woo moderate Republicans away from MAGA, focusing on his threat to democracy.

They tried to make the election a referendum on Trump, and instead the result was a complete rejection of the Democratic Party.

One tactic to do so was a major mistake by Harris, the embrace of Liz and Dick Cheney. A baffling centerpiece of the campaign, it allowed Donald Trump to claim she was cozying up to warmongers and chickenhawks. It reinforced his portrayal as the more peaceful candidate. While VP Harris shared the stage in multiple swing states with former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, she snubbed progressives like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the most popular politicians in the country. His state went for Harris at 64%, her largest win in the nation. A whopping 72% of Wyoming’s voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump, the largest win for Trump in the nation. Whoops.

Winning moderate Republican support has been a Democratic obsession for over 30 years. Triangulation, the political strategy of President Bill Clinton and New Democrats who adopted and enacted long-held Republican positions, should now be pronounced officially dead. Maybe it was never a good strategy at all. After all, Bill Clinton never did win a majority of the popular vote.

VP Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, used the line, “We’ve got Bernie Sanders, Dick Cheney, and Taylor Swift!” Their support spanned the entire Left vs. Right spectrum of American political debate. If that model still worked, VP Harris would have won an overwhelming victory on election night. Of course that’s not what happened. Another political axis, the Establishment vs. Anti-Establishment spectrum, is becoming increasingly more important as compared to the traditional Left-Right divide that has dominated politics for so long. The Democratic effort to market themselves as “Diet Republicans” never worked and it never will. In the process Democrats have become the party defending the establishment and opposing populism. They’re now the party of endless war, the National Security state, the FBI, the mainstream media, universities, and banks. It’s lost them the working class and gutted their base.

Let’s not pretend that misogyny and racism didn’t have a role in VP Harris’ defeat. There’s a reason why the United States has never had a female president in its 248-year history and only one president who was not white. Prejudice exists. It affects politics, and will do so for the foreseeable future. It makes it more difficult for women and marginalized groups to win public office. The lesson we absolutely must not take away from this election is that that fact disqualifies candidates who are not white men. Prejudice is a human frailty and is reinforced in many ways by power structures. It cannot be removed, but it must be overcome.

To win, VP Harris needed to be bolder, and unapologetic in her support for popular progressive ideas, including peace. One of her worst moments was when she couldn’t think of anything she would have done differently from Joe Biden, except to put a Republican in her cabinet. Her inability to put distance between herself and an unpopular Joe Biden, on Gaza particularly, hurt her significantly. “Things will get worse in Gaza and the Middle East if Trump is elected,” was not a good argument, because Biden’s policies destroyed Gaza. The Democrats lost by such large margins that they can’t blame third-party voters, or Muslim-Americans, or really any individual demographic. They tried to make the election a referendum on Trump, and instead the result was a complete rejection of the Democratic Party.

It’s what we do now that matters. The work for peace demands action. It requires us to roll up our sleeves and get involved. Genocide in Gaza, destruction in Ukraine, the threats of nuclear war and climate catastrophe, and the violence that comes home in the form of poverty, racism, and anti-immigrant xenophobia, are realities we all face. Voices that demand peace and progressive policies need to sharpen those demands. Genocide, runaway spending on war, the suicide pact of nuclear rearmament, and the decaying environment and society that result are dealbreakers.

The advice for the movement is the same advice that could have served VP Harris and that she refused to accept:

Be bold and unapologetic in the demand for popular ideas. Put Peace at the center.