If Harris
Wins, Here’s Why
We don’t yet
know the result, but we do know Kamala Harris’s strategy. Here’s what analysts
will say if she pulls off a victory this week.
Adam Nagourney
By Adam Nagourney
Nov. 4, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/us/politics/what-if-kamala-harris-wins-election-2024.html
This was always a challenging race for Vice President Kamala
Harris. She started late, and ran against a tough opponent in a bleak
environment. She faced an electorate hungry for change, upset with the
direction of the country and the economy.
If she wins, she will be able to credit a handful of factors
that helped her fight those headwinds and defeat former President Donald J.
Trump.
Here is what analysts will be saying should Ms. Harris win.
(And here is the same thought experiment on a Trump victory.)
Turnout,
turnout, turnout
The vice president’s embrace of the traditional Democratic
get-out-the-vote effort, relying on paid staff and unions to knock on doors,
will have proven to be every bit as effective as promised. By contrast, Mr.
Trump largely outsourced this work to allies, including Elon Musk, who had far
less experience in the world of organizing and reaching voters.
The Harris campaign said it had dispatched 2,500 staff
members, working out of 353 offices nationwide, to work on finding supporters
and getting them to vote. In one week alone, the campaign logged 600,000
door-knocks and three million phone calls. A Harris win would offer proof for
what has often seemed a barroom theory of political operatives and strategists:
that turnout operations make a difference in close races.
Abortion
In the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.
Wade and abolished the constitutional right to abortion, Democrats have
repeatedly won in national and congressional elections. Every abortion-rights
measure that has appeared on a state ballot has been approved.
This trend became clear in the 2022 midterm elections, when
Democrats defied expectations and staved off big losses, a surge that analysts
in both parties said was because of the court decision. Democrats said they had
spent more money on advertisements highlighting abortion than any other
subject.
Ms. Harris’s victory would leave little doubt about the
issue’s potency. Mr. Trump’s efforts to muddy the waters, by saying he would
not sign a national abortion ban, appears to have fallen flat. Republicans in
future elections will most likely need to find new ways to neutralize the
issue.
Thank you,
Mr. Trump
If Ms. Harris wins, it will most likely also be because Mr.
Trump turned off as many voters as he appealed to — particularly in the final
days of the campaign, with his disjointed, rambling speeches filled with dark
and often menacing rhetoric.
Two weeks before Election Day, Ms. Harris delivered a speech
from the vice president’s official residence at the Naval Observatory, calling
Mr. Trump “unhinged and unstable,” setting the frame for the final stretch of
the campaign. And he seemed determined to help her do that, from the time he
spent some 30 minutes swaying onstage to music to when he suggested that Liz
Cheney, one of his most prominent Republican critics, be put on a battlefield
“with nine barrels shooting at her.”
Change
Ms. Harris has spent the past four years in the White House,
and Mr. Trump went to great effort to link her to President Biden’s legacy. If
she wins, she succeeded, after some faltering efforts, in presenting herself as
a candidate of change, in an election in which change was a powerful force.
It helped that she is 18 years younger than Mr. Trump and a
woman.
Unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016, Ms. Harris did not highlight
the historic nature of her candidacy — that she would be the first woman, never
mind the first Black woman and the first Asian American woman, to serve as
president. There was no need. A Harris victory would be powered by a surge of
support from women. The final New York Times/Siena College poll, taken at the
end of October, found a stark gender divide: Ms. Harris led Mr. Trump among
women, 54 percent to 42 percent, while Mr. Trump led Ms. Harris among men, 55
percent to 41 percent.
Adam Nagourney is a national political reporter for The
Times, covering the 2024 campaign. More about Adam Nagourney
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