Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah... "I would do nothing different from Biden"[1] probably wasn't the right message at the peak of Biden's unpopularity. I wonder who came up with that, or if it was genuine. [1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/08/harris-biden-the-vi...
Question from a European who doesn’t deeply understand your partisan politics: what specifically should they have done differently? My probably wrong understanding was that people were still angry about the inflationary consequences of dealing with the pandemic and didn’t believe it was tapering off, didn’t believe that unemployment was low, didn’t believe that real wages were increasing. How could they have combated…
Kamala squandered a lot of good will and enthusiasm when she needed it the most. When Biden dropped out there was a lot of real excitement about something different.
It really wouldn't have been hard for her to spend time touting some of the best parts of the Biden admin like Lina Khan. But that sort of messaging was unpopular with the donors.
Putting forward actual policies to make things better would have also helped, even if they were just carbon copies of the biden policies. The way she campaigned there was, frankly, really weak. Giving a tax break to home owners and copying Trump's "No tax on tips" line really did not look good.
It was also pretty apparent that while Walz was doing a pretty good job making Trump and Vance look bad, the Kamala team pulled him in for being too alienating. Kamala distanced herself from her own VP pick and instead decided to campaign with Liz Cheney, a well known republican who's father was good ole war crimes cheney. Neither are particularly popular with either Democrats or Republicans.
The Kamala campaign spent a large amount of time trying to win over disaffected trump voters. That was a disaster. No amount of "I'm tough of transnational criminals" would convince a crown that's currently cheering on ICE to cheer on Kamala.
In the end, she did a lot to kill the enthusiasm of the base. She spent just too much of the limited time she had trying to make the case that she is appealing to republicans. Who, of course, all thought she was a super woke radical leftist (she was not).
Gaza was another huge issue that Kamala's campaign ignored and never addressed. A lot of people believe this is why the DNC autopsy hasn't been released as it likely played a large role in the depressed voter turnout for Kamala.
In the end, the problem with her and her campaign is she ran the Hillary Clinton campaign playbook. Far too much time trying to remind people that Trump is bad and far too little time making the case for why she's better.
This isn't all her fault. Biden is a big asshole for running for a second term. There has been leaks that his staff knew full well that he was a train-wreck and that his polling was really bad. I think they thought that the early debate would ultimately prove that he was capable of winning which, as we all know, was one of the biggest train-wrecks of a modern presidential campaign. But also, there's absolutely no chance that Biden didn't know he was dealing with cancer going into 2024. That's not something a President is unaware of. Especially not getting to stage 4. My conspiracy theory was that a major reason he disappeared towards the end of his term is that he was dealing with cancer therapy. It wouldn't shock me to know that he had chemobrain while debating trump.