It has been an extraordinary week for US politics – and a very depressing couple of days for those such as me who spent hours on the phone to people, trying to persuade them to vote for Kamala Harris and not Donald Trump. This is what voters told me time and again, and why so many did vote for Trump.
The first type of voter I encountered as a volunteer on the Harris phone bank was the one focused purely on the economy. It is hard for people on the European side of the Atlantic to grasp that soaring growth rates and low unemployment in the US would not be seen positively in the eyes of an American voter. But it was clear in my conversations that the Trump campaign was extremely effective at countering that story. Wages may well be rising at all levels, but everyday inflation was more discernible to voters.
Very often, I spoke to small business owners who would talk about the price of gas or bread, rendering any attempted explanation of global pressures responsible for that ineffective at best, and at worst condescending. Often, they would also tell me that everyone they knew was doing badly, even if they were just fine themselves. Was poor messaging to blame? That didn’t seem obvious. Democrats tried to tell the story of average wages being higher and unemployment being at an historic low, but people just seemed to believe Trump more often than they believed Harris and Tim Walz. There was no easy way to counter that, especially in a campaign lasting barely 100 days.
The next group was extremely focused on Harris as a candidate. She was as baggage-free as a vice-president could have been, and many voters spoke of how much they admired her. But there were too many others. Multiple times, I was told that Harris was a “communist”, “clueless” and that she had “thrown black men in jail for carrying one blunt”. One Latin American voter told me at length that she had “seen it all before in South America”.
Harris’s perceived failures on border security did come up too, but mainly the criticisms came straight from the mouth of the Trump campaign. Some spoke of Harris’s tough stance on crime as the district attorney of San Francisco. Others, very often of Latino origin, would tell me that she was soft on law and order. Quite remarkably, the Trump campaign successfully branded Harris as both a communist – lax on law and order – and simultaneously too tough on crime. To many, she was both an ineffective vice-president and one who had her hands all over the Biden administration. Voters held these facts in their heads at once – and would not be persuaded otherwise.
I started calling voters five weeks ago and especially then, many voters said they didn’t know who Harris was or what she stood for. It is said that an open primary process would have given Harris the chance to separate herself from Biden, but not a single person I spoke to suggested that they would have preferred a different candidate.
But gender did play a role. Time and again, voters, very often women themselves, told me that they just didn’t think that “America is ready for a female president”. People said they couldn’t “see her in the chair” and asked if I “really thought a woman could run the country”. One person memorably told me that she couldn’t vote for Harris because “you don’t see women building skyscrapers”. Sometimes, these people would be persuaded, but more often than not it was a red line. Many conversations would start with positive discussions on policy and then end on Harris and her gender. That is an extraordinary and uncomfortable truth.
You should know what I didn’t hear during the hours speaking to US voters. I can only think of one occasion when someone mentioned stricter taxes on billionaires or any similar policies. The atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza only came up six times in more than 1,000 calls. The idea that Harris was not leftwing enough seems false: the majority of the country just voted for the complete opposite.
After all those conversations, I think the main reason that Harris and Walz lost this campaign is simple: Trump. Ultimately, he was simply too much of a pull again. Despite the gaffes, despite his views on women, despite his distaste for democracy and despite an insurrection, voters just didn’t care.
For reasons that I’m sure will be studied for decades, when he speaks, people listen. When he speaks, people believe him. After all those calls, I can be shocked at this result, but hardly surprised.
Oliver Hall is a journalist and podcaster
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