Came across this paragraph in my
substack reading queue this a.m.
The biggest reason Harris lost is that she was the representative of an unpopular, incumbent administration that failed to control inflation or illegal immigration and was seen as out of touch with voters’ concerns about crime. As pollster David Shor
noted on Ezra Klein’s podcast last month, Biden’s job approval was 20 points underwater by the time he left office — he was a huge liability for the party and for his vice president.
1 The second-biggest reason she lost is that she was seen as too liberal. This is also a topic Shor covers in his presentation: 49% of voters saw Harris as more liberal than themselves, while only 39% of voters saw Trump as more conservative. That too-liberal image was driven in large part by unwise choices she made during the campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020, endorsing positions favored by left-wing pressure groups, like decriminalizing illegal entry and providing taxpayer-funded sex changes to imprisoned criminals and detained migrants.
Barro actually packs several issues into his two reasons here, but you get the idea. He also goes to some trouble to deprecate sexism as an explanation, linking to studies from Tufts and Stanford on point.
