Why Harris Struggled Down the Stretch

The early ’10s were the height of the “data journalism” project. After the spread of the RealClearPolitics Averages and the rise of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, readers increasingly found themselves demanding analysis that was supported by numbers. Of course, the rise of Donald Trump in the mid-teens removed some of the mystique, but until then, data-driven journalists spent the decade launching increasingly vitriolic salvos at traditional reporters.

Perhaps no piece more enraged data journalists than a piece Peggy Noonan wrote suggesting that Barack Obama’s presidential struggles could be attributed to the fact that he had “lost his sentence.” While the particular piece seems to have been lost to the shifting sands of the Internet, the piece on which it was based seems to have survived. 

The idea is that successful presidents have a single “sentence” that can characterize their presidency: an idea that boils things down. Noonan’s examples are Abraham Lincoln (“He preserved the Union and freed the slaves”) or FDR (“He lifted us out of a great depression and helped to win a World War”). Without even telling you who the president was, those sentences would immediately identify the man.

This actually brought down hoots of derision at political science conferences. Political scientists claimed that Obama’s problems weren’t due to losing his sentence, but rather to the softness of the economy and the slow economic growth. 

There’s something to this. But I think Noonan’s piece gets at another political science concept that helps to explain why Kamala Harris struggled down the stretch. Political scientists endorse various theories of representation – what people look for in an elected official and what an elected official should offer. 

Most people have heard of the trustee vs. delegate model: Do you expect your representatives to exercise their sound judgment on problems, or do you expect your representatives to do what you want? There’s a lesser-known theory of representation, though, called the gyroscopic model. Under this theory, representatives don’t promise to be ciphers for their constituents. At the same time, neither do they claim the right to be independent of those constituents once they get to Congress.

Instead, the theory goes, a good representative offers insight as to their internal “gyroscope.” It’s the sort of stabilizing mechanism that will guide them as they serve in Congress. It recognizes that representatives will often face novel challenges that are unpredictable, and that they can’t make promises ahead of time as to how they will approach them. Instead, the representatives offer a “core” set of ideas that will influence their decision making. Indeed, campaign slogans and labels are a form of this.

I’ve also thought about it quite a bit with regard to the Harris for President campaign. Harris probably lost because inflation is devastating to governments. 

But I think there’s more to it than that. Harris was placed in a unique position (to say the least) by taking over the reins of a presidential campaign in late July. That gave her a lot of momentum heading into the fall, and for a period of time it appeared that momentum would be enough for her to capture the presidency.

When she faltered, however, there was a problem. Usually, the primary season is when candidates hone their candidate skills and, more importantly, express their cores. By the end of June 2008, everyone had a sense of who Barack Obama was; the same is true of Trump in 2016. 

Harris didn’t have the benefit of this. Making matters worse, she had backed off of so many of her previously held positions that it was difficult to know exactly what remained and how much of it was sincere. I do think that she missed an opportunity in the debate and throughout October to really reveal that gyroscope, but much of that opportunity was lost in her relentless anti-Trump messaging (itself a mistake, most likely).

In the end, Harris lost because she was the vice president of an unpopular administration, and the vice presidents of unpopular administrations lose. But it certainly didn’t help that by the end of the campaign, a lot of Americans didn’t really know who she was. 

A lot of that was outside of her control and demanded by the schedule of this campaign. But not all of it.