The strategy of the Kamala Harris campaign sounded great on paper. She would stay clear of the unpopular progressive positions of 2019, unapologetically embrace American patriotism and freedom, and establish a broad coalition by gladly accepting the endorsements of former Republican officials and officeholders like Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.
The approach seemed strategically reasonable.
Modeled on the cross-ideological “popular front” against fascism in the 1930s, it has been tried against right-wing populist parties and candidates in Israel, Hungary and other countries in recent years.
Yet the strategy has, at best, a mixed record of success. Add in the sour, inflation-inflected mood among voters around the world that has brought down incumbents over the past year, and Ms. Harris’s struggles can begin to look like the most recent episode of a continuing story.
But the decisive defeat of the Harris campaign strategy has its own dimension — and it is not just the consequence of a fleeting bad vibe in the country or the world.
For years and even decades, overwhelming majorities of Americans have been telling pollsters that they are unhappy about the direction of the country and much else besides.
By portraying herself as the defender and champion of the country’s governing establishment against Donald Trump’s anti-system impulses and diatribes, she placed herself, fatally, on the wrong side of public opinion.
For more than a decade, between 50 percent and 75 percent of the country has told pollsters they think the country is on the wrong track. That’s the most widely discussed measure of discontent, but there are others that tell an even bleaker story.
Asked by Gallup in October if they are satisfied with the way things are going in the country, barely more than a quarter of respondents said yes.
A Pew poll about trust in government sits at an astonishingly low 22 percent.
The reasons for this lost trust are almost too numerous to mention.
Aside from the aforementioned Iraq War and financial crisis, there was a pandemic response by public health officials that many thought was far too draconian, with lockdowns causing widespread suffering and psychological and educational damage to children; a humiliating and demoralizing withdrawal of military forces from Afghanistan; the sharply rising prices of 2022 and spike in interest rates that followed, making many working people feel significantly poorer; skyrocketing public debt; surging rates of homelessness and the spread of tent encampments in American cities; a tense, frustrating and seemingly endless stalemate in Ukraine’s war with Russia; and a flood of undocumented migrants streaming over the southern border, which continued largely unabated for years until the Biden administration was forced by political reality last summer to firmly address the problem.
Maybe you don’t consider all or even many of these to be failures. But many Americans do — and they consider them especially galling because those who have presided over them, from both parties, tend not to concede any fault.
Officeholders develop policies and implement them, and when voters disapprove of the outcome, those in charge more often than not simply move on to the next thing, hoping the discontent gets forgotten, or else wave away the criticism as a function of ignorance or disinformation.
Turns out, that isn’t very politically effective. On the contrary, it tends to lead the discontent to fester and develop into a virulent infection plaguing the body politic. Donald Trump is its foremost and most dangerous symptom.
