TOI Correspondent from Washington: Although not always true, purveyors of Presidential election trivia say the taller of the two Presidential candidates is usually the winner. Even so, the 6 ‘ 3″ Donald Trump’s victory over the 5’4″ Kamala Harris was overwhelming, thanks in part to an underwhelming performance by the vice-president who could not even rise to the stature of the outgoing President Joe Biden, who ceded the Democratic nomination to her just 14 weeks ago.
Throughout the tortured Tuesday night for Democrats, it became apparent that Harris was coming up short in county after county, state after state, polling well below Biden’s victory margins in 2020, even as Trump bumped up his vote count in rural areas. Harris once asserted that although she is 5’4″, she is 5′ 7″ in heels. Well, she came up 3 percent short of Biden’s tally in more than 1000 counties across the country — sometimes more.
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Nowhere was the nationwide drag on Harris more apparent than in New York City, a reliably Democratic stronghold. Although Harris won the state and its 29 electoral vote comfortably by 12 per cent, her victory margin was halved from the 23 percent margin Biden won over Trump in 2020. In Manhattan, the most liberal of the city’s five boroughs, where Biden won 86-12 in 2020, Kamala Harris’ victory margin was 63-35.
This was repeated across many cities and states. In New Jersey, Biden’s 16 point win in 2020 was whittled down to a 5 point win for Harris. In Virginia, south of Washington DC, a state Biden won by 10 points in 2020, Harris won by only 5 points. While the wins still enabled Harris to win all the electoral votes in NY and NJ in a winner-take-all system, what it also did was allow Trump to win the nationwide popular vote too.
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At the time of writing, Trump had polled more than 71 million votes (51 per cent of votes cast) compared to Harris’ 66 million. Biden polled more than 80 million votes in 2020, leading to Trump’s charge that there was a lot of voter fraud, such a tally was impossible, and therefore the election was stolen from him.
Harris’ underperformance was most damaging to her in battleground states. For instance, in Pennsylvania, she was expected to erase Trump’s expected leads from the state’s 50+ rural counties by polling 85 percent plus votes in suburban and urban centers such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, heavily populated Democratic strongholds. Instead, she came in at sub-80 per cent votes in urban areas, lower than what Biden got. Black and Hispanic male voters decamped to Trump in large numbers, ostensibly for economic, cultural, and gender reasons. At the same time, Trump ramped up his white rural vote count.
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This dynamic cost Harris the battleground states of Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Minority male voters in the suburban and urban centers did not deliver for Harris to the extent they did for Biden, whereas the white male rural voters in these states plumped for Trump in greater numbers.
In doing so, they effectively repudiated Trump’s record as a convicted felon who was twice impeached as President, and an adjudicated rapist. Instead, they embraced his pledge to restore America’s greatness and stop the flow of illegal immigrants. Even urban voters appeared to have tired of government largesse to immigrants in so-called sanctuary cities on top of inflation.
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Early on Election Day, a Kamala voter announced on social media: This morning I walked into a polling station at 7:45am and voted for a Black and Indian woman (with Jewish husband from Jersey) to be the 47th President of the United States of America. I am my Ancestor’s wildest dreams.
It will remain a dream.