Kamala Harris and Joe Biden

TOI Reporter from Washington: Although not always true, Presidential election insiders say that the taller of the two Presidential candidates will usually win. Even so, 6’3″ Donald Trump’s victory over 5’4″ Kamala Harris was overwhelming, thanks in part to the lackluster performance of the vice president, who failed to even match outgoing President Joe Biden. He handed over the Democratic nomination to her just 14 weeks ago.
Throughout a torturous Tuesday night for Democrats, it became clear that Harris was falling short county by county, state by state, voting well below Biden’s margins of victory in 2020, as Trump increased the vote count in rural areas. Harris once claimed that her heels were 5’7″ even though she was 5’7″. In more than 1,000 counties across the country, she fell 3 percentage points below Biden’s figure, sometimes even more.
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Nowhere was Harris’s nationwide push more evident than in New York City, a reliable Democratic stronghold. Although Harris comfortably won the state and its 29 electoral delegates by 12 percentage points, her margin of victory was half the 23 percentage point margin Biden won over Trump in 2020. In Manhattan, the most liberal of the city’s five boroughs, Biden won 86-86. The margin of victory for Kamala Harris, who was ranked 12th in 2020, was 63-35.
This was repeated in many cities and states. In New Jersey, Biden’s 16-point win in 2020 fell to Harris’ 5-point win. In Virginia, south of Washington DC, the state Biden won by 10 points in 2020, while Harris won by just 5 points. The wins still allowed Harris to win all the electoral votes in NY and NJ in a winner-takes-all system, while also allowing Trump to win the popular vote nationwide.
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At the time of this writing, Trump had received more than 71 million votes (51 percent of votes cast), compared to Harris’ 66 million. Biden received more than 80 million votes in 2020, leading Trump to charge that there was so much voter fraud that such a calculation was impossible and that the election was therefore stolen from him.
Harris’ poor performance was hurting her the most in battleground states. In Pennsylvania, for example, he was expected to erase Trump’s leads in the state’s more than 50 rural counties by winning over 85 percent in suburban and urban centers like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, densely populated Democratic strongholds. Instead, he received less than 80 percent of the vote in urban areas; that rate was lower than what Biden received. Black and Hispanic male voters defected to Trump in large numbers, ostensibly for economic, cultural and gender reasons. At the same time, Trump also increased the number of white rural votes.
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This dynamic cost Harris the battleground states of Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Minority male voters in suburban and urban centers did not support Harris as much as they did for Biden, whereas rural white male voters in those states backed Trump in greater numbers.
By doing so, they effectively disproved Trump’s record as a convicted criminal and convicted rapist who was twice impeached as president. Instead, they embraced his promise to restore America’s greatness and stem the flow of illegal immigrants. Even urban voters seemed fed up with the government’s generous, above-inflation, treatment of immigrants in so-called sanctuary cities.
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Early on election day, a Kamala voter posted on social media: I walked into a polling station at 7:45 this morning and voted (along with her Jewish husband from Jersey) for a Black and Indian woman to become the 47th President of the United States. I gave it. America. I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.
This will remain a dream.