Kamala Harris’s defeat in the 2024 presidential election stemmed from a fundamental strategic error: pursuing moderate Republicans at the expense of energizing the Democratic base, according to a new autopsy released by the progressive advocacy group RootsAction.
The report argues that Harris’s campaign focused too heavily on courting suburban moderates while failing to mobilize working-class Democrats, young voters, and progressives who had powered Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. That miscalculation, combined with Harris’s refusal to break from the Biden administration on Gaza, ultimately depressed turnout among key constituencies and proved decisive in a close election.
Authored by Christopher Cook and edited by Sam Rosenthal, Autopsy: How Democrats Lost the White House points to turnout as the pivotal factor. Harris received roughly 6.8 million fewer votes than Biden did four years earlier, while Donald Trump gained about 2.8 million votes. Trump won the national popular vote by 1.5 percent and swept all seven major swing states, a stark reversal from 2020.
For the first time since 2004, independent voters outnumbered registered Democrats at the polls. Turnout dropped sharply in Democratic strongholds, with especially steep declines among voters aged 18 to 29. RootsAction attributes this collapse to widespread frustration with the administration’s economic record and foreign policy, particularly on Israel and Gaza.
The report acknowledges structural challenges facing the campaign, including Biden’s late withdrawal from the race, which left Harris just 107 days and no primary process to build momentum. Still, it concludes that the campaign failed to adapt its message to voters’ economic anxieties. Harris leaned on upbeat rhetoric about “Bidenomics” even as nearly 70 percent of voters rated the economy poorly, and she declined to distance herself from Biden, famously telling The View that she could not think of “a thing” she would do differently.
RootsAction also criticizes the campaign’s emphasis on democracy-themed messaging and prominent appearances with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, arguing that this approach muddled the message and diverted resources from basic turnout operations in Black and Latino communities. In some cities, staffers reportedly launched unofficial get-out-the-vote efforts after being told to stand down.
The autopsy warns that Democrats’ long-term erosion among working-class voters accelerated into a collapse in 2024. Trump expanded his margin among voters without a college degree, while Harris’s economic message, shaped by corporate-friendly advisers, never coalesced into a clear populist argument.
Norman Solomon, RootsAction’s national director, said the parallels with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss were “unnerving,” adding that Harris’s campaign repeated many of the same mistakes, with even more damaging results.
