Exemplary and moved, Kamala Harris offered Donald Trump what he had refused to Joe Biden four years earlier: recognition of defeat. On Wednesday, November 6, the Democratic candidate addressed her supporters, gathered at Howard University in Washington, to recognize the result of the presidential election.
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“This principle, more than any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny,” she said. The vice president, who had spoken with the winner, pledged to help him during the transition. Kamala Harris promised that “The light of America’s promise will always burn bright, as long as we don’t give up and keep fighting.” Despite the scale of his defeat, there was no trace of regret, only gratitude for the inconsolable activists. “I’m so proud of the race we ran and the way we ran it. »
Jen O’Malley Dillon, his campaign manager, expressed an identical tone in the note of thanks to the volunteers. “You faced unprecedented headwinds and obstacles that were largely beyond your control,” she wrote. Then came the big denial. “We knew it was going to be a race within the margin of error, and it was. » No. It was a rout. No distance or self-criticism on the strategy followed. Maybe it wasn’t the time.
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For months, a powerful confirmation bias has held sway in the Democratic camp and among most commentators. It consisted of finding in each excess, each inconsistency of Donald Trump the confirmation of his extremism, to which the Americans could not decently acquiesce.
When Kamala Harris spoke of the need to reconcile the country, tired by the chaos of the Trumpist era, she missed another priority for a majority of the population: expressing their dissatisfaction with the chosen direction. Violent loss of purchasing power, modification of identity markers, migration question, rejection of costly and endless military adventures abroad, even by proxy: all this has coagulated to form a desire for alternation.
A legitimist, fearful and conventional democratic apparatus
The autopsy of the political disaster will take time, on the Democratic side. It begins with political evidence. At 81, Joe Biden should not have been a presidential candidate again. In 2020, he promised to be a figure of generational transition. He did not keep his word, without offering a clear explanation for his stubbornness, while he was affected by the decline of his abilities. Finally, his unpopularity was without hope of return, too anchored in time. But the president was banking on a massive rejection of Donald Trump. The democratic apparatus, legitimist and fearful, did not dare to challenge his decision.
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