What does Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 election mean for the US?

Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss in the US presidential election means that she has become the second female candidate to be beaten by Republican Donald Trump, despite mounting a historic campaign.

For the analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera, Harris’s loss brought a sense of deja vu, echoing the defeat of fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

They stressed that Harris’s race and gender played a pivotal role in her defeat at the hands of former President Trump, whose political career has been defined by sexism and racism.

“The biggest underlying dynamic in American politics right now is views toward race, views toward gender,” said Tresa Undem, a public opinion researcher focused on gender.

Undem and other experts predict the Democrats will face a tsunami of backlash, given the stakes of the 2024 election.

“Harris and the Democrats are going to face a whole lot of wrath,” Undem explained. “There will be all kinds of narratives: What’s wrong with Democrats? What’s wrong with Harris? Was it her race and gender? She talks about abortion too much…”

As the shock of Harris’s loss settles, Mike Nellis, a former adviser to Harris’s 2020 campaign and a founder of the group White Dudes for Harris, said there will be crucial lessons for the Democratic Party to heed as it faces the battles ahead under President-elect Trump.

“Everybody will have an opinion,” Nellis told Al Jazeera. “All of our hair will be on fire.”

Vice President Kamala Harris waves as she boards Air Force Two in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on November 1 [Alex Brandon/AP Photo]

The ‘deep-seatedness of white supremacy’

Had she won, Harris would have shattered glass ceilings and become the first woman, second Black person and first South Asian to be elected to the highest office in the land.

Harris herself made little mention of the historic nature of her presidential bid during her compressed, three-month sprint to Election Day, after President Joe Biden dropped out in July.

Instead, she pitched herself as a candidate for “all Americans”, running a centrist campaign and promising a continuation of Biden’s policies.

Part of that strategy included overtures to Republicans disillusioned with Trump, and she campaigned alongside conservative lawmakers like former US Representative Liz Cheney.

But it wasn’t enough to win her the White House.

“This loss indicates we still have so much more work to do here in the US in terms of sex and race relations,” said Tammy Vigil, a professor at Boston University whose research focuses on women in politics.

Vigil said that Trump has “afforded people the ability to be their worst selves, and that definitely includes being sexist and racist”.

The question of gender and race will continue to be a mobilising force, she added: “It’s going to be a big rallying cry.”

For Nadia Brown, the director of the women’s and gender studies programme at Georgetown University, there is no question that Harris was the better-qualified candidate in the race.

She had decades of government experience under her belt: from her time as a public prosecutor to her service in the Senate and White House.

That raises questions about why so many voters opted for her opponent, Brown explained.

“This loss just underscores the amount of ingrained racism and white hetero-patriarchy, the deep-seatedness of white supremacy in this nation,” Brown said. “You can’t deny that she is someone who could have served as president on day one.”

Trump has repeatedly described Harris as “low IQ” and “mentally disabled”, even calling her “one of the dumber people in the history of our country”.

That kind of rhetoric, Brown said, gave his supporters a licence to dismiss and denigrate Harris. “The way that Trump has painted her and people’s responses to her have just brought out the worst in a lot of folks.”

Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, noted that Harris is not the first presidential candidate to encounter hurdles based on race or gender.

She pointed to former President Barack Obama, the first Black president of the US, who faced repeated questions about his country of birth and whether he was Muslim.

And then there was Clinton, the first female presidential nominee from a major party. During her campaign, Trump supporters rallied under signs that read, “Trump that b****”. Trump himself accused her of “playing the woman’s card”.

While Obama faced challenges with race and Clinton with gender, those hurdles were compounded for Harris, Gillespie told Al Jazeera, adding that the “sexism that Harris faced is racially tinged”.

“All three of them, because of the ways that they were different, experienced challenges,” Gillespie said of Harris, Clinton and Obama.

But Gillespie argued it was “doubly hard for Harris” because of the combined force of misogyny and racism. “Harris experienced them differently because she is both a woman and a person of colour.”

A protesters holds up a Palestinian flag as Vice President Kamala Harris speaks in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on October 30 [Matt Slocum/AP Photo]

Playing the blame game

But Harris’s loss does not solely come down to questions of race and gender.

Several analysts said the Democratic Party will have to grapple with how effectively it was able to connect with key demographics during this presidential race, including those disenchanted by Harris’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza.

The war had splintered the party in the lead-up to the election, with progressives, Arab Americans and Muslim voters largely opposing the Biden-Harris administration’s continued support of Israel.

Dalia Mogahed, a former research director at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, had warned that Harris’s pro-Israel stance had the potential of costing her the election.

But she emphasised it would be unfair to blame specific demographics for Harris’s loss.

“It’s the candidate that should be earning people’s votes, not feeling entitled to them,” Mogahed said.

Still, she feared that the tendency to assign blame may crop up now that Harris has been defeated. When Trump was first elected in 2016, there was a lot of “liberal sympathy” for Muslim and Arab people who were seen as victims of his policies, Mogahed said.

Trump implemented what critics called a “Muslim ban” in 2017, restricting entry from seven Muslim-majority countries.

But given the large Arab American and Muslim backlash to Harris’s support for Israel, that same sympathy might not be present this time around, Mogahed warned.

“Muslims might feel very isolated in a second Trump presidency,” she said. “And it’s going to be a very difficult four years for anyone who is advocating on behalf of the humanity of Palestinians.”

For Rasha Mubarak, a Palestinian American community organiser from Florida, Harris’s defeat highlights the Democratic Party’s failures to connect with key elements of its base.

“The Democratic Party continues to fail in listening to their voters,” Mubarak said, citing the party’s support for Israel as well as its lack of engagement with under-resourced communities.

She pointed out that, while Trump also boasts pro-Israel policies, Democrats like Harris had an opportunity to take action to alleviate the humanitarian concerns raised by Israel’s war. But they did not.

“They had the power to place an arms embargo but instead chose to continue to fund and endorse Israel’s genocide, and now it is the people in this country that will continue to suffer,” Mubarak explained.

“But the people have spoken, and this is a message that they will no longer continue to vote for a cleaner dirty shirt.”

Nellis, the former Harris adviser, stressed that, to be successful in future presidential races, Democrats must ask themselves, “What are the things about us that we can change?”

The condensed nature of Harris’s campaign did not help, Nellis said, but Democrats need to think about the voters they left behind. That includes demographics commonly associated with the Republican Party.

“I want to have a serious conversation about how we’re talking to and trying to bring back non-college-educated white men. I want to talk about rural voters. I want to talk about going into hostile spaces and trying to win folks back,” he said.

Most urgently, he added, “We need to be mobilising to fight back and try to stop some of the worst things that Trump is going to want to do.”

What happens now?

With Harris defeated, Brown, the Georgetown University professor, predicts the US will not see the groundswell of protest that greeted Trump’s first win in 2016.

In 2017, the day after Trump was inaugurated, thousands of women flooded the streets in Washington, DC, and other cities with pink hats and feminist slogans. Activists around the country organised anti-Trump “resistance” campaigns.

Brown said that there may be some protests this year, though likely not to that scale.

“I’ve been doing focus groups with Black women who are the most reliable Democratic voters, and what they’re sharing is that they are just exhausted. They are fatigued. They are burned out,” said Brown.

Protesting Trump, she added, has become “less safe”. More than 180 people, for example, were arrested for protesting Trump’s inauguration, and some were charged with felony rioting — though many of those charges were later dropped.

But Trump has promised vengeance against critics and opponents, and many fear that the repression of dissent will be far harsher this time around.

“There are going to be some people who will figure out ways to resist,” Gillespie at Emory University said. “The big question is, how will Trump respond? Does he respond with repression?”

Vigil of Boston University pointed to recent decisions by two leading national newspapers to cancel their Harris endorsements as evidence that even the powerful fear a Trump backlash.

“Unfortunately there is a fear that has become [almost] pervasive among business owners, among reporters, among everyday people,” Vigil said.

Trump, she noted, has called his domestic adversaries “the enemy within” — and threatened military intervention against them.

“All that speaks to the motion towards fascism that Harris was right about,” Vigil said. That, in turn, threatens to dampen any protest.

“People not only are tired and worn out and figure it doesn’t matter any more, but if we don’t see those kinds of rallies, I think there’s going to be a fear element to it as well.”