By Kenneth Tiven
A landslide popular presidential vote initially claimed by Donald Trump became, in reality, a narrow win with just a 1.5 percent margin of victory after California and all the western states’ votes were counted and certified the day after the election. Despite the closeness, recriminations from the Kamala Harris supporters are relentless. No consolation prize for Democratic voters and Harris, who believe President Joe Biden had put the nation on the right economic and social track post-pandemic. Her taking personal time after a four-month rushed campaign has given critics an easy space to criticize her performance.
Hawaii, gave Harris 60 percent of its votes, so that—and good weather—is where she and husband Doug Emhoff have relaxed for a long week, no doubt asking themselves how could we have come so close and lost to that angry guy as well as losing control of the entire Congress?
There has been substantial intra-party criticism of the loss, because Harris indicates she did the best job she could under the circumstances. Pundits and unhappy voters of all sorts have offered at least one hundred explanations for the outcome. There are two distinct realities demonstrated by actual voting data: educational levels are the biggest aspect dividing voters. White Americans with little education or only a high school education gave Trump a much higher percentage of their votes, and did better than expected with several ethnic groups, especially Hispanics. Those with higher education voted for Democrats. Misogyny and racism figure in this as well, directed against Harris as a woman of Jamaican and Indian heritage.
Trump’s campaign knew his MAGA supporters were solid, so it campaigned against Harris. Although Trump talked about immigration and inflation frequently, the Republican campaign put heavy emphasis on transgender, crime and woke issues. These were actually hammered incessantly with a “data war” carried out in relative secrecy by the Republicans. They used sophisticated computer analysis of people’s personal electronic data, bought legally from multiple sources, to refine their print and visual advertising, on line as well. Most described Harris in negative terms believed to influence ethnic voters who met certain criteria ascertained by the software.
Every cookie you leave on a website means something to data analysis in a sophisticated approach that combines it with other electronic fingerprints from smartphones. If Democrats did anything comparable they did it far less successfully. This will be the key to marketing and advertising everything for the next decades. Few critics of Harris either understood or wanted to blame Republican success as resting on shifting traditional Democrats convinced to change on various issues because the GOP intensely focused on negative advertising.
Blame within the Democratic party from the progressive wing of Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez did focus on losing working-class voters, and President Biden not exiting the race sooner, with no recognition of how the GOP used advanced software efforts to make that point. Actually, Pete Buttigieg, transportation secretary in the Biden cabinet, ignored this together, insisting the Harris campaign worked too hard to win voters using memes and social media rather than through in-person interactions.
Because so much of what Trump says seems imprecise, most American journalists paid little attention when he said a few weeks before the election, “we have the votes, we don’t need any votes,” most likely from having been told he only needed to shift 3,000,000 Harris voters and he’d win, which was the intent of the secret social network effort, assuming third party candidates took nearly 2,000,000 votes (which they did) out of the 147,000,000 votes cast.
His first campaign did some of this in 2016 in what became a controversy because Cambridge Analytica owned by Robert Mercer did this in a rudimentary way with Facebook data obtained falsely.
This decade as we enter the AI phase, there is vastly more personal data available globally to buy and obtain than in 2020. Better faster processing software is available. Ask the right questions and you get useful answers. For example, positive and negative messages about candidates and issues were micro-targeted at groups on both sides of the Middle East situation. This is not just a USA problem, but the pervasive use of mobile smartphones makes it work everywhere today.
If the internet has rearranged media, as well as reducing the legal concept of personal privacy, then the Will Smith-Gene Hackman movie Enemy of the State is today’s reality on steroids. Add in credit and cash card data and it gets even more pervasive.
Now, a large segment of the nation’s voters wonder if Trump is seriously destroying government by putting together advisors and a cabinet of agency leaders chosen for loyalty not skill or experience. Having won, almost no one on the Republican side is denying that the Project 2025 is the blueprint for a Christian nationalist vision for the Trump presidency.
Harris has told allies and friends that she is “staying in the fight” and is keeping open the possibility of running for governor of California in 2026 or president in 2028, according to a report from Politico website.
An easy conclusion is to think that some of the issues considered “progressive and left wing” in the USA—such as gender, pronouns, critical race theory—are a starting point in assessing the failure of the Democrats with many voters. However, Harris made little mention of her race and gender, choosing to talk about growing up middle class in California with a hardworking mother.
Trump made remarks baiting Harris to say something that would turn off white voters, but she didn’t bite. She was evasive on gender issues and hardline on immigration, defending what the Biden administration had done to stem the flow always exaggerated by Trump. He said Harris suddenly “became a Black person” to make her race an issue. His campaign spent millions openly and secretly on ads about transgender rights to create an issue which affects very few people. “There will be a desire to hear her voice, and there won’t be a vacuum for long,” a person close to Harris said. She oversees the joint session of Congress that certifies the election on January 6.
Updating the status of the Trump cabinet nominations, Matt Gaetz, who is married, bowed out of contention for attorney general after more revelations about his drug-fuelled orgies with young single women. Actual confirmation hearings for nominees will begin in early January after the new Congress is sworn into office.
Harris still has two public events before she leaves. She will oversee the joint session of Congress on January 6, and her departure from the official residence as vice-president on January 20. She has not said if she will attend the inauguration, but it is customary for the outgoing president and vice-president to do so. Trump did not attend President Joe Biden and Harris’ January 2021 inauguration, but Trump’s then vice-president Mike Pence did attend the ceremony.
Harris is expected to be the leading contender for the governor’s race in California, where she has won three statewide races, two for state attorney general and one for senate, along with defeating Trump, 58.6 percent to 38.2 percent, in this just finished presidential election.
—The writer has worked in senior positions at The Washington Post, NBC, ABC and CNN and also consults for several Indian channels