Professor Lawless: What Went Wrong for Harris and Right for Trump
Professor Lawless: What Went Wrong for Harris and Right for Trump
When asked what went wrong with Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign, Lawless said, “I don't know if anything went wrong I think that what ultimately happened is that it really is about the economy and presidential approval, and [Joe] Biden has very very low approval his approval rating — overall he was at about 40%.”
“The economy, despite improving on a lot of indicators, didn't resonate that way with voters, and I think the Democrats assumed and thought that such a flawed candidate [in Donald Trump], who was engaged in such a hate-filled campaign and who had been convicted of 34 felonies would allow them [the Democrats] to overcome these fundamentals that were working against them, and at the end of the day that's not what happened,” said Lawless.
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Trump’s Ground Game
Lawless was surprised by the effectiveness of Donald Trump’s ground game.
“I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at the exit polls and looking at various other analytics and I think that what the Harris campaign didn't realize was that Donald Trump's ground game was actually quite robust," said Lawless. "You know we had talked quite a bit Elon Musk about how it was unclear how organized it was, but if you look at first-time voters who were a very small segment of the population, they were only, I think, about 8% of the overall electorate they overwhelmingly went for Trump, and these were voters that he mobilized in red rural areas,” said Lawless.
Economy, Stupid
Lawless said, “I do think that a lot of this comes down to the economy. A lot of it comes down to uncertainty about what the economy means — on a daily basis, on a monthly basis, on a yearly basis, and the Donald Trump campaign was, for better or worse, seen as a change from the status quo."
"The Harris campaign apparently was unable to effectively make the case that the economy we have now is a result of what was inherited post-pandemic because of Donald Trump," said Lawless. "That's a hard argument to make.”