Well, here we are. After months of anticipation, we know who will spend the next four years in the White House, and this revelation promises to turn this country’s political and social rifts into chasms.

Donald Trump, who lost his bid for reelection in 2020 and has faced criminal prosecution in the years since, has declared victory over his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. He seems to have finally won the popular vote in his third run for president and swept the swing states that went blue last time right out from under her.

This is an outcome that many dreaded, but it is not one that came completely out of nowhere. I have watched this campaign as closely as I could. Although I am not a credentialed expert in matters of political science, I would like to think that I know enough to explain how we got here.

Trump did not win this election by any exceptional talent of his own. The Harris campaign and everyone involved in shaping it paved the way for his victory. They need to reckon with their catastrophic failure.

Harris had an uphill battle from the start of her remarkably short campaign. Joe Biden’s stubborn persistence in running for reelection and, more importantly, the Democratic Party’s reluctance to force him out sooner meant that she had very little time to establish herself as a candidate after he dropped out.

The first few days of her campaign offered reasons for optimism. The choice of Minnesota’s progressive Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate and what could be understood as a wave of relieved enthusiasm from the Democratic base. Biden had seen a brutal drop in polls after a term that gave many people reason to disapprove of him and a debate that made him look, to put it mildly, incompetent.

Even as Harris was making up Biden’s polling gap by leaps and bounds, people trusted that she would bring change. The cracks began to show not long after she entered the race. Her policy proposals were slow to materialize, and when they did they were not nearly bold enough to set her apart from Biden’s perceived failure.

Once the Democratic National Convention arrived, the question of what her campaign platform would look like loomed large. 

After the party leaders snubbed the pro-Palestinian delegates who petitioned to speak and Harris promised a border crackdown, unwavering support for Israel and hawkish foreign policy in her acceptance speech, the answer to that question was depressingly clear.

Harris received endorsements from several Republicans who lost seats in Congress for separating themselves from Trump, including Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. 

The one that disturbed me most was the endorsement of Dick Cheney, the former vice president who left office with a 13% approval rating but whose support Harris gladly accepted.

The strategy adopted by Harris was clearly tailored to draw more support from people like Kinzinger and the Cheneys. Harris insisted that she was willing to work with those who did not share her politics and promised them in her words, “a seat at the table.” 

She even pledged that her Cabinet would include a Republican.

Obviously, this course of action served to alienate the sizable segment of Democratic voters who do not approve of Republican policies. The logic, as far as I can tell, was that these voters were probably secured due to opposition to Trump and that they would put up with the rightward shift or would not represent a major loss of support if they did not.

Aversion to the left has characterized the bulk of Harris’s campaign. 

From fracking to immigration, she made an explicit turn around from her 2020 bid for the Democratic nomination. Although she promised to combat price gouging and address the housing crisis, she seemed to inexplicably lose interest in messaging on these issues. She mostly relied on presenting her opponent as a threat to democracy.

Now that we are on the other side of this election, I think it is fair to say that this strategy did not pay off. 

As of this writing, Harris is millions of votes behind Biden’s share of the popular vote in 2020. If she won any number of Republican voters disillusioned with Trump, they certainly did not outweigh her losses with other voting blocs.

For all the speculation and spiteful blame games online, the unavoidable truth is that no single group of voters is responsible for this. There is only one explanation that accounts for this hemorrhaging of support, and that is that Harris did not offer a compelling platform to people who were frustrated with the outgoing administration the way Biden did in 2020.

So why did she run like this? Why did she scorn her base, embrace unpopular Republican figures and dance around the issues that people wanted to hear her address, like the higher cost of living?

My estimation is that Harris—or rather, the political consultants feeding her talking points—would rather lose or, at best, narrowly win elections on a center-right platform than give the progressives in the party base an inch. 

Even if a left-wing populist like Bernie Sanders could rally the support of working-class voters and revitalize the party, the leadership prioritizes the interests of donors, and it shows.

I have watched this same playbook in action since I first became politically conscious in 2016.

Hillary Clinton ran against Trump as a centrist and lost. Amy McGrath ran against Mitch McConnell in 2020 as a centrist and lost. Harris ran against Trump as a centrist this year and lost. By my reckoning, this is a losing strategy.

I doubt the people at the head of the Democratic Party will ever confront this reality. They only ever seem to learn the lesson they want to learn from election results, which is that the left is responsible for all their losses and they should move even further right. My expectations are no longer high enough for me to find this disappointing or surprising.

We have two years until voters get their chance to respond to Trump’s choices in his second term by deciding the balance of Congress. Frankly, it would be miraculous if Democrats rise to the moment.