Why Kamala Harris Lost The U.S. Presidential Election

As President, Donald Trump will likely again reduce skilled worker visas for foreigners, including Indians

(Photo: Kamala Harris.)

November 7, 2024

In 2020, more than 500 Black leaders in the Democratic Party, including former President Barack Obama, successfully lobbied Joe Biden to select Kamala Harris as his vice presidential running mate. Harris’s father is Black and mother Indian.

Since July, when Biden dropped out of the Presidential race, the mainstream media reported that there was a sharp decline in support for Harris among Blacks and other racial minorities, who overwhelmingly voted for Democrats in past elections.

Indeed, this week, Harris lost the presidential race mainly because, in the crucial swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Republican opponent Donald Trump won more votes of Blacks - and other racial minorities - than he did in the 2020 election.

In Pennsylvania, Trump won 3.5 million votes, beating Harris by about 144,000 votes. In contrast, in 2020, Joe Biden, who also won 3.5 million votes in the state, beat Trump by 81,000 votes, and thereby won the Presidential election. Thus, while the voter turnout in the state was roughly the same in both presidential elections, this year Harris won fewer votes than Biden did in 2020.

The decline in votes for Harris in Pennsylvania was mainly due to her winning fewer Black and Latino votes. According to The Washington Post exit polls, Harris won 89% of the Black votes in the state, three percent fewer than the votes won by Biden in 2020.  

In Philadelphia, the largest county in the state where 708,000 votes were cast this year, nearly four out of ten voters are Black. Harris won 59% more votes than Trump, lower than Biden’s 64% lead over Trump in the city in 2020. Overall, Trump secured 142,000 votes in Philadelphia in 2024, about 9,000 more than he did in 2020.  

In Pennsylvania, Latino voters, mainly Puerto Ricans, number about 580,000, accounting for about 6% of the state’s registered voters. In 2020, Biden was backed by 78% of them, compared to 18% who voted for Trump. This year, Latino votes for Harris in the state fell by more than a quarter to 57%, while those for Trump more than doubled to 42%. This sharp decline in Latino votes for Harris was despite a speaker, at a Trump campaign rally last month, calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

Across the U.S., Trump won 46% of the Latino votes, the highest share in at least 50 years, according to The Washington Post. Among Latino men, Trump won a majority, 55%, of the votes. 

Similarly in the other key swing states, Harris lost because she got fewer votes than Biden among racial minorities: in Michigan, among Arabs and Blacks, and in Wisconsin, among Blacks and Latinos.

Black voters supporting Trump said immigrants are taking American jobs; Latinos are unhappy with cash, housing and other benefits given to illegal migrants in New York and other states run by Democrats; and Arabs are critical of the Biden/Harris policy in the Israeli Gaza conflict.

(Image: courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Harris also lost support among Asians, including Indians. While she won a majority, 54%, of Asian votes, this was seven points lower than their votes for Biden in 2020, according to NBC News. Indian supporters of Trump included a couple who were part of his staged campaign appearance, working at a McDonald’s in Atlanta, Georgia.  

In June Trump told a podcast host, Reuters reported, that when foreign students graduate from a college, they should automatically get a green card, which allows them to permanently work and stay in the country.

Not surprisingly, this Trump promise was widely covered by the media in India. There are roughly 270,000 Indian students in the U.S., a quarter of all foreign students in the country. Also, there are 1.2 million Indians in the U.S. on temporary work visas, and their dependents, who are waiting in line for a green card. The wait is more than 17 years for recent applicants.

Several conservative backers of Trump immediately attacked his proposal. Non-U.S. citizen college students should "leave the country and go home immediately after graduation," Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and part of Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement, told Newsweek. "Green cards for foreign college graduates is not a plan—President Trump tossed out an idea on a podcast—and his most fervent supporters tossed it back."

Hours later, as the U.S. media widely covered conservatives criticizing Trump’s green card proposal, his campaign staff issued a clarification. Green cards will be issued only to the “most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America,,,(and) who would never undercut American wages or workers,” a Trump campaign spokesperson said in a statement.

In addition to strong opposition from his base of conservative voters, there is another major reason why there is little chance of Trump granting green cards to fresh foreign graduates.

It appears that technology and other companies in the U.S. manage their supply of entry level engineers, and other skilled technical professionals, by using the excess labor capacity provided by foreigners, mainly Indians, and the system of temporary work visas.

In 2022, for instance, the top 30 employers of temporary workers on H-1B visas hired more than 34,000 new workers, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. In 2022, and the first quarter of 2023, the top 30 H-1B employers also laid off at least 85,000 H-1B workers. Foreigners on temporary work visas who lose their jobs have sixty days to find another job, with a work visa, or leave the country.

More important, during his first presidential term, from 2016 to 2020, Trump cut back on issuance of temporary work visas, green cards, and other forms of legal immigration.

(J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s vice president nominee, with wife Usha. Photo: courtesy Anand Mahindra.)

In this week’s election, securing more Latino, Black, and Atab votes helped Trump cushion the lead he built over Harris among White voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

As was expected, Trump won a majority of White votes, especially of those without college degrees who make up about half of all White voters. Two thirds of White voters without a college degree voted for Trump, according to a Washington Post exit poll.

The higher turnout of White voters for Trump in the swing states was due to a campaign funded and run by billionaire Elon Musk.

Harris got roughly four percent fewer votes than the Democrats contesting U.S. Senate seats in the swing states. In fact Democrats were elected Senators in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada; votes are still being counted in Pennsylvania and Arizona. This, “reinforces the idea that voters were willing to vote for Democrats — just not so much Harris in the presidential race,” notes The Washington Post.

Harris’s inability to win was not due to any personal factors – on the eve of the election, her approval among voters was 44%, roughly the same as that of Trump.

In 2008 and 2012, Obama, who is Black and from Chicago, Illinois, was elected President partly due to winning more support in the swing states from independent Whites, mainly suburban women and college educated voters. In 2016, some of these White Obama voters did not vote at all. Even though they disliked Trump, they did not vote for Hillary Clinton because they saw her as part of the coastal elites who look down on folks in the Midwest. In fact, Clinton called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.”  

This year, Harris lost partly because voters, especially independent Whites, in the swing states viewed her as being part of the coastal elite - a politician from the liberal state of California.

Apparently, Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic speaker of the House, did not expect Harris to win the presidency. Also, from California, Pelosi delayed endorsing Harris, likely seeking an open process for choosing a replacement for Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate after he withdrew in July.

Another person seeking an open process was billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, an unusually blunt and public political stance for someone in business. In July, Khosla, 69, posted on X/Twitter, that it is time for the Democrats to “have an open convention and get a more moderate candidate (than Harris) who can easily beat” Republican Donald Trump. An independent, Khosla has backed both Democratic and Republican candidates.  

As speaker of the House, Pelosi played a key role in curbing some of Trump’s excesses during his first term, including Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in his favor.

Pelosi also pressured Biden to withdraw as the Democratic nominee for President, After Biden dropped out, Pelosi said, according to The Hill, “President Joe Biden is a patriotic American who has always put our country first.”

Pelosi likely wanted Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of the swing state of Michigan, to replace Biden as the Democratic candidate in this year’s presidential election. In 2020, as speaker of the House, Pelosi asked Whitmer to deliver the Democratic response to Trump’s State of the Union speech.

Some Harris supporters are blaming her loss to Trump on Biden waiting too long, until July, to step down from the presidential race and endorse Harris. Perhaps Biden’s bigger mistake was selecting Harris, not Whitmer, as his vice presidential running mate in 2020.

(Story updated 11.9.2024)