ANALYSIS
It was Joe Biden, not Kamala Harris, who lost this election. At least that is what her supporters want you to think.
Even Donald Trump, who ahead of his historical election victory centred his campaign on the outgoing administration’s failures.
Harris only really caught flak from the former president for her border record and intelligence.
Whether on the rising cost of living or increasing immigration, Trump pinned the blame on Biden.
Throughout her historically short campaign, Harris was unable to shake her association with her former boss.
The outgoing president’s aborted attempt to cling onto the White House gave Harris only 107 days between becoming the new Democratic nominee and election day.
As a former president, billionaire businessman and star of reality television, Trump needed no introduction … but still started his re-election bid in November 2022, two years before the vote.
“I 100 per cent know more about Donald Trump than I know about Kamala Harris because of just how long he’s been in the public eye,” said Alexander Millian, 18, a biology student at Howard.
“And there was just more focus on President Biden for the four years he was president than his vice-president.”
The main problem for Harris was her inability to separate herself from Biden’s deeply unpopular policies because she was his vice-president.
Millian added: “There’s not much she could do ... she can’t be a wildly different person than he was in terms of policy because of the party line.
“Inherently, Joe Biden would have to bear a bit of the fault, or blame at the very least, for Kamala losing because there’s nothing she can do to separate herself from him. In the public eye, they’re synonymous.”
Yet for some of Ms Harris’s supporters, the answer to her defeat is simpler than her policies.
“There are so many people who are against Kamala because she’s a woman, because she’s black,” said Sanaa Canady, a Howard student.
“I know this gets brought up a lot, but she is a woman and that’s definitely not something we have seen before,” Millian added. “I think you can’t underestimate what that means for some voters.”
When Harris herself was asked what she would do differently to the Biden administration, all she could muster was to point out that “obviously, we’re different people”.
Harris sat in a grey blazer and her signature string of pearls, hands clasped together politely before her coffee cup.
“What do you think would be the biggest specific difference between your presidency and a Biden presidency,” The View host Sunny Hostin asked her, raising a hand to put an emphasis on “specific”.
It was her big opportunity to distinguish herself from Biden, and she failed to summon a single idea.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said when asked if there was something she would have handled differently. “I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had an impact.”
One of the reasons why some voters may feel they have not had an opportunity to discover who the real Harris is could be because of her media-shy communications strategy.
Her presidential campaign may have started late, but her media blitz started later.
While Trump was speaking to everyone from video game streamers to Elon Musk, the Democratic nominee was maintaining a low profile.
Instead of set-piece interviews, Harris opted for staged moments controlled by her campaign, avoiding questions from reporters, dodging scrutiny and leaving little room for mistakes – but also little room to sell herself to the public.
She would often be vague on policy and push instead to tell more colourful stories about her past.
She appeared to have devised a careful strategy to target younger voters, people of colour and women.
At Howard, Wesley Bell, 18, a nursing student, said: “In my perspective, she’s done a good job at marketing herself towards Gen Z and getting them to vote, getting their voice out.”
Canady, a fellow student, added: “Her target audience [was] younger people, people of colour, women and minorities.”
But because of narrow focus, Fox News, the pro-Trump broadcaster, frequently published articles highlighting the stark contrast in the number of interviews or questions taken by both candidates. Each showed the Republican to be leading the way.
Trump said her shy, quiet approach showed she was not fit for office.
Harris is set to speak today to concede the presidency to Trump. She is then expected to take some time away from public life.
It took until the final weeks of the campaign before Harris decided to dramatically shift her strategy.
She appeared on CBS News’ 60 Minutes, drank a beer on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and allowed herself to be grilled by shock jock Howard Stern and Fox News’s Bret Baier.
During the final weekend of the campaign, she appeared on the comedy show Saturday Night Live in a skit that portrayed Mr Biden as senile.
Her last-ditch media blitz has allowed Harris to somewhat flip the narrative, throwing the spotlight on Trump and his mental and physical fitness.
But in a contest that saw almost 200 million voters come out, her lack of visibility to the mass audiences potentially proved a decisive factor.
Harris chose Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, to be her vice-presidential candidate.
She overlooked Josh Shapiro, the politically talented governor of Pennsylvania.
Both men were touted as running mates because of their credentials in the Midwest, a key area for election victory.
But having lost Pennsylvania, Harris’s decision to pick Walz appears to be massively flawed.
Election experts say Shapiro wrote the guide on how to win Pennsylvania, probably the most important of the swing states, by pushing a narrative of governing as a moderate and proving that Democrats don’t look down on their voters.
Nate Silver, the pollster, said Harris had missed a “big opportunity” in not selecting him as her running mate.
Lindy Li, a member of the DNC National Finance Committee, said: “People are wondering tonight what would have happened had Shapiro been on the ticket. And not only in terms of Pennsylvania.
“He’s famously moderate. So that would have signalled to the American people that she is not the San Francisco liberal that Trump said she was.”
Instead, Harris settled for a historically gaffe-prone politician, who did more to unsettle American voters than win them over.
A series of misleading claims by the Minnesota governor that did nothing to fight back against the aspersions that Harris and her running mate lacked authenticity, and said anything for votes.
Reports surfaced that Walz had claimed he was in Hong Kong in the spring of 1989 during protests in China’s Tiananmen Square. Publicly available evidence suggests he was not.
Walz also faced scrutiny over his military service after claiming he had carried weapons “in war”.
He never actually saw active service, according to his service records.
He retired from the National Guard before his battalion was deployed to Iraq in 2006. His departure from his unit actually came in July 2005, two months before it was alerted of the deployment.
A decades-old drink-driving conviction also re-emerged to haunt the Democratic campaign.
The 1995 arrest first became an issue in 2006 when Walz was running for Congress. At the time, his campaign blamed his drunken appearance on hearing loss from serving in a field artillery brigade in the National Guard.
In a later political campaign, Walz told an entirely different story, admitting he had a problem with sobriety, leading him to quit drinking.
While a vice-presidential candidate is unlikely to sway the election results too much, Walz opened himself up to attacks from the Trump campaign.
Trump was successful in tarring Harris as an untrustworthy candidate – and the mud stuck.
The Republican whipped up a scandal over whether his rival had worked in a McDonald’s while a student in the early 1980s into a national news story.
She was never able to provide concrete evidence that she worked at the fast food chain, which was turned into a stunt by the Republicans when Trump visited a branch in Philadelphia.
“I’ve worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala,” Trump said on a campaign stop at a McDonald’s, where he manned the fryer and served at the drive-through.
Similar happened when Harris was accused of plagiarism when it was alleged that sections of a book on crime were copied from various sources, including Wikipedia.
The Harris campaign said the allegations were a result of Right-wing “operatives”, but it was nonetheless damaging for her claims of integrity.
When push came to shove, Trump was the candidate who was able to land the most viral blows on his opponent, an important element of an election campaign that focused so much on two personalities.
The little girl was only two years old.