By Bill Wilson
A new spectacularly farcical claim is making the Democratic Party rounds, and it reveals how revisionist and unwilling to face reality the party has become. In an August op-ed, the editor in chief of Campaigns & Elections, Max Greenwood, highlights survey data from a Democratic donor group that claims the primary reason for Kamala Harris’ deafening defeat in 2024 was an inadequate number of would-be Harris voters coming out to support her.
The Democrats’ theory stems from a left-wing organization called Way to Win, and their survey that revealed voters who sat out the 2024 election now say they “would have” voted for Kamala Harris — if they had voted. Even if we are to extrapolate from the survey that a representative-sample of non-voters voters are telling the truth, that they sat out the election but if they could redo it they would support Kamala Harris, the theory doesn’t square with virtually everything we know about the 2024 election.
The so-called “skippers” who sat out the 2024 election “generally hold more favorable views of Democrats” according to the Democrat group that fielded the survey, and said they “would have” voted for Kamala Harris if they had actually voted.
According to the organization’s theory, the Biden-elite did not turn out to vote in battleground states in adequate numbers, and Democrats were unable to combat the storm of working-class voters who swamped the polls and voted Trump into office. Now, Democrats think they can win back alleged “election-skippers” in 2026.
The idea that highly-engaged partisan leftists would have voted for Kamala Harris but passed on her and allowed their nemesis President Donald Trump to secure the presidency is nothing short of absurd.
First, the reality is that Harris’ so-called “underperformance” of Biden’s numbers is overblown. Harris only received around 47,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden did in the seven competitive battleground states combined.
She lost votes compared to Biden in blue states that do not determine the winner like California to Trump, but she received more votes than Biden in Georgia, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Nevada. In Georgia, Harris received around 74,000 more votes than Biden, in Wisconsin she received over 37,000 more votes than Biden, in North Carolina she received over 31,000 more votes, and in Nevada she received 1,711 more votes than Biden.
The battleground state where she significantly underperformed Biden can be much more likely attributed to the mass upswing in Latino voters for Trump, than it can partisan Biden voters sitting out the election. In Florida, Harris underperformed Biden by over 614,000 votes, but considering Trump gained eleven percentage points among Florida Latinos — and won the Latino vote as a whole in Florida — it is far more likely that Trump’s appeal played a major role in Harris’ loss than sideline-Biden voters did.
Second, if there were ever an institutionally-backed presidential candidate in political history that should appeal to the deep-blue party elite, it was Harris. She had Wall Street pouring millions into her campaign within weeks of unseating Joe Biden for the nomination spot, Hollywood and celebrities singing her praises, and the elitists at every major institution rooting for her, not to mention she checked two diversity boxes that any leftist would be glad to claim.
The real problem wasn’t that a large number of highly-engaged would-be Democrat voters passed on Kamala Harris. Leftists voted, but they are a dwindling species. Independent and unaffiliated identity is growing, young and minority voters are becoming more conservative, and the country is turning in favor of populist, America First priorities and against Biden’s sky-high inflation and illegal immigration. Not that Democrats appear to have learned anything from their 2024 defeat, considering the lockdown-fanatic California Governor Gavin Newsom is leading Democratic primary polling.
Third, Donald Trump has been one of the most smeared politicians in history. The Democratic Party and their allies in the mainstream media, academia, and culture at large were working overtime in 2024 to paint a dire end times scenario for the United States if Donald Trump was not defeated by Kamala Harris. Yet according to Democrats these alleged Democrat voters who say they wish they’d voted for Harris in retrospect sat on the sidelines in 2024?
Last, Kamala Harris the candidate was not the issue for Democrats in 2024, necessarily. Harris was simply the tipping point at which the country shifted away from the failed globalist agenda that has been wreaking havoc on the nation for decades. Democrat affinity has been plummeting, and Republicans added more voters between 2020 and 2024 than Democrats in every single state that tracks party voter records. Republicans added 2.4 million new voters across states that track partisanship while Democrats lost 2.1 million between 2020 and 2024.
The one assertion that does make sense from the Democrats’ analysis is that voters that crossed the line over to President Trump will be harder for Democrats to recollect in 2026.
“Our theory here is that the people that have crossed that Rubicon – that flipped from voting Democrat to Republican – are going to be really hard to persuade back,” Way to Win’s President Tory Gavito said.
That is the one kernel of truth from the survey, but the idea that millions of would-be Kamala voters are waiting on the sidelines to support Democrats in 2026 is highly speculative and has little basis in reality.
The reason President Donald Trump succeeded in defeating Kamala Harris in the most deafening number of raw votes for a Republican candidate in two decades is not because partisan Biden voters didn’t vote for Harris. President Trump won with the backing of the people, securing his base and expanding his reach into territory formerly occupied by Democrats, including gaining ground with young people, Hispanics, suburban voters, and even the coastal-elite in states like California and New Jersey. The idea that Kamala Harris is an inadequate representation of the deep-blue party elite and that is why she lost is exactly the kind of delusional revisionist blindness that is causing the Democratic Party to crater from within.
Bill Wilson is the former president of Americans for Limited Government.
