- All the gaffes that cost Kamala Harris a four-year stint in the Oval Office
Kamala Harris‘ chances at election victory came to a fast halt in the early hours of Wednesday morning as she lost key swing states and retreated into silence.
While Democratic strategists will spend the coming weeks poring over voting data to account for the Vice President’s unraveling at the ballot box, for Americans the reason for the loss is crystal clear – she was a weak, gaffe-prone candidate who failed to connect with voters.
Ascended into candidacy by the Democrats who turned on Joe Biden mid-summer, Kamala had little time to catch up.
US Vice President Kamala Harris’s gaffe-prone campaign came to a screeching halt on Wednesday.
But she failed at almost every opportunity during the four-month window she had to make an impact.
Dodging interviews and public appearances, flip-flopping on key issues and rolling out a parade of varied accents to deliver a long menu of word salads, the voters didn’t buy it – and they spoke loudly at the polls.
Here’s a look back at all the ways the Democrat candidate missed the mark in her 13-week campaign, that will go down in history as one of the most disastrous.
REFUSING HARD INTERVIEWS – AND FAILING THOSE SHE ATTEMPTED
US presidents need many skills, but perhaps the most important is being a good communicator.
Harris, however, avoided opening her mouth during the first three weeks of a lackluster campaign.
When she finally sat down for a television interview, with CNN‘s Dana Bash on August 29, she showed up with running mate Tim Walz to hold her hand.
One of Kamala’s most disastrous interviews was her fiery sit-down with Fox’s Bret Baier
It was not until mid-September that Harris had her first solo interview, with a local ABC News station in the key swing state of Pennsylvania.
This risk-averse approach gave Harris and her campaign team maximum control over their message.
But to voters, it looked like she was scared of saying the wrong thing.
Critics said Harris had something to hide, or was not sure of her policy positions.
Ahead of polling day, New Hampshire voter Jim Olivera, 58, said he did not think Harris was ‘pulling the strings.’
‘It comes across like there’s somebody behind the scenes, and they’re telling her what to say,’ he told DailyMail.com.
Then followed a disastrous, fiery sit-down with Fox News’ Bret Baier, where she focused on Trump and the network’s editing choices, and failed to communicate any kind of clear message.
THE FAKE ACCENTS
Say what you like about Trump, but the former president is seldom accused of being inauthentic.
That’s not the case for Harris, 60, who faced ongoing criticism for deploying ‘fake accents’ in public.
While Harris is of Jamaican and Indian descent, she’s been lampooned for changing her voice and cadence depending on the race, class and other demographics of her audience.
Most recently, viewers blasted her ‘fake hood’ voice in her SNL appearance.
While speaking at a church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she was mocked for preaching like a southern Baptist clergyman.
In September, Harris was accused of faking an urban accent to relate to working class voters in Detroit, Michigan.
‘These fake accents would be bad enough, if she was even halfway decent at them, but this is just pathetic,’ posted one of her online critics.
‘You know it’s bad if I’m embarrassed for her.’
THE WRONG PODCAST
Harris’ appearance on Call Her Daddy, a hit podcast aimed at younger women, backfired in spectacular fashion.
A relatively new media format came into its own during the 2024 presidential contest: the podcast.
Trump used them to full effect, securing millions of downloads from sit-downs with such hit podcasters as Logan Paul and Theo Von.
Harris also dabbled in downloads, but failed to shine.
Her appearance last month on Call Her Daddy, a hit podcast aimed at younger women, backfired in spectacular fashion.
Listeners slammed host Alexandra Cooper for ‘softball’ questions to Harris over the war in Gaza or her administration’s response to hurricanes.
They called the download ‘propaganda’ that ludicrously tried to pass off Harris as a hip Gen Zer.
‘Unsubscribed and unfollowed,’ wrote one fan in the comments.
Worse still is the podcast that Harris dodged: the Joe Rogan Experience.
Trump and his running mate JD Vance each chatted with Rogan for hours on the show, which has a whopping 18 million subscribers.
Rogan invited Harris, but said she only agreed to record for 45 minutes and refused to travel to his studio in Austin, Texas.
Some younger voters said they soured on Harris because she did not take part.
FRIES OR LIES?
President-elect Donald Trump said he’s worked at McDonald’s for ’15 minutes longer’ than Kamala Harris ever did.
Harris’ presidential bid got bogged down over whether she had lied about her time working at McDonald’s as a youngster.
But Republicans questioned whether she’d made up the job to look like a more regular, working American.
The New York Times cited a high school of friend of Harris with recollections of her job, but no photos or other records have been produced to prove it occurred.
Staff at the restaurant have reportedly been sworn to secrecy and when DailyMail.com contacted them to ask, an employee replied ‘no, sorry’.
Trump capitalized the controversy, getting behind the fryer at a McDonald’s in the Philadelphia suburbs and serving up fries and other meals at the drive-thru counter.
‘I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala,’ he quipped.
WORD SALAD AFTER WORD SALAD
Public speaking is a tough skill, and even good orators have their off days.
But for Harris, they happened too often for somebody seeking such a high-profile gig.
When asked direct questions, she frequently answered in meandering, jumbled sentences without a conclusion.
They even got a name: the ‘word salad.’
A heckler at a rally in Reno, Nevada, last month lured Harris into one such oratory.
‘You know what? Let me say something about this,’ Harris said amid the disruption.
‘We are here because we are fighting for a democracy. Fighting for a democracy.
‘And understand the difference here, understand the difference here, moving forward, moving forward, understand the difference here,’ she rambled.
‘What we are looking at is a difference in this election — let’s move forward and see where we are because on the issue, for example, freedom of choice…’
There were many other examples.
Democratic campaigners were left scratching their heads by Harris’ flustered appearance at a high-stakes CNN town hall just 13 days from the election.
She could not provide clear answers on either domestic or foreign policy, and meandered throughout the 90-minute session
Veteran Democratic strategist David Axelrod, who helped get Barack Obama elected and served as one of his top advisers, summed up the performance as: ‘Word salad city.’
‘When she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to word salad city, and she did that in a couple of questions,’ Axelrod said.
FLIP FLOPPING ON ISSUES
Good politicians have a knack for quietly changing their policy positions.
But Harris did not manage to U-turn discreetly.
As a senator back in 2019, Harris said she would ban fracking, a method of natural gas extraction.
In her 20204 race, however, she reversed course — as she needed to win in battleground Pennsylvania, where fracking is vital to the economy.
The same went for immigration. She once called Trump’s wall building on the southern border during his first term ‘un-American.’
Harris appears to have turned off voters by not sticking to her guns on immigration and fracking.
But once it became clear that unchecked immigration was a deal-breaker for voters, she reversed course, and vowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the frontier.
She’s also accused of flip-flopping on everything from legalizing marijuana to plastic straws.
When asked about some of these shifts, Harris told CNN that her policies may have shifted, but her ‘values have not changed.’
The voters, it seems, were not convinced.
PHONE FAKER
Kamala Harris was caught in an embarrassing election day gaffe after flipping her cell around to the cameras while ‘on the phone with a voter’ – to reveal she was seemingly not on a call at all.
‘Kamala just pretended to talk to a voter on the phone but mistakenly showed that her phone was open to the camera app,’ one person wrote on X. ‘LMAO Everything about Kamala is FAKE and STAGED’
Sadly for Harris, the gaffes kept on coming all the way up until election day.
She was caught in an embarrassing gaffe after flipping her smartphone around to the cameras while claiming to be ‘on the phone with a voter.’
The problem was, she wasn’t on a call at all.
‘Have you voted already?’ a beaming Harris said into the phone.
Then she paused as though listening, before exclaiming: ‘You did, thank you!’
The vice president then turned her phone screen around to adoring supporters at the Democrat party’s Washington, DC headquarters, who applauded and cheered.
Viewers at home were lightning quick to point out that her phone appeared to show she had the camera app open and was not on a phone call.
‘Kamala just pretended to talk to a voter on the phone but mistakenly showed that her phone was open to the camera app,’ one viewer wrote on X.
‘LMAO… everything about Kamala is fake and staged.’
In a similar gaffe, Harris was panned for a door-knocking photo-op in Pennsylvania that to many looked staged.
Harris joined canvassers in Reading, where they walked up to a porch where one family was standing outside, saying: ‘Hi guys… sorry for the intrusion.’
But online viewers noted how the interaction and embraces looked staged – especially when Harris asked the householders to move to the doorway to be in view of the cameras.
One user called it ‘fake door knock,’ and ‘Humiliating!’
THE LONG GOODBYE
It was clear overnight on Tuesday that Trump had an insurmountable lead, but Harris’s final gaffe was how long she took to concede the election.
She finally appeared late Wednesday afternoon to admit defeat to a massive crowd of supporters at Howard University, her alma mater.
‘While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,’ she said.
That was about 12 hours after the election was called for her Republican rival.
Ahead of her speech, Harris called Trump to congratulate him and encourage him to be a president for all Americans.
As her campaign deflated, Harris was criticized for being a sore loser by not throwing in the towel.
She was on track to do worse than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race, and may end up with fewer Electoral College votes than any Democrat since 1988.