What Kamala Harris Actually Got Right

The former Vice President deserved better, Part II.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Oct. 18, 2024. | Andrew Roth/Michigan Advance

On one of my days off, I was watching a bunch of YouTube videos. When I’m bored, I’ll just let the rabbit hole run wild — whatever autoplay feeds me, I’ll roll with. But apparently, the theme of the day was “Bash Kamala Harris,” because video after video was just liberals dragging her like it was a sport. Every thumbnail was screaming about how flawed she was, how doomed she was, how embarrassing her campaign had been. And after about the seventh Kamala-bashing video, it really started to piss me off.

So I sat down and wrote, She Deserved Better: Kamala Harris, the Fall Guy for Everyone Else’s Cowardice.

Now, I don’t write to chase virality. That’s never been my thing. I write about the stuff that sits on my chest too long—until I have to let it out or implode. But this one? This one took off. And some virality isn’t unusual, especially when I’m writing with the kind of platform that Lincoln Square gives me access to. But this time, it got out of hand. The post blew up so fast I could barely keep up with the comments. For four straight days, it just wouldn’t stop. Notifications. Emails. Shares. And what was wild was — it wasn’t even Lincoln Square yet. This was just my plain old regular Substack.

When it was time to send my next article to Lincoln Square Editor Susan Demas for the usual editing process, I included the new piece. She responded: No problem — I’ll post this on Wednesday. But do you mind if we post your Kamala piece, too?

And that’s where things got crazy with the republication of Kamala Harris Deserved Better.

Let me be clear: I’m not trying to make this sequel Godfather II. I’m just trying to make sure people understand the logic behind the decisions Kamala Harris made — because clearly, a lot of people don’t.

Since the November election, I’ve watched Democrats act like Kamala Harris was some remedial substitute teacher who accidentally wandered into a presidential campaign. And the media? They were worse. From mainstream outlets to YouTubers I actually respect, everyone treated her like the political equivalent of a washing machine with a brick inside. That first article I wrote? That was about correcting the record — because if people were going to act like Harris made a series of idiotic decisions, then somebody needed to stand up and say: No, what she did was calculated. What she faced was stacked. And what she pulled off, given the circumstances, deserves a hell of a lot more credit than she’s been getting.

Kamala Harris lost on the margins. Period. And had she won, it would’ve been by the same thread. That’s not an indictment — it’s reality. People reached out to me after that first piece saying I captured what they were already feeling: that she was sabotaged from within, ghosted by the party’s loudest voices, and then blamed for not being a miracle worker. And they were right.

And I’ll keep it real. While I got a lot of support from that first article, I got my fair share of detractors, too. Some folks just dropped blatantly bigoted nonsense about a Black woman in power — the kind of nonsense that always seems to reemerge when a woman of color dares to lead. Others insisted my analysis was just flat-out wrong. And that’s fine. You don’t have to agree with me. But what you’re not gonna do is pretend that in the face of a political climate where the Republican nominee is out here saying immigrants are “eating the cats and dogs,” Kamala Harris didn’t do some real heavy lifting.

So if I’m saying something bold, I’m backing it up with facts. Because it’s not just about having a take — it’s about making it make sense.

This piece isn’t about the sabotage. This one’s about the strategy.

Let me be honest up front: I don’t love centrism. I don’t wake up dreaming about third-way compromises or purple-state polling cross tabs. But pretending that Harris’ decision to embrace the center was foolish is either dishonest or historically illiterate. Joe Biden didn’t beat Trump in 2020 because he was a once-in-a-generation movement leader. He beat Trump because he was the sane old white guy going up against the crazy old white guy yelling at clouds. That’s it. That was the whole strategy. Normalcy versus chaos. Predictability versus danger.

And it worked.

So when Kamala Harris took a similar approach in 2024, that wasn’t cowardice — that was pragmatism. The problem is, the left (and I say this as someone deeply leftist) loves purity tests more than power. So when Harris didn’t run the perfect unicorn campaign to satisfy every niche activist and TikTok theorist, they pounced. She was either too moderate, too cautious, or not radical enough to inspire the revolution they wanted to binge-watch on livestream.

What infuriated me most wasn’t just cable news. It was watching creators, columnists, and podcast hosts I genuinely like bend over backward to make Harris sound like she lost 45 states. You’d think Trump won in a sweep the way they recapped it. One of the clearest examples of that energy came from the I’ve Had It podcast. Now look, I like those women. They’re funny. They’re sharp and they are not afraid to call out other white people playing the supremacy game. They usually get it. But the way they piled on after the election? You’d think Kamala Harris was the Washington Generals and Trump was the Harlem Globetrotters dunking from half court.

No offense to these white ladies, but y’all live in Oklahoma City — a place where every Black person you’ve met either plays for the Thunder or works concessions at the arena. I’m gonna need you to pump the brakes before declaring Kamala Harris a national embarrassment.

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It wasn’t just criticism — it was erasure. Erasure of the context, of the odds, and of the absolute circus Harris had to walk into with no warning and no runway.

Let’s talk about that circus.

While Harris was out trying to stitch the Democratic coalition back together, the Republicans were deep-throating dysfunction on national television. Their primary debates were the most embarrassing exercises in sycophancy since the Roman Empire. Every candidate showed up to basically audition for a cabinet post in a second Trump term. Chris Christie looked like the only Crip c-walking into a Blood rally. He tried to fight, but even he had to pretend not to flinch.

Harris had every reason to believe that 2024, like 2020, would be decided on the margins. There was no red wave. There was no MAGA masterstroke. There was just one party clinging to Trump like he was a radioactive teddy bear, and another party too scared to stand behind the candidate they nominated. And Harris knew it.

She didn’t have two years to build an image. She didn’t have a well-oiled campaign machine ready to go. She got the call, got the mic, and had to run a national campaign with the clock already ticking. And she still held her ground.

The data backs this up. In the previous article, I laid out how she held critical coalitions, overperformed expectations in key urban centers, and took nonstop hits from pundits who were convinced the election was already lost the moment she entered the race. She didn’t lose because she was unprepared. She lost because the lane was already full of debris, and no one bothered to clear it before she got the keys.

And even with all that, this was not a blowout. This wasn’t 1984 Mondale. This wasn’t McGovern ’72. This was the political version of Robert Horry in game four of the 2002 Western Conference Finals. The Kings had that game. They had it. And then a missed rebound, a lucky bounce, and a last-second three-pointer broke Sacramento’s heart (not mine because I’m a Lakers fan).

Harris was the Kings in that analogy. Trump was the bounce. And yes, it still stings — especially when the bounce came from a man who has spent more time dodging subpoenas than delivering speeches. We are quite literally watching a man with more ties to Epstein Island than policy proposals enjoy the privileges of presidential power. And somehow, Harris is the one being called unserious.

Losing on the margins doesn’t mean you suck. It means the other team had just enough to steal it. That’s politics.

Let’s also be real about the structural betrayal. The very same people who spent years talking about the importance of representation, the future of the party, and the need to empower women of color were suddenly silent when the first Black and South Asian woman to top a major-party ticket was left out there on her own. If the Democratic establishment truly thought Biden was done after the debate, the move should have been to let him resign and install Harris as president. Let her run as the incumbent. That would’ve made history, helped neutralize the “first-term fear,” and electrified the base.

Instead, they tried to force him out without elevating her. And that made it look like they didn’t believe in her either. The optics were trash. The strategy was nonexistent. And the party paid the price.

The media didn’t help. Major publications ran shallow postmortems full of recycled tropes and anonymous handwringing. Even legacy outlets that should know better leaned into framing Harris as a placeholder — not a politician. The idea that her campaign was flat ignores the reality that the coverage was shaped to make it that way. Meanwhile, the pundit class became a caricature of itself: quick to declare disaster, slow to explain why it wasn’t inevitable.

She didn’t get to build her own campaign infrastructure from scratch. She inherited Biden’s team — with all their baggage, missteps, and media fatigue. That was the squad she had, and she had to play the game with it. Could she have replaced more of them? Maybe. But when you step in late, you don’t get to draft your all-stars. You roll with the bench you’re handed.

Then came the Liz Cheney endorsement — and progressives damn near lost their minds. And look, I get it. Cheney isn’t exactly a leftist folk hero. But Harris wasn’t trying to win over Twitter revolutionaries. She was doing triage. She looked at the landscape and asked a brutally practical question: Who’s most likely to actually show up and vote for me? The people threatening to vote for Jill Stein because of something Biden did in 1994? Or the people who hate Trump enough to pull the lever for me, no purity tests required?

U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) campaigning in Lansing, Mich. on Nov. 1, 2022. | Andrew Roth/Michigan Advance

She got torched from both sides. Progressives treated her like a traitor for shaking hands with someone who once backed the Iraq War. Moderates doubted she could hold the line. But Harris understood bounded rationality: the idea that people make the best decisions they can, given the information and constraints they face. And she understood rational choice theory: voters aren’t moved by ideology — they’re moved by perceived consequences.

Harris was reading the room. And in a room where Trump was talking about immigrants “eating the cats and dogs” and Liz Cheney was pledging to stop him at all costs, aligning with Cheney wasn’t about principle. It was about survival.

Harris wasn’t trying to win an argument on YouTube. She was trying to survive a broken, polarized electorate where the Overton Window has been dragged through a MAGA swamp. And when you’re dealing with that? You court the voters who see you as a life raft, not the ones who want you to pass a 12-point vibe check before they’ll even consider showing up. With the benefit of hindsight everyone can be Cleo the psychic and lament over how misguided that was but I maintain that in a country where 76 million people saw the lunacy and diabolical nature of Trump first hand and vote for a second helping of it, I can totally envision a reality where she passes all of the lefts purity test and still lose.

So no — she didn’t lose because she was out of touch. She lost because too many people demanded transformation while she was just trying to stop the bleeding.

But here’s the truth: Kamala Harris is not done.

Whether she decides to run for Governor of California, make another run at the White House, or pull a double feature and do both (stranger things have happened), I want this on record: she is not some failed experiment. She is not a cautionary tale. She is battle-tested. And if she runs again, I want her to come back like the 1989 Detroit Pistons.

That team lost to the Lakers the year before. Came back pissed off, polished, and ready to exploit every weakness. And they swept the Lakers in four games.

That’s what a comeback looks like.

The Democratic Party and the political media are making a critical error in underestimating Harris. They think the story is over. They think she’s been written off. But if my first article proved anything, it’s that there is still an appetite for her. There is still love for her. And there are still people watching who refuse to let her story be buried under lazy narratives and bad takes.

Kamala Harris doesn’t need a rescue mission.

What she deserves is a clear-eyed assessment of the weight she carried, the constraints she faced, and the brutal logic behind every criticized move. She wasn’t campaigning with a blank slate. She was managing inherited liabilities, appeasing a fractured base, and navigating a media narrative that treated her as either invisible or expendable. This should never be overlooked.

And yet, even within that vice grip, she nearly pulled it off.

So no, this isn’t a eulogy. It’s a challenge.

Because if Kamala Harris ever gets a full runway and a real team — HER TEAM — we’re not asking whether she deserves the shot.

We’re asking whether the country finally deserves her.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons. Read the original column here.