It wasn't her fault (or was it?)

Democratic Party chairs on the 2024 election results

Why exactly did Kamala Harris lose to Donald Trump last year? I’ll bet you have a theory about it! A lot of people do. I am interested in just how those election narratives emerge and what effect they have on parties going into the next election cycle.

To get at this, I conducted an on-line survey of Democratic county party chairs across the country, starting a week after the November 2024 election. I asked them about two main topics: Why they thought Harris lost, and what they thought the Democratic Party should do going forward. I asked them a series of open-ended questions (inviting them to write down a few sentences), and then asked them some closed-ended questions (asking them to rank possible election narratives and possible directions for the party). 261 chairs filled out the November survey, and among those, 100 filled out a followup survey in July of 2025.

(I’ll be presenting this work at the American Political Science Association conference later this week, but I’m offering a teaser here. In this piece, I’m focusing on the narratives about the 2024 election. In a later piece, I’ll describe what they said about the party’s directions for the future.)

Starting with the closed ended questions, I offered these county chairs six possible reasons that Harris lost, and I asked the to rank them from 1 (most important) to 6 (least important). The narratives were:

• Economic conditions, including inflation

• The candidates’ personal traits, including race and sex

• The unpopularity of the Biden administration

• The candidates’ and parties’ stances on key issues

• The amount of money raised and spent by the campaigns

• The speeches of the candidates

The rankings came out in the above order. Remember, these are ranks, so lower numbers mean greater importance. Interestingly, chairs considered economic conditions — something very much out of Kamala Harris’ hands — the most important issue. Her race and sex were mentioned in the second-place narrative, although they were not predominant. Campaign-specific things like spending and speeches were at the bottom.

I asked the same set of questions in a July 2025 followup survey. What struck me about those results are that they looked very similar to November 2024. The rankings of issues were the same, although a few shifted around slightly. But at the level of the individual chair, people were pretty inconsistent. The figure below (a Sankey plot) shows how the chairs who answered both waves of the survey shifted around in which narrative they thought was the most important. For example, of the 43 chairs who listed economic conditions as the most important reason for Harris’ loss, only 23 held that same position 8 months later, although others came to adopt that view.

What really stands out about this figure is that there was even less of a consensus about the causes of Harris’ loss in the summer of 2025 than there was right after election day in 2024. Most chairs had named economic conditions as their top narrative in November. This was still the top answer in July, but quite a few of those originally naming economic conditions had bled to blaming Biden’s unpopularity, candidate traits, or other causes. It’s a similar story with the candidate traits narratives. In general, the most popular narratives became somewhat less popular, while the less popular ones gained adherents. While there’s traditionally a pattern that parties and journalists converge on an election narrative over time, we’ve seen the opposite in the wake of the 2024 election.

Now, chairs were not united in these viewpoints. I looked at how these answers broke down among different demographic groups.