Democrats won 4 big Senate races in states Harris lost. Their ads looked very different.
Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t win Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada or Arizona. But her party still did: Democratic Senate candidates in each of those battlegrounds emerged victorious, even as voters rejected Harris.
Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t win Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada or Arizona. But her party still did: Democratic Senate candidates in each of those battlegrounds emerged victorious, even as voters rejected Harris.
Long before Election Day, the winning candidates’ messages diverged from that of the top of the ticket.
In more than a half-billion dollars in ad spending over just three months, Harris painted a picture of what she would do as president, but she spent little airtime selling what she and the Biden administration achieved. That dynamic was core to the paid media strategy of both the official Harris campaign and the main super PAC supporting her, which sought to make a subtle break with President Joe Biden and offer voters two competing economic visions for the future, between her and former President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, the senators and senators-elect who ran ahead of her made tangible, bipartisan accomplishments on prices and other core economic issues central pieces of their campaigns, often taking the impact of the legislation out of Washington to connect it to local effects.
That avenue may not have been as readily available to Harris, largely because of the different challenge she faced taking over the top of the ticket from a politically diminished president saddled with low approval ratings, as well as the need to repair her relatively low favorability ratings.
Rating: 5