Analysis: Kamala Harris lost, but how weak of a candidate was she?

WASHINGTON — In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory last month, Democrats are still searching for answers to key questions, including whether Kamala Harris was a strong or weak nominee. With help from an Inside Elections metric, there’s a way to quantify how well the vice president performed in each state.

The answer isn’t a complete surprise: Harris underperformed across the country, according to the Vote Above Replacement, or VAR, standard. And the dynamic wasn’t limited to critical battleground states but spread over Democratic and Republican territory alike.

Harris finished ahead of a typical Democratic candidate in just 13 states, ran even in Connecticut and underperformed the average Democrat in 36 states.

In contrast, Trump did much better. He underperformed a typical statewide Republican in 11 states, put in an average performance in New Hampshire and Colorado, but overperformed a typical GOP candidate in a whopping 37 states.

The VAR metric measures the strength of political candidates relative to a typical candidate from their party within the same state. It’s the political version of baseball’s Wins Above Replacement, which assesses a player’s value to a team compared with a replacement-level player.

The initial benchmark is derived using Inside Elections’ Baseline, which captures a state’s political performance by combining all federal and state election results over the past four cycles into a single average. (Technically, it’s a trimmed mean, which is the average after throwing out the highest and lowest totals.) VAR is then simply the candidate’s share of the vote minus the party’s Baseline.

In the battlegrounds

Harris’ performance mattered most in the key states that effectively decided the presidential election, and she didn’t do well.

The vice president underperformed a typical statewide Democrat in six of the seven preelection battlegrounds, including Michigan (-2.7 VAR), Arizona (-2.4), Nevada (-1.2), Pennsylvania (-1.2), North Carolina (-0.9) and Wisconsin (-0.9). The only battleground state where she overperformed was Georgia, where the new Democratic Baseline is 47.6 percent and Harris received 48.5 percent of the vote.

Georgia was the only state where Trump had a negative VAR (-1.0) even though he still won it as part of his battleground state sweep and his 312-226 Electoral College victory. Trump’s strong performances in Nevada (+3.4), Michigan (+3.3), and Arizona (+1.9), and his +0.9 VAR in Wisconsin nearly pulled those states’ Republican Senate nominees across the line with him, which would have given his party a stunning eight-seat gain. (Senate Republicans ended up flipping four seats, still enough to win the majority.)

Despite more than 90 felony indictments (and 34 convictions) since he was last president, and four additional years of baggage from being in the political arena, 2024 marked Trump’s strongest showing in a presidential race, according to VAR.

In 2020, he posted a positive VAR in just four of the 12 closest presidential states. He did better than an average GOP statewide candidate in Iowa (+1.7), Michigan (+0.3), Minnesota (+1.6) and Pennsylvania (+2), but worse than the average Republican in Arizona (-2.0), Florida (-0.7), Georgia (-3.8), Nevada (-0.8), North Carolina (-0.7), Ohio (-1.4), Texas (-3.2) and Wisconsin (-0.1).

And in 2016, Trump underperformed in seven of the 10 closest states but still won the election through the Electoral College because Hillary Clinton did even worse. She had a negative VAR in the four closest states (Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) and that was enough to lock her out of the presidency.

Beyond the battlegrounds

There were a few bright spots for Harris this year, although they were mostly in states that didn’t really matter. Her biggest overperformances came in Utah (+5.6 VAR), Vermont (+5.5) and Louisiana (+5.2). The Pacific Northwest was a strength as well – Harris’ positive VARs in Oregon (+1.8) and Washington state (+1.0) probably helped save Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington’s 3rd District and contributed to unseating GOP Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer in Oregon’s 5th.

It’s not particularly surprising that a liberal Democrat from California underperformed in several Republican states, including Kentucky (-6.3), West Virginia (-4.8) and Mississippi (-3.8). But Harris also underperformed in Democratic states such as Hawaii (-6.2), Rhode Island (-4.1), New Jersey (-2.9), New Mexico (-2.8), New York (-2.7) and Illinois (-2.5), which helped Trump become the first GOP presidential nominee to finish ahead in the national popular vote in 20 years.

Not only did Trump defeat Harris, he also overperformed by a greater margin. The president-elect had a +6.2 VAR in Hawaii and Louisiana and a +5.8 in Kentucky, overperforming a typical Democrat by an average of 2.5 points across the states where he had a positive VAR. Harris had a VAR of more than 2 points in just three states in total.

Looking ahead

It’s possible that Democrats will end up blaming Harris as a weak candidate, even though that doesn’t seem to be a focus of their angst in the immediate aftermath of the election. But Trump’s victory was so broad that it’s harder for Democrats to focus on a single problem as opposed to the many issues that need to be addressed.

If any one person should receive significant blame for Democrats’ debacle, it’s probably someone who wasn’t even on the ballot. While Harris was not the perfect candidate, Joe Biden’s performance as president soured the electorate on the direction of the country and strength of the economy under Democratic leadership.

Going by the VAR numbers, it might be easy to pin the Democratic losses on Harris. But there’s no guarantee a different nominee would have done better.

And Biden certainly would have been worse had he stayed in. The combination of frustration with the economy and direction of the country coupled with questions about his age would likely have fueled a GOP wave reminiscent of 1980 – when Ronald Reagan won the presidency in an Electoral College landslide, Senate Republicans flipped 12 seats on their way to winning the majority and the House GOP gained 34 seats.