Dan Haar: Connecticut voices tell us 9 reasons why Trump beat Harris in the election

Sometime after 1 a.m. Wednesday I stopped at a gas station-convenience store in West Hartford, still absorbing the victory by former and future President Donald Trump. A fellow filling up his Ford cargo van asked me who won. 

"Trump," I said. He punched the air and said that's good for the country. I asked why he thought that; why he thought Vice President Kamala Harris rightly lost.

The early middle-aged Brazilian immigrant in the commercial cleaning business, who identified himself as Santos Paulo, said he has never voted in this country although he's a U.S. citizen. Still, he gave a long and detailed answer that congealed much of what I've heard from dozens of voters these last several weeks about Harris and Trump.

For starters, he found Trump clear and strong and Harris more confusing. He listened to an interview with her and told me, "it was like I don't believe she was second-grade to talk like this." She was not weak, just not as forceful as Trump, in his view. "If you don't have a strong president, you have a weak country," he said.

In no particular order, these are the reasons why Harris was destined to lose and why she performed poorly in deep-blue Connecticut, based on what I heard from Connecticut residents.

She was perceived as weaker than Trump

It's an unfair comparison in part because Trump's whole public persona is about projecting power in a cartoonish way. That's the core of his appeal as a tribal-style leader. Harris brought a modern sensibility in which every comment had layers; too many layers. This mattered to a lot of people, as Paulo said, and not in her favor among voters who could go either way. Underlying this perception was Trump's simplicity and appeal to less intellectual voters vs. Harris' world of endless shades of gray. 

Her campaign started late 

We can debate whether Harris gaining the nomination by acclaim after President Joe Biden exited the race was fair and right. Certainly it gave Republicans a reason to call her "anti-democratic," balancing those same charges against Trump. But there's no doubt the four-month run, half of it in the summer, left some people feeling they didn't know her. I heard that Tuesday at polls in Meriden from a couple of ranking Connecticut Democrats and from Chenille Staton, a local hairstylist looking to open a cosmetology school, who voted for the first time ever at age 49. Her pick: Trump. "I don't know Kamala," she said, pronouncing her name Kamila. "We survived four years of Trump."

She lost the battle of inflation vs. anti-democracy

These were the two biggest issues for Trump and Harris supporters, respectively: higher prices under Biden/Harris and an attack on democracy by Trump, who falsely claimed he won the 2020 election and inspired the Jan. 6, 2021 mob scene at the U.S. Capitol. Both were huge but while Trump was able to deflect his role in the Capitol assault despite indictments, Harris didn't even try to deny responsibility for inflation. That's too bad because a sober look shows that Trump was at least as much to blame for high prices as Biden; he ran up the deficit by more than $3 trillion before COVID-19 even started, and he did little to address the supply chain crisis that led to backlogs. Inflation spiked before Biden's spending even kicked in. Democrats including Sen. Chris Murphy and Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz all told me Tuesday it would have done her no good to make that claim. Maybe that battle was unwinnable, but she lost it. 

She is a woman of color

This is a multi-pronged issue. Did Harris run into the same glass gender ceiling as Hillary Clinton in 2016? As a woman of Black and South Asian heritage, did she suffer from racial discrimination? Are they related? The answers are yes, almost certainly, and it doesn't matter the connection. Not many people brought up Harris' gender as a negative but when they did, it was as a disqualifier. (No one brought up her race to me.) Paulo, in West Hartford, delivered a complex, biblical reason why men and not women should run counties, stemming from Adam and Eve. "Who messed up with the opportunity Adam and Eve have in the garden?" he asked. "The woman should be part of society but not that much ... they're so sensitive, they're not like men. We decide hard things." That's an unacceptable view for most of us but it's real and not just among people willing to admit it. Ask any woman.

Her support among Black and Latino voters eroded

Harris inherited the Democratic Party mantle at a time when Republicans were already making inroads among minority voters. The trend appears to have accelerated despite her being a woman of color. Over and over in Hartford and other places, including Meriden on Election Day, I met Black and Latino voters who set aside the politics of identity in favor of other factors. The numbers bear this out, as partial, preliminary results in Hartford and New Haven showed 22 percent support for Trump and in Bridgeport it was 30 percent. Those cities delivered far lower totals for Trump in 2020 against Biden and lower still percentages for him in 2016 against Clinton. That may be good for the country in the long run, as no party should own an ethnic or racial bloc; but it hurt Harris badly, especially in the swing states she needed to win. 

The wars, especially in Gaza, hurt

Voters didn't name the war in Gaza very often as an issue of high concern, much to my surprise. Still, the 13-month conflict between Israel and Hamas cost Harris some support on the far left, among pro-Palestinian voters who accused the Biden administration of genocide. Worse, it gave Trump the ability to contrast the Biden/Harris era, with that war and the Russian attack on Ukraine, with his own tenure of no new wars; and Trump played it up. As with inflation, rather than fight back by saying Trump laid the groundwork for these conflicts, Harris held to a moral and global strategic position — losing the battle over the wars. 

Harris didn't answer questions clearly

Her 2019 campaign crashed in large part on her inability to say why she wanted to be president. That didn't matter as much when it was just Harris vs. Trump. She didn't have to distinguish herself from similar candidates, only one who was dramatically different, giving voters a clear choice. Still, Harris' convoluted answers to questions haunted her in the campaign. When asked about whether she would pardon Trump, how she differed from Biden and whether she believed the economy was better for families in 2024 than 2020, she fumbled. You might think her inherent inability to offer clear answers is a lesser liability than Trump's inability to show empathy or compassion. In fact, over and over, his supporters, including Meriden Republican Town Chairman Joseph Vollano, who lost a bid for a state House seat Tuesday, said they don't need their leaders to be nice people. Harris supporters, by contrast, had to apologize for her word salads even if her underlying message was sound. 

Immigration crisis countered reproductive choice

Going into the campaign, Democrats had the ace-in-the-hole issue of women's rights and reproductive freedom. A Cheshire voter, with her tweener daughter in tow, told me Tuesday she voted straight Republican except for Harris, because of Harris' stand on that issue. (Not Rep. Jahana Hayes? Go figure.) But Trump and his supporters managed to stick Harris with a failure on immigration and border security that probably outdid reproductive freedom as an influencer in the campaign. This was partly unfair. Harris was never the "Border Czar" as Republicans charged and we simply never had an open border with Mexico. Migration slowed under Trump in large part because of the pandemic. No matter. I heard about immigration, border security and crime by immigrants from just about every Trump supporter, as if they were personally affected by it, which most were not. Harris' argument that Trump as a candidate cynically pushed Congress to kill a workable compromise on immigration — a correct charge — never stuck. Like so much of her appeal, it was too abstract. 

Harris lost the culture war

A large number of voters cited what they called Harris' extreme views on social-cultural issues such as taxpayer support for gender-affirming care, use of bathrooms, participation in female sports by non-cisgender women and girls and gender education. Ads for Trump included apparent comments by Harris that all prisoners should be entitled to medical care including gender affirmation surgery. Harris failed to clarify or defend her position in this and other culture war issues, preferring instead to wave it off as the ranting of the far right. It was not entirely the ranting of the far right. Some of it was citizens of places such as Southington, Coventry and Torrington, many of them older, looking for answers on a social debate that, rightly or wrongly, has them riled up. 

dhaar@hearstmediact.com