1. trump is a popular, well-liked tv personality. people like donald trump. he increased his vote totals everywhere, swung states and made major gains in previously uncompetitive democratic strongholds. sometimes, the other candidate is simply better liked by more people and you lose not because you did something wrong but because the other guy was more popular.
2. that said, kamala harris was a female trying to appeal to minority voters as her base voting demographic and what the outcome demonstrated - and you'll have to handle the truth - is the well understood reality that black, hispanic/catholic, muslim/arab and other minority males have less equal views towards women of any colour than white men do. they were never going to vote for a black women.
3. further, kamala harris was a black person trying to hold on to majority white and rural states.
4. worse, kamala harris was completely unqualified to be president.
5. even worse, kamala harris had no substantive executive experience.
kamala harris occupies the intersection of {inexperienced, unqualified, black, female} and had to deal with compounding problems that had to do with all four of those concerns, and how they intersect with each other.
i stated on the day she was nominated that she was the worst candidate imaginable (that you couldn't imagine a worse candidate if you wrote a work of fiction about it) and that she was obviously going to get blown out. she had no remote chance of success, whatsoever. the results clarify that there was, as i suspected, somewhat of a bradley effect in the polling, for the first few weeks, before it wore off.
what could harris have done differently, then? she should have avoided running for president until she got more experience to become more qualified, and she should have been less black and less female. she could try going back to the senate for a while or running for governor of california, first. however, i think her career is over and she should retire; her 15 minutes are up.
the united states will probably eventually elect a female president, and may elect a black female president, but that female candidate is going to need to claw her way to the top on her own merits, not by being parachuted in as vice president after getting bludgeoned in the primaries as unqualified or by riding the coattails of her husband, as the candidate from 2016 tried to do. the eventually successful female candidate will need to be a two term governor or perhaps spend a lot of time in the senate. nancy pelosi would have been a more likely choice, if she wasn't already too old by the time she got into politics and if she wasn't herself also terrible. she will have to have a clear legislative record that people are comfortable with and support. she will have to aggressively prove that she is qualified by building experience that demonstrates it to everybody and she will be at a disadvantage in doing so; her bars will be set higher, and she'll have to meet those higher standards. that's not fair, but it's too fucking bad.
kamala harris, like hillary clinton, was simply a terrible candidate and she got beat by somebody that was better liked and more popular than her, but the fact that they were both terrible candidates allowed the republicans to capitalize on the overwhelming misogyny that is endemic in immigrant communities and on the latent racism in rural white america.
them's the facts.
deal with it.