The uncontrollable factors that cost Kamala Harris the election

ANALYSIS: Little more than 24 hours ago, the Harris campaign was feeling confident they had made the right moves in the election.

But as the vote results are finalised, it has become apparent Kamala Harris' bid to appeal to everybody fell flat.

County by county, precinct by precinct, Harris did worse just about everywhere compared to Joe Biden.

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The swings to Trump were most pronounced among minority voters and the youth, but it was bad news for Harris everywhere.

In heavily Muslim Dearborn, Michigan, Biden won nearly 90 per cent of the vote, and Harris lost the city.

In Puerto Rican-dominant precincts in The Bronx, Democratic turnout nosedived.

In New York's heavily Jewish Lower East Side, Trump gained votes, but many Democrats stayed at home.

And on the Mexico border, Texas's Starr County broke the Democratic winning streak it had held since 1892.

Hillary Clinton won nearly 80 per cent of the vote there in 2016.

Harris got 42 per cent.

Post-election analysis tends to present the decisions made by the winner as ingenious, and the decisions made by the loser as idiotic.

But there was little criticism of Harris' campaign decisions before yesterday.

So what went wrong?

Clearly, Harris' strategy didn't connect with voters.

Criticism of Trump's policies, attitudes and foibles didn't convince Republicans to defect.

And an unambitious policy agenda didn't motivate Democrats to turn out.

With ballots still to count, Trump still has about a million fewer votes than he got in 2020.

Harris got close to 15 million fewer votes than Biden.

But Harris' biggest electoral problem was out of her hands.

Voters consistently said the biggest issues in this election were the economy and immigration.

Inflation may have cooled in the past year, but things haven't gotten cheaper and wages haven't risen fast enough.

And despite leaving office in the middle of a pandemic-driven recession, Trump still has the veneer of a successful businessman.

Immigration was also a huge problem and one that's hard to fix.

Amid a huge labour shortage in the US and economic downturns elsewhere, it was hard to stop the flood of migrants pouring across the border.

LIVE UPDATES: Harris calls with Trump and concedes 2024 race

Harris was also tarnished by the stink of her boss, Joe Biden, who has been deeply unpopular in recent years.

The vice president was reluctant to distance herself from the administration she serves in, and doing so would hardly make her look good to voters.

The swing against Democrats among both Jewish voters and Muslim voters offers some indication that Harris failed to thread the needle on Gaza.

The antisemitism during progressive campus protests appears to have harmed the left among Jewish voters.

But the administration's continued support of Israel clearly hurt them among Muslim voters.

There's also the unspoken hesitation voters would be unlikely to admit to pollsters – that they don't want a woman in charge.

We'll never know how many voters changed their votes based on gender.

It's also apparent Harris did not introduce herself to voters well.

The vice presidency is a great place for a politician to become anonymous, and when Biden dropped out of the race, Harris was rapidly elevated.

But with little more than 100 days to introduce herself to voters, she did not do enough.

She gave one late-night talk show interview, a handful of podcasts and remarkably few television news interviews.

Would changing any of these things have changed the outcome of the election?

Unlike the knife's edge result in 2016, Harris lost by millions of votes.

It's fair to conclude she could not have changed the outcome with her campaign decisions alone.

But that's cold comfort for Democrats facing another four years of Trump in the White House.