A lot of hand wringing and recrimination are underway in the Democratic orbit over Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump. It was a loss to be sure but it may not have been much more than that. Let’s conduct the autopsy.

1) Donald Trump was a more dynamic and charismatic candidate. Not necessarily in a good way, as those qualities have also been possessed by some of history’s darkest political figures. But he is and always has been all but impossible to ignore. Donald Trump literally sucked all the political oxygen out of the room during the entire campaign and Kamala Harris was hard pressed to compete for national media attention.

2) Another huge problem was the lack of a legitimate Democratic presidential nominating process. The Democrats had their excuse ducks all lined up, we didn’t have enough time for a full nominating process, Joe Biden endorsed Kamala Harris, she only had 5 months, etc. At the end of the day the Democratic presidential candidate was picked by the party not by the voters again and that was reflected in the low turnout among democratic leaning voters.

Democratic process continues to be a serious problem for the Democratic Party. It’s a tightly controlled corporate-style organization that puts control above all. The base is something they take great pride in managing. That for sure is killing voter enthusiasm.

If the Democrats can come up with what the voters view as a more compelling candidate, repeat: this would be in the eyes of the voters, then it is entirely conceivable a comeback might well be achievable.

3) The assassination attempt in Butler Pennsylvania was a huge moment in the campaign. For a candidate running for public office an assassination attempt can either very good or very bad for your campaign. It all depends on the path of the bullet. The bullet grazed Donald Trump’s head piecing his right ear. Trump ever the showman was bloodied but undeterred, he was playing to the crowd even as his Secret Service detail was pulling him from the stage. He saw and understood the political benefits and did not hesitate to seize the moment.

4) Gender and race bias are always on the table as concerns in US elections. Were those factors in play in the Harris-Trump matchup? It’s a difficult thing to quantify, but you have to wonder if being a woman of color didn’t hamper Kamala Harris’ campaign. What we do know is that Donald Trump had more baggage going into the 2024 campaign than any other candidate that has ever run for the office and Harris had a spotless and distinguished career in public service. You decide.

But here’s the wildcard, would Michelle Obama have fared better? There’s a large contingent of Democratic leaning voters that think she would have.

5) The criminal prosecutions of Donald Trump were always a concern. There were two schools of thought, the analysts and experts who cautioned that criminal prosecution would make a martyr of Trump, popularize him and engender empathy for him and the opposing camp who argued that the rule of law is the core of the republic and that to ignore Trump’s blatantly criminal conduct would be to encourage more of the same on a far wider scale. In totality, at least in the short run the criminal prosecutions appear to have rallied Trump’s supporters and aided his rise to a second term as President. In the long run the stand taken by state and federal prosecutors bodes well for justice in America.

Also worthy of note is that what helped get Trump voted out of office in 2020 was his performance during his first term. It was literally one long continuous calamity. What we are seeing, still weeks out from his second swearing in is reminiscent of that first term chaos and quite likely predictive of what is to come.