I Read 87 "Why Kamala Lost" Articles. Only 20% Mentioned Gaza.

It is an objective fact: Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people hurt Kamala Harris's chances to win the White House.

If you don't believe me, here's a quick summary of all the evidence supporting this:

• Before the election, there were 30+ polls that showed Kamala would benefit from implementing a ceasefire and calling for a weapons embargo (link to list here).
• Two polls in particular showed a potential increase of 3% - 5% for Harris's vote share if she directly called for a weapons embargo (specifically poll 1 and 2 of the list linked above).
• Harris's position was direct parallel to Hubert Humphrey in 1968. When Humphrey broke with Johnson's unpopular Vietnam bombing policy (a very clear parallel to Israel), he then rose in the polls massively by 15% in a little over a month (I go over this in my previous analysis of the impact here)
• A post-election poll showed 29% of Biden 2020 voters said they didn't vote for Harris because of Gaza was the reason they didn't vote for Harris in 2024 (link here)
• Post election analyses directly connected the decrease in Democratic voter turnout to the genocide (link here to analysis).

Yet despite this significant amount of evidence proving the impact of Gaza on the election, as I read more and more "Why Kamala Lost" articles, very few, if any, brought up Gaza as a reason for why Kamala lost.

I constantly read about the economy, immigration, inflation and Joe Biden as the reason for Harris losing, but Gaza was almost always absent.

So I wondered: did "Why Kamala Lost" articles particularly ignore the genocide, or was it just a subset of articles I was reading in the wake of the election.

Turns out the answer was the clearly former.

Only 20% of "Why Kamala Lost" Articles Mentioned Gaza

In the 87 "Why Kamala Lost" articles I read, only 17 mentioned Gaza within the article.

This was a clear under-count compared to both generally popular topics ("Economy" at 57 and "Immigration" at 49 and "Inflation" at 48) and topics that became popular after the election ("Working-Class" at 40).

It's even less than "Trans/Transgender" mentions at 23 despite evidence saying this issue did not play a part in the election, certainly much less than the evidence that Gaza played an impact.

This tracks with the general disinterest from the media on the genocide, but it stands in stark contrast to the extensive evidence showing it had a clear impact, especially among Democratic voter turnout.

Major Publishers In Particular Avoided Mentioning Gaza

When we breakdown the mentions by the major outlets, this avoidance of Gaza becomes even more clear.

There were 16 publishers that had 2+ "Why Kamala Lost" articles in my list, and of those publishers, only one (Vox) had multiple articles mentioning "Gaza". The rest either had either one mention or zero.

And to be generous to these publishers individually, I opened up the analysis to include any mention of Gaza or Palestine or Israel. The results didn't change much.

Of the top four newspaper publishers, the NYTimes (8 articles), Washington Post (8 articles) and USA Today (4 articles) each have just one mention of either Gaza/Palestine/Israel.

The Wall Street Journal has zero Gaza mentions among it's six articles.

That's means, across the top four major newspapers in the US, there were only three mentions of Gaza across their 24 "Why Kamala Lost" articles.

Outside of Vox there is no Publisher I looked at that had more than 1 mentions of Gaza/Palestine/Israel across it's "Why Kamala Lost" articles, which is absolutely wild.

That's means, across the top four major newspapers in the US, there were only three mentions of Gaza across their 24 "Why Kamala Lost" articles.

"Why Kamala Lost" Videos Mentioned Gaza More, But Still At A Low Rate

In addition to the 87 articles I looked at, I also looked at transcripts for the 42 "Why Kamala Lost" videos on YouTube.

To determine these I looked at a mix of videos from top YouTube political channels (Ezra Klein Show, Pod Save America, Ben Shapiro, HasanAbi) along with just videos that had strong view totals when searching "Why Kamala Lost".

The results still had Gaza mentioned significantly lower than popular issues like "Economy" (34), "Immigration" (28) and "Inflation" (25), but in the same ballpark as "Working Class" (19) and the same as "Trans" (16).

All in all Gaza was mentioned in 38% of "Why Kamala Lost" videos, which is massive compared to the 20% for the articles, but still well below where it should be given the evidence showing it's impact.

Of these videos, which you can find under the "video" tab in the public spreadsheet here, there are two videos that I think are notably influential that don't mention Gaza at all.

First is the Post-Mortem Pod Save America interview with the Harris campaign, where they seemingly mentioned every single issue possible except Gaza.

I mean let's remember we had 30+ public polls showing the American people, especially Democrats, cared deeply about Gaza, yet the Harris campaign didn't even mention it in this interview as a reason why they lost. And the fact that not even the Pod Save host brings up this issue shows a clear effort to ignore this issue despite it's clear impact.

Second is the episode from the Ezra Klein show entitled "Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won", which is particularly egregious in the issues it mentions.

Specifically it's because the episode mentions TikTok 20 times (the second most issue of the issues I tracked), which was the platform that was the subject of extreme scrutiny because of it's association with Gaza in mobilizing young people.

And even though he mentions TikTok 20 times in the 83 minute episode, Ezra doesn't mention Gaza ONCE!

(Also Elon Musk is mentioned 11 times in the same interview)

This episode was actually the spark of me doing this work because I couldn't believe that this video didn't mention Gaza at all.

And yet sadly this was not an outlier, as a far majority of both articles and videos failed to mention the genocide.

In the wake of Trump winning, I had naively believed that there would have been an honest discussion of the clear influence the genocide had on the election, especially in regards to the drop-off in Democratic voters.

However, just like the months leading up to the election, the evidence points to traditional media continuing to ignore the impact of the genocide on the election, all while the genocide continues.

This ignorance is minimization of the genocide in every way possible, and it needs to be called out.

Appendix: Background On The List I Created

In total I read 87 articles along with 43 videos on "Why Kamala Lost". You can find the list here in this public spreadsheet.

If you want a quick summary of how I found these articles, it's a combination of the following.

• Manually searched the phrase "Why Kamala Lost" on the websites of the top 10 newspapers in the country
• Manually noting all the articles on the first two pages of Google Search for "Why Kamala Lost".
• Manually searched on YouTube for "Why Kamala Harris Lost" while filtering for both most viewed videos and well known political channels.
• Manually noted data analyses that came across my feed since the election.