Harris Warns "Remember The 30's" And Forget The 81 Million Votes

At the Australian Real Estate Conference (AREC) on the Gold Coast, held May 25-26, 2025, former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a stark warning during her hour-long on-stage interview, urging the audience to “remember the 1930s” as a lesson for today’s global political landscape. She indirectly criticized figures like Elon Musk, condemning the idea that empathy signals weakness in Western leadership, tying this mindset to the authoritarian rise of the 1930s, while advocating for strength through “curiosity, concern, and care for others.” Harris also tackled AI’s rapid growth, highlighting its risks to jobs and misinformation, and called for safeguards for vulnerable groups, blending her prosecutorial skepticism with a nuanced take on innovation that underscored her thoughtful approach—an approach many now see as more coherent than Joe Biden’s in 2020.
 
Looking back at her 2024 presidential campaign, Harris’s AREC appearance highlights why many consider her a more formidable, cohesive, and thoughtful candidate than Biden was in 2020, though it also raises questions about the mysterious drop-off in Democratic voter turnout between 2020 and 2024. Biden secured 81 million votes in 2020, a record driven by anti-Trump sentiment and a unified Democratic coalition, but Harris, despite a compelling campaign emphasizing “freedom, compassion, and rule of law” over “chaos, fear, and hate,” only garnered 75 million votes in 2024, leaving observers puzzled over where those 6 million votes went. Harris’s campaign showcased clarity on issues like the cost of living, abortion rights, and bipartisan border control, contrasting with Biden’s 2020 run, which often stumbled over his age, verbal gaffes, and a failure to connect with working-class economic frustrations, as later detailed in Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson—a stark contrast to Harris’s ability to emotionally engage voters, even if it wasn’t enough to overcome Trump’s battleground state sweep.
 
The confusion over the missing 81 million votes Biden received in 2020 deepens when examining Harris’s 2024 performance, which, despite its strengths, couldn’t replicate Biden’s turnout. Harris stepped into the race late after Biden’s July 2024 withdrawal, yet still mounted a dynamic campaign that addressed future challenges—like AI’s societal impact, as reiterated at AREC—while Biden’s 2020 effort leaned heavily on nostalgia and was criticized for being out of touch, per Stan Greenberg’s analysis in The American Prospect. Some speculate the 6 million vote drop reflects voter disillusionment with Democratic governance amid economic woes, or even distrust in the electoral process, with X posts from 2024 questioning turnout irregularities in states like Pennsylvania and Georgia. Harris’s AREC speech, blending historical insight with forward-thinking policy, reinforces her as a candidate who could articulate a vision more effectively than Biden did in 2020, but the unresolved mystery of the vanished votes underscores lingering questions about the Democratic base’s engagement and the broader political landscape in 2024.