Amid the welter of commentary and post-mortems among Democrats to explain Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump, there is one theory that has received widespread acceptance. The Democrats made a serious tactical mistake in concentrating too much on Trump, and spent too little time promoting positive messages about Harris.

Admittedly, Harris was an awful candidate – hectoring, annoying, a platitude-mongering avatar of political correctness, faced with the difficult task of defending an incumbent administration at a time when most Americans felt worse off after four years of the Democrats. She was hard to sell.

Labor can keep trying to convince voters that Peter Dutton is unelectable, but Kamala Harris made that mistake with Donald Trump.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen, AP

Nevertheless, the main pitch of the Democrats’ campaign was not to accentuate their positives, but to demonise Trump. They allowed their visceral loathing of him – their granite conviction that he was unfit for the presidency – to dictate their messaging and determine their strategy. Incumbents seldom win that way – particularly in a cost-of-living crisis.

The “demonise the alternative” strategy misses the point that, while for some voters – particularly those who follow politics closely – an election is a binary choice, for many others – especially the less politically engaged – an election is not so much a comparative judgment as a referendum on the government. If people are sick of the status quo, they will use their vote to........

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