In the final sprint to the election, Kamala Harris’ campaign — at her insistence, aides and allies said — started playing Donald Trump’s most incendiary comments on the jumbotrons at her rallies, displaying in technicolour his meandering, racist and, sometimes, violent rhetoric.

It was an emphatic reminder of the stakes of the election. And it hardly seemed to help her at all. The result Wednesday was brutal for Harris, a bloodbath for Democrats across the map.

She inherited a campaign from Joe Biden over the summer that appeared to be flatlining, given the president’s unpopularity and inability to carry a message. And after Democrats excised Biden from the ticket, she rapidly consolidated her moribund party, rallying women, setting TikTok and Instagram creators ablaze with supportive memes and raising eye-popping sums from donors.

But the momentum advisers insisted she’d built failed to materialize. She never sufficiently buried Biden’s ghost, severely hamstringing her ability to sell voters on the idea that hers was the turn-the-page candidacy.

It happened, simply, because Harris refused to make a clean break from the last four years when voters indicated that’s what they wanted. Worse, she hesitated to draw any daylight between herself and her boss on Biden’s biggest vulnerability — his stewardship over the economy — nor identify any specific way her presidency would be different from his tenure beyond naming a Republican to her Cabinet.

Some close allies and even a few aides privately questioned why she continued to hold him so closely, particularly because her campaign didn’t try to make extensive use of their record.

Yet inside her campaign, there was little sense Harris should bear the brunt of the blame, with aides pointing to how she moved battleground numbers in her favour and held down Trump’s margins, and a pervasive feeling that Biden and broader anti-incumbent fervour put her in a difficult, even impossible position.