There are 1,000 convoluted theories floating around on social media that purport to explain why Donald Trump won the presidential race. But some Democrats and people on Kamala Harris’s campaign have concluded that one very significant reason is a straightforward one: It proved disturbingly difficult to persuade undecided voters that Trump had been a bad president.

Internal testing in all the battleground states over the course of many months yielded a result that unnerved the campaign, according to a senior Harris campaign operative who has seen the data. It was this: Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency—even if they saw these things negatively—were his fault.

This was the case on two of the biggest issues in the campaign—the 2020 economic crash and demise of reproductive rights, the operative told me. The result: The good pre-Covid economy during the Trump years largely defined undecided voters’ impressions of him, and no message about his first term could persuade them to the contrary.

To be clear, this assessment does not mean voters are to blame. Rather, one culprit here might be President Biden. Because he stayed in the race too long, undecided voters viewed the post-Covid status quo and the very real pain of inflation only through the prism of their dislike of Biden, which blotted out hopes of attuning them to arguments about Trump’s culpability in all of it, the operative said.

Some Democrats believe that the leading pro-Harris Super PAC, Future Forward, failed to spend enough of its enormous budget on advertising early on that might have reminded voters of the horrors of the Trump presidency. That perhaps allowed him to slowly rehabilitate himself and edge up his favorable numbers while Democrats weren’t looking.

“There was a calculation among Democrats after 2020 that Trump was........

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