As with any election cycle that goes badly for the Democratic Party, writers, pundits, activists, blowhards, intellectuals, and party leaders immediately start doing post-mortems on what went wrong and who is responsible. And that’s fine. Somewhere in there you’ll find something more helpful than spiteful and self-serving. But it’s always useful to look at analysis from before the results came in. This is the reason I bookmarked the piece Nate Cohn published in the New York Times on November 2nd: Why Are Democrats Having Such a Hard Time Beating Trump?
It wasn’t making a prediction that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz would lose, but it explained why they very well might. The starting point was that people were unhappy with the Biden administration and the direction of the country.
Democrats clearly face headwinds in this election. In the last New York Times/Siena College poll, only 40 percent of voters approved of President Biden’s performance, and only 28 percent said the country was heading in the right direction. No party has retained control of the White House when so many Americans were dissatisfied with the country or the president.
It’s always been somewhat of a mystery why Biden never was popular. I don’t think he ever had good poll numbers after the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, but I really don’t think the American people cared all that much about that mess, at least not in a way that would sustain disapproval for years afterward. Pandemic restrictions were probably a big factor, but nothing seems to have soured the American people more than inflation.
But we should be careful about looking for things that are too specific to America.
The Democrats’ challenge appears to be part of a broader trend of political struggles for ruling parties across the developed world. Voters appear eager for change when they get the chance. The ruling parties in Britain, Germany, Italy, Australia and most recently Japan all faced electoral setbacks or lost power. Mr. Trump himself lost four years ago. France and Canada might well join the list.
The real consistency is that in the post-pandemic world, incumbent parties lost badly as soon as people went to the polls. In some places, like the United Kingdom, the right was wiped out. In other places, it was the left that suffered a bloodbath. In France, it was Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party. Ideology did not seem to matter, as the voters were not responding to ideological overreach or unpopular party platforms. They just wanted to punish whoever was in charge.
Knowing this, the Democrats had a very good reason to replace Joe Biden on the ticket. This is irrespective of his record, his age, his debate performance, his race, his gender or his religion. The mere fact that he was the incumbent almost ensured he would lose. I think we should give the party credit for not waddling into the threshing blades without making a change.
My personal opinion was that Harris wasn’t enough of a change since she was the vice-president. I also had concerns that she would not be a strong candidate, based on her campaign for president in 2020. On that score, I was pleasantly surprised. I think she did a fantastic job of presenting herself. I think she ramped up Biden’s pre-existing reelection machine in an impressive way. I have no complaints about how she did on the stump or with the media, and her debate performance was outstanding. It wasn’t enough. Would a different candidate have fared better? Perhaps, but the process of choosing someone else would have ripped the party apart, making it hard to present a united front. And it would have been harder to finance a new candidate.
There are some things specific to America that Cohn noted:
In the United States, post-pandemic disillusionment and frustration took a toll on Democrats. The party championed a tough response to the virus, including mask and vaccine mandates, school closures and lockdowns. It had backed the Black Lives Matter movement, argued for a more liberal border policy, sought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and spent trillions on stimulus. As the pandemic ended, all of this quickly became a liability.
I think people need to take seriously the pendulum swing Cohn describes here:
Since 2008, Democrats and liberalism have been dominant in American politics.
Democrats won the popular vote in four straight presidential elections. When they held full control of government, they enacted the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank and the CHIPS Act; they saved the auto industry and spent billions on renewable energy, infrastructure and more.
Liberalism has been ascendant in the culture as well. The period was marked by a series of popular movements on the activist left, from the Obama ’08 campaign to Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Bernie Sanders campaign and calls for a Green New Deal and Medicare for all.
The election of Mr. Trump didn’t stop this outpouring of liberal energy. Instead, it accelerated it. His election alarmed and outraged millions, who saw him as racist, sexist and a threat to democracy. The murder of George Floyd and the pandemic only added to the outrage, leading to a vigilant and righteous new left that preached antiracism and coronavirus restrictions. It culminated in a wave of protests and so-called “woke” progressive activism on race and gender.
Over just the last few years, all of this liberal energy suddenly seemed to vanish. The backlash against pandemic restrictions and the woke left gradually went mainstream, and even divided liberal institutions. Trust in the media, “experts” and scientists plunged. Younger Americans took to social media — perhaps with the help of algorithmic changes — to vent their frustrations with an aging president, high prices, lost opportunity and anger at a system that wasn’t working for them.
At the same time, the events that followed the pandemic took a serious toll on the case for liberalism, whatever the precise merits of the arguments. Inflation and high interest rates could be blamed on high government spending stimulating excessive demand. High gas prices could be blamed on suspending drilling permits and the termination of the Keystone pipeline project. A surge of migrants could be blamed on the administration’s looser border policy, which became politically untenable; homelessness, crime and disorder made the case for “law and order.”
On issue after issue, Democrats have responded by moving to the right.
It’s important to not get bogged down on the merits of these critiques but rather to acknowledge that there was a shift in the mood of the country and that the Democrats noticed and reacted to it. The zeitgeist was unmistakably moving to the right, which put the Democrats on the defensive. The ad I saw the most during the campaign here in Philadelphia had a clip of Harris from her time as California attorney general saying she supported allowing prisoners to get sex changes on the people’s dime. It was part of a broader anti-Trans campaign that exceeded $215 million dollars, and it reportedly tested so well that it shocked the people running Trump’s re-election effort.
As Cohn notes, young people were displeased with high rents and an overall housing shortage, as well as inflation generally, and young men appear to have joined the backlash against some of the so-called “Woke” agenda.
Against this, the Democrats were facing an historically bad candidate with every kind of liability conceivable. But that was only enough to put them about even in the polls once Harris replaced Biden. It gave them a fighting chance not enjoyed by incumbent parties in other countries, but it proved insufficient.
There is no doubt that as a woman of color, Harris faced additional challenges. And there’s no question that she didn’t run a perfect campaign with optimal messaging. There’s always room to improve, and there are theoretical scenarios where she could have done marginally better.
If the law had moved more swiftly against Trump after January 6, it’s possible that he wouldn’t have been the candidate or would have been too damaged to win. But the truth is that if he had not been the candidate, this election would have been a much bigger slaughter for the left. His glaring weaknesses are the only reason it was competitive.
Having said that, the Republicans not named Trump often ran behind him, which shows up in several Senate races where Democrats prevailed even as Harris lost the state. I think Harris was the only Democrat who lost statewide in North Carolina. The anti-incumbent mood was much more focused on the Biden administration than the state or local politicians. Does this mean that Trumpism is more popular than the Republican Party? I think that question is a bit tricky to answer. Trumpism is definitely more popular than McConnellism with the Republican base, but generally speaking I think both lack robust support from the electorate at-large.
Before I conclude, I want to address a couple of things from Jeet Heer’s article in The Nation entitled: This Time We Have to Hold the Democratic Party Elite Responsible for This Catastrophe. First, I want to introduce some analysis that I largely agree with:
The key to understanding the Trump era is that the real divide in America is not between left and right but between pro-system and anti-system politics. Pro-system politics is the bipartisan consensus of establishment Democrats and Republicans: It’s the politics of NATO and other military alliances, of trade agreements, and of deference to economists (as when they say that price gouging isn’t the cause of inflation). Trump stands for no fixed ideology but rather a general thumbing of the nose at this consensus.
The main fact of American politics in the post-Obama era is that an ever larger majority of Americans are angry at the status quo and open to anti-system politics. Trump won as the candidate of anti-system anger in 2016. In 2020, he suffered the liability of being the status quo even as Covid was ravaging the world. But by 2024 he was able to return again as the voice of change, bolstered by the fond memories many Americans have of the economy under his presidency—and of the temporary, but generous, expansion of the welfare state under Covid emergency measures.
I think the pro-system, anti-system formula is quite good and instructive, and I believe it applies globally, not just to our specific experience in America. And that’s largely why I disagree with much of the rest of Heer’s analysis which focuses on Harris’s efforts to win over Never Trumpers and suburban college-educated women as a cause of her downfall. Frankly, as I’ve already mentioned, I don’t think tinkering with the message was likely to have much effect.
If you’re familiar with this blog, you know that way back in 2017, I wrote a Trump/Clinton post-mortem feature piece for the Washington Monthly called How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values that talked about the flawed strategy of relying on an unstable urban/suburban alliance against Red America. So, I’ve been making a version of Heer’s argument for economic populism for a long time. But a main plank of my argument has been the Democrats need to deal with the monopolization of the economy. As my brother points out, the Biden administration has by far the best record on that in recent memory, and it didn’t break through. Sure, this was in part a failure of messaging throughout Biden’s four years in office, and Harris should have done more to highlight their record, but I just don’t believe she could have won if only she’d hit this harder in the 100 days she had to introduce herself and campaign. If it was going to win back rural voters, it needed to be a sustained message originating with the president, not a last second adjustment by his replacement.
Additionally, I don’t really believe Harris focused too much on Never Trumpers or suburban women. Abortion was her strongest issue, followed by Trump’s record and personality, which was best critiqued by the people who worked closely with him during his time in office. She leaned into these strengths, but not exclusively or at the expense of other messaging on entitlements, tax cuts for the rich, and other economic issues.
I still think the suburban/urban alliance is unstable. It has failed in two of the last three presidential elections, and there are signs of erosion with the urban working class that may grow. Suburbanites are highly sensitive to taxation and crime, and are not natural or inevitable Democrats in an economic sense and even in some cultural senses. To win consistently, there’s no way to avoid the need to do much better with rural voters, and the only way to do that without sacrificing liberal values is to organize and message against the hollowing out small businesses by monopolization. Having someone like Elon Musk in charge, will help with that messaging.
The truth is, as frustrating and terrifying as our situation is, pointing fingers isn’t likely to be that productive. This was an almost impossible election to win for reasons that were mainly out of our control. I had hope that the people would choose sanity over fascism, but inflation is fascism’s best friend, and now we have the worst crisis on our hands we’ve faced since the Civil War.
That’s really my main takeaway. Inflation kills democracy.