Post-election thoughts
Trying to write something which won't sound foolish in a few years
I've been slow to write this, because so many election takes offer certainty, and I am much less sure, but I think it's useful to put thoughts in writing as something to come back to over the next few years. It's clearly an important moment for American politics to have Trump see his greatest success in his third consecutive race. What I take from that, at this moment are:
Most importantly, the result of the election is deeply distressing. I am unhappy to realize that there's a decent chance there will be a Trump appointee on the Supreme Court for the rest of my life. I don't know what policy will look like under a second Trump administration but even if he falls short of his ambitions, the effect of Trump appointments to the court will be felt for decades.
It was a close election. Not as close as 2016 or 2020, but the results do not look like a political realignment. Going into the election it looked like Democrats had a durable advantage in the presidential popular vote, a significant long-term weakness in the Senate, and a likely advantage in mid-term and special elections. After the election, most of that is unchanged except the strength in the popular vote looks less reliable.
The biggest reason to see the 2024 election as a repudiation of the Democratic party is if you think that people voted for Trump despite disliking him1. However, after three elections, there's a lot of reason to think that, given the current political environment, Trump is, a formidable candidate. He is, first of all, excellent at getting attention and presenting himself as a larger-than-life figure. It's political conventional wisdom that the taller candidate wins more frequently and Trump always seems like the larger figure. Beyond that, his campaigns have consistently been good a turning out voters who are otherwise unlikely to vote2.
Beyond that, if I have one somewhat original comment to make about Trump, it is that he has managed to appeal both to voters who are attracted to a nostalgic sense of tradition and hierarchy ("Make America Great Again") and also people who dislike the status quo and want chaos or disruption. On paper that's a challenging gap to straddle, and he's managed it in each election. That's part of why each Democratic opponent has stuggled to define a clear competing vision of how they want to lead the country. They are stuck trying to argue for change but not too much, and not the wrong sort of change. The Democratic anti-Trump message ends up sounding like the Serenity prayer, which isn't compelling politics.
As an aside, whatever one things of the strengths and weaknesses of the Democratic party the faction that looks most adrift in American politics right now is anti-Trump Republicans. They have been extremely visible in the last two elections and, despite the claims of the Lincoln project, have had little success identifying a vision which is convincing to Trump voting Republicans. It is political conventional wisdom that a candidate who is vehemently opposed by a significant faction of their own party will struggle in a general election because it undermines their claims to leadership. In Trump's case that is one reason for his relative unpopularity, but it has never seemed to be a significant problem for his campaign.
Despite the election being close, the margin of victory was enough that it seems unlikely that any single factor made the difference, but I think the assassination attempt seems like an important event. At the time there was a flood of people who thought that would create an insurmountable advantage for Trump, and that seemed to evaporate after the switch of Democratic candidates and successful convention which made the race seem less predictable. But, looking at it now, the boost from Harris's nomination seems like an exception and the remainder of the race seems closer to the rest of the year in which the appeal of each candidate changed very slowly and in small increments. In that situation, it is important, as Nate Silver noted, that
Trump was very nearly killed in an assassination attempt, and then there was a second one against him. The first attempt was closely correlated with an increase in favorability ratings for Trump, and polling shows he’s considerably more popular and sympathetic than in 2016 or 2020.
That was also one of the events of the campaign which had the greatest coverage and was likely to reach people who otherwise didn't follow politics.
All of that ultimately means that most post-election commentary reflects concerns which are no more and no less true that they were before the election. If someone thinks that Democrats are too out-of-touch, or inclined to overly academic language, or that online leftists are often patronizing and off-putting -- or whatever other popular theories are offered for the election outcome -- those would be equally true if Harris had won. The main reason to emphasize them now is the hope that that they will find a more receptive audience following a loss and that some people who would have resisted that argument will find it more urgent now.
I think there's some truth to each of those critiques and, certainly, there's plenty of reason to want Democratic politicians and political strategists to find some way to improve. At the same time, most of those reflect basic dynamics of coalition politics. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are large enough to include large groups who are uncomfortable with some of the other members of the party. For whatever reason Trump has been a strong enough personality to largely bully through those tensions within the Republican party whereas the Democrats, at the moment, lack any figure with the ability to resolve debate through personal authority. So, instead, there's an opportunity for everyone to make an attempt to persuade other members of the party towards their own preferred priorities.
I think the attempt at persuasion is healthy and it remains true that for whatever seems like simple common sense to one Democrat there are likely very good reason why that doesn't seem as simple or as sensible to another. I myself am a fan of Michael Bérubé's 2018 piece, on the political fights after Trump’s first win.
ILLE: All right, fine. Tell me what’s wrong with Lilla’s diagnosis of Democrats’ electoral woes: “Rather than concentrate on the daily task of winning over people at the local level, they have concentrated on the national media and invested their energies in trying to win the presidency every four years. And once they do, they expect Daddy to solve all the country’s problems, oblivious to the fact that without support in Congress and the states a president under our system can accomplish very little.”
HIC: That is not wrong at all. Anyone who has followed the Democratic Party over the past 30 years and who has a functioning sensorium knows that the party has atrophied at the state and local levels. Hell, Republicans are this far away from being able to call a constitutional convention and repeal all the amendments except the Second. But blaming that on “identity politics,” as Lilla does, doesn’t make a fraction of a lick of sense. Take this bit, for instance: “[I]f identity liberals were thinking politically, not pseudo-politically, they would concentrate on turning that around at the local level, not on organizing yet another March on Washington or preparing yet another federal court brief.” I can take or leave some marches, sure, but you’re writing a book in the early days of the Trump Administration and you decide to piss on the women’s marches that constituted the first mass public show of resistance to the guy? More important, what’s this about “preparing another federal court brief”? Only someone with no understanding of American politics, someone even less literate about the separation of powers than Glenn Greenwald, would be so cavalierly dismissive of the judicial system.
My theory is that there a large segments of the population in which voting for a Democratic candidate is seen as disloyal. That’s a political challenge, but not a group of swing voters.
This article is an excellent overview of some of the nuts-and-bolts campaign decisions:
Trump was the overwhelming favorite among people who don't know or care how government or economics works. These folks are not uninformed because they haven't had an opportunity to learn about these things, but because they are defiant of any effort to teach them. It's a difficult problem, that no one has found a solution to.
Trump's campaign promised one impossible thing after another. This is why he's talking about Greenland. For people who view government as something that only happens on TV, as a reality show, this is all well and good.
It's been the problem for Democrats since Reagan. The answer isn't to adopt a set of equally impossible promises -- this loses the reality-based part of the coalition, and, as it turns out, a lot more white people like the fantasy of restoring white supremacy than like the fantasy of all peoples living in harmony. Similarly, a lot of men, of all races, like the idea of putting women back in their place. It's all such a bitter pill to swallow.
Anyway, because I don't think we're losing on policy, the answer isn't new policies. We're also not losing because of our candidate's attributes.