So, What Had Happened Was...

Just another Monday (or, I guess, Wednesday) Morning Quarterback making sense of last week's disastrous presidential election.

This is where things got bad.

I was at my friend Alize’s birthday party at Russian Samovar when my optimism for Kamala Harris winning the 2024 presidential election flamed out. Dumplings and vodka samplers flanked me, and I was surrounded by some of the most beautiful women in New York City, but I was largely locked in on the election coverage playing on one of the televisions behind the bar and on my Twitter feed.

By nine p.m. I was doom-scrolling at the end of the dinner table along with some other guy at the party, watching panic build in real-time among the politics junkies I follow. By eleven p.m. I hopped into an Uber home and invited my friend David over; this was my first election without Rob, and I didn’t want to be alone. I was too upset even to get drunk (the same could not be said about him). By midnight, I emailed the veterinarian’s office to reschedule my cat’s annual checkup slotted that morning. By one a.m., all my hope was gone, and I watched episodes of The Inbetweeners as a distraction. By three, I was ranting on the phone with my friend Chloe. By four, I was ranting on the phone with my parents, who had already gone to bed hours ago. I woke up the following day and saw the headlines: Trump won. But I wasn’t sobbing like I was in 2016. This time all I can muster is a defeated “Well, this fucking sucks.”

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I’ve spent the last week engaging in a lot of post-election analysis. I can’t help it; I’m letting the former politics reporter jump out, and I have plenty to say in the wake of these results. It’s been a little over a week now since the election, and while votes are still getting counted, the following is clear: Trump won the popular vote by approximately two percent, the Republicans will control the House, and it appears that the Republicans will also control the House, by just a handful of seats.

Let’s just get into it.

A real happy voter…

I voted for Kamala but have been vocal about the aspects of her campaign that have disappointed me and the actions of the Democratic Party that I find baffling at best and immoral at worst: The party’s complicity in Israeli aggression and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, too much focus on attracting Never Trump Republicans, putting Tim Walz—a guy who had progressive clout—on the ticket and almost immediately muzzling him, the campaign’s embracing of the kind of neocons that would make a 2007 Daily Show lib crash out…

And let’s not forget: allowing Joe Biden to run for re-election in the first place when poll after poll for over a year showed that Americans believed he was too old for the job. His presidency should have been the transitional one he suggested it would be (shout out to reporter Astead Herndon for sounding this alarm for months), and we should have had a primary. The fact that it took a month of bullying to get Biden out of the race after his debate disaster was another misstep that I’ll be thinking about for a while (especially considering how many Democratic politicians and surrogates tried to convince us that this man was fit to campaign, let alone govern for another four years; that’s one surefire way to erode trust from both inside and outside of your base).

Yes, I think the right has done a better job at cultivating media spaces and echo chambers to spread their ideology. No, I don’t think that’s the main problem here. Yes, I think Kamala should have gone on Joe Rogan. No, I don’t believe it would have saved her. Yes, I think racism and sexism played a role in Kamala’s loss. No, those are not the only fucking reasons, you idiots.

There are a lot of uncomfortable truths emerging from this election. Primary among them is that many people are what I can only describe as vibe voters.

Trump was able to bumble his way through this entire presidential campaign: He rambled during speeches, clearly didn’t know what “asylum” meant in the context of immigration, parrotted a racist conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats, said he only had “concepts of a plan” when it came to reforming healthcare, and danced and swayed to “YMCA” and “Ave Maria” during a Pennsylvania campaign rally instead of, well, campaigning. Not to mention all those felonies. He is a shadow of his 2016 self; hell, he’s a shadow of his 2020 self.

And it still didn’t fucking matter.

Part of that is simply Trump’s unique appeal. It’s been nearly a decade since he entered our lives as a serious political prospect, and even these four years he has been out of power have been defined by Trumpism and its most loyal adherents. People still see him as the anti-establishment politician, the rebel, the outsider, the asshole who speaks his mind unabashedly, unafraid. People like that, and they see all of this coming from a rich guy they used to see on television, and they like it even more. 

But I think it’s stupid to attribute all of Trump’s success to this. I think it’s giving him too much credit. Much of this comes down to that old adage: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Economic vibes under Biden feel bad.

Even if Biden had dropped out and Kamala’s campaign had been gaffe-free, the Democrats would have had an uphill battle because rising costs dominated their reign. Global inflation fucked the Democrats. People usually do not re-elect the incumbent or the incumbent party stuck with an economic fallout.

“But wait!” some of you might say. “The economy is good! Our post-covid economy is so much better than our allies! Inflation is lower now! The stock market is thriving!”

This is true. But the economy being good on paper only goes so far. I think that part of the Democrats’ issue—and Kamala’s, thanks to her unwillingness to distance herself from Biden (more on that later)—was that the stock response to economic concerns was “the economy is good, actually.”

The average American doesn’t give a shit about the stock market. The average American doesn’t even know how to define inflation beyond “prices higher.” But telling them that inflation is lower when the cost of living is more hellish now than it was six years ago is a non-starter. Following Trump’s victory, I remember seeing liberals dismissively tweet that Americans were willing to throw marginalized people under the bus because they were upset about the price of eggs. Okay, sure, but I also think this is an unhelpful way to respond to people’s real concerns about making ends meet.

I don’t want to say that Americans aren’t bright. Instead, I’ll say that Americans are easily swayed. Trump swayed Americans into believing he would ease their wallets more than the Democrats. Even if the Democrats were fucked from the jump, they didn’t help themselves by allowing Trump to position himself as the change candidate while Kamala represented more of the same.

Kinder people than me insist that Kamala was stuck between a rock and a hard place because she couldn’t put too much distance between herself and the administration, where she was second in command. But Kamala would be associated with the Biden era no matter what. It would have cost nothing but Biden’s (clearly fragile) ego to throw him under the bus just a little for the sake of securing the country’s future from a fascist.

I’ll admit, I got swept up in the excitement after Kamala replaced Biden. Okay, the Democrats are willing to take a risk for once and switch things up? Great. Cool. Oh, Kamala’s team chose Walz as the VP? Thank God, I was gunning for him as soon as I heard him calling the Republicans weird. The Dems got a bump in the polls? Now we’re cookin’ with gas. Maybe they’ll turn this thing around.

There was an unmistakable vibe shift. Why the Kamala campaign didn’t do a better job of seizing it, I have no fucking idea.

Personally, the vibes were irrevocably damaged for me when Kamala scolded a pro-Palestinian heckler at a Detroit rally in early August. I remember tweeting that this was terrible optics and that there was a better way she could have handled this. I was yelled at, obviously.¹

I didn’t expect Kamala to embrace an arms embargo, but being so dismissive toward someone speaking out against the abject carnage that Israel has inflicted on Palestinians—a carnage that the United States continues to support—was…illuminating.

Whatever hopes anyone—in retrospect, naively—had of Kamala presenting a shift in policy or even tone toward Gaza evaporated. And it only got worse with the DNC, or, as I like to call it, The Ode To Joe Biden, Border Patrol, and Never Trump Neocons. That, amidst all this, Palestinians were denied an opportunity to even speak at the DNC was utterly shameful.

I realize that the prime audience of the DNC is not 30-something-year-old lefties in New York City, but still. They did all that and didn’t even get a post-convention bump. (Trump, meanwhile, did).

At least Kamala won the only presidential debate held against Donald Trump. It almost made up for her barely speaking to the press for weeks. But then, when she started… yikes.

Tell me why Kamala thought telling the American people that there would be no difference between her and Biden was a good idea.

When she trotted out this line on The View, I immediately groaned. Why, why would she say that? Why not at least offer a bullshit answer, riff on a list of laundry list items you would like to tackle during your first 100 days in office. Something! To say that you would change nothing except, maybe, have a Republican in your cabinet was one of the most foolish things Kamala could have said at that moment.

I thought, “If I were the Trump campaign, I’d immediately cut this into an ad.”

And what do you know? This became the clarion call of the Trump campaign and his surrogates: Kamala is business as usual. Why vote for business as usual?

A key slogan from Kamala’s campaign was “We’re not going back.” I liked it a lot. One of the problems, however, was that Kamala didn’t offer much of a vision of what going forward would look like. I’m not saying she didn’t have any good policy proposals. Hell, the fact that she was able to say the word “abortion” without treating it like a four-letter word (Biden) felt like a refreshing step in the right direction. But the most repeated lines coming from the Kamala campaign and its surrogates were charges of Trump being an existential threat to this country and…like…insisting she’ll be tough on the border. And if she wasn’t talking about that, she was going on about loans for enterprising small business owners. I’m being a little reductive here, but not by much.

In the days following Kamala’s defeat, I heard someone say, “Why was Kamala Harris sharing stages with Liz Cheney more than someone like Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers president?” I can’t stop thinking about that.

For many voters, Kamala didn’t need a new vision for America to get support. The idea of another Trump presidency was enough for many to put aside whatever they didn’t like about her campaign to support her. However, you cannot rely on Trump’s specter to win a campaign.

Yes, conditions now are uniquely ripe for a bleak and vindictive Trump presidency. I can’t even think about the future of the Supreme Court; I’m convinced that as soon as Trump is in office, Justices Alito and Thomas will take turns announcing their retirement, only to be replaced by the most evil Gen Xers imaginable. But while that threat feels more sinister now than it did in 2016, I suspect that the messaging of Trump as an existential threat to democracy began to fall flat. The same accusations were launched at Trump in 2016, but his presidency didn’t result in the complete crumbling of institutions. If even I, someone who is keenly aware of how Trump’s first presidency fucked us, doesn’t feel moved by this messaging, I struggle to see how someone who is clueless would.

Besides, it’s not like the Democrats are moving like Trump is the threat they’ve spent months (years) claiming he is. (Sup, Merrick Garland?)

I can go on and on about the things the Democrats did wrong. People are doing a better job at this than I am (I keep returning to this piece called “Exit Right” by Gabriel Winant). One narrative we need to dismiss entirely is this idea that Democrats lost because they ran on identity politics. In other words, they were too woke.

Maureen Dowd wrote an op-ed for the New York Times claiming the Democratic Party “embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation.” New York Congressman Richie Torres tweeted, “Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ or ‘From the River to the Sea’ or ‘Latinx.” Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton said Democrats were out of touch and spent too much time trying not to offend people. “I have two little girls,” Moulton told the Times. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

The thing is…the Democrats didn’t talk about woke shit at all during this campaign. Kamala barely acknowledged that she was a woman, let alone mixed race. Hell, Kamala spoke about her glock more than she did about trans kids. Nobody was calling for defunding the police or using the term “Latinx,” and there was no Democratic Party co-sign of pro-Palestinian protesters chanting that from the river to the sea Palestine will be free. Democrats running for Congress and Senate boasted about their support for strict border policies and how much they love cops. Talking heads have spent the last several days insisting that wokeness cost Dems the election.

Jon Stewart made this very point the other day on The Daily Show about just how nonsensical this claim is:

Most of these are 2020 talking points the Republicans were trying to make stick. It didn’t work in 2020, and it didn’t work during the 2022 midterms either. Either we’re supposed to believe that this took four years to finally work, or something else was going on that made this talking point more alluring to voters.²

To be clear, I do think that the right has done a good job of painting the Democrats as the Party of Woke, even when the actual leaders of the party don’t do anything to really justify this pejorative. That has been a turn-off for people. But throwing trans people under the bus isn’t what the party needs to do to start winning again.

Nothing has convinced me of this more than the down-ballot results. Kamala lost the swing states by a slim margin, but most Democratic senators competing in those same swing states beat their Republican challengers. Focusing on abortion wasn’t a flop because Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York had pro-abortion measures on the ballot, and they passed.³ Missouri—Missouri, a reliably red state—voted to increase the minimum wage and guarantee paid sick leave.

This election was more of a referendum on Biden and party leadership than a complete rejection of Democrats or the progressive policies they push.

The right relies on cultural grievances to divide voters. It depends on telling someone that the reason they feel alienated isn’t because corporate greed keeps them poorer, but because some Star Wars television show went woke. It relies on telling someone they can’t get a job because DEI hires are taking over. It relies on distracting people and blaming The Other for things that could easily be linked to capitalism, the erosion of unions, and both Republicans and Democrats deprioritizing safety nets for Americans.

Democratic Governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear, put it like this in a recent op-ed for the NYT:

So the way forward is not complicated, but it takes work and discipline. The focus of the Democratic Party must return to creating better jobs, more affordable and accessible health care, safer roads and bridges, the best education for our children and communities where people aren’t just safer but also feel safer. […] None of this means we abandon important values and principles. As governor, I have vetoed numerous anti-L.G.B.T.Q. and anti-choice bills, yet I still beat Mr. Trump’s handpicked candidate last fall. That happened because even if some voters might have disagreed with the vetoes, they knew the next day I would be announcing new jobs, opening a new health clinic or finishing a new road that would cut 20 minutes off their commute. They knew my focus and effort was on their daily needs and that our gains as a commonwealth would help every single one of our families.

There will always be an audience for cultural grievances, but as I said earlier, Americans are easily swayed. This can be a good thing. The Democrats need to do a better job at swaying them.

A part of me is convinced that this loss had to happen for the Democrats to get their shit together and (maybe, hopefully) clean House. Kamala still pulled impressive numbers considering what she was up against, but it wasn’t enough. Democrats lost millions of voters; how does the party get them back?

Democratic strategist and professional curmudgeon James Carville—the man behind the phrase “it’s the economy stupid,” by the way—lamented that identity issues have left a “stench” on the Democratic Party, and “now people are running away from it like the devil runs away from holy water.” 

I’m no Democratic strategist; I’m merely a humble observer. But it seems like the best way to counteract that is by giving them something to run toward.

1. But if I was wrong, why did Kamala soften her response to pro-Palestinian hecklers after this? Hmmm!

2. Again, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

3. This measure would have passed in Florida if the state didn’t require a 60 percent threshold for ballot measures to pass.