To be completely honest, I could probably have written a largely identical post a month ago, or even earlier. At that juncture, however, I would have come up against two valid counterpoints – that the polls were too close to call, meaning that it were still possible for my specific criticisms to end up as non-issues on election night; and that the Harris campaign had an “impressive ground game” to drum up voter turnout. We now know for a fact that this “ground game” failed, and quite spectacularly. We now know for a fact that Harris is on track to lose the popular vote to Trump, and by a very noticeable margin. We now know almost for a fact, pending final vote tallies, that a substantial majority of the drop in voter turnout relative to 2020 came on the Democratic side, at present about 12 million out of the total 14 million decline in votes cast. The Democrats failed.
So how did they do it?
Granted, as more data is revealed, more granular details will emerge for each particular jurisdiction. Nevertheless, some strategic and operational issues can already be readily identified, not the least because these are the same issues that surfaced in both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns. In effect, the Democratic Party employed the same playbook three presidential elections in a row, and their only victory out of the bunch came by a whisker, and, arguably, only because of the political effects of a truly monstrous pandemic, which is not quite something to reliably count on in every election cycle. And what are the key, the core, the most wrongheaded elements of this playbook?
Running to the right
For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.
Senator Chuck Schumer, 20161
The Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost that year in Pennsylvania, and in Ohio, and in Wisconsin, though, interestingly, not in Illinois. Regardless, the Democrats tried again, in 2020, and again, in 2024. The idea, apparently, seems to be that, on the one hand, core Democratic Party constituencies – ethnic minorities, and in particular Hispanics and African-Americans, labor unions, various “progressive” elements of the party – will vote for the Democratic candidate regardless, or can at least be scolded, bludgeoned, henpecked into so doing. As such, there is no reason to fight for them, or even to offer them more than some token bones – but “moderate”, affluent Republicans, now there is the real prize. Especially since on policy, the Democratic Party had shifted far to the right, into the “moderate Republican” end of the spectrum, as far back as the Clinton presidency in the 1990s. Obama said this openly in 2012, claiming in an interview that, if judged by his economic policies, he would have been considered a “moderate Republican” in the Reagan era2. Why, oh why, oh why, in that case, would actual card-carrying Republicans, at least of the “moderate” – read, affluent – variety, not wish to vote for any Democratic candidate?
Of course, it would not do to exercise basic logic – if the Democratic Party expects its core constituencies to vote the party line even if they are not getting any policy benefits out of so doing, why would the Republican Party not exercise precisely the same control over its core constituencies, especially as on policy they were getting something out of the arrangement? In fact, Politico‘s key election takeaways this morning include one that reads “Harris’ gambit for Liz Cheney Republicans fell flat”3, while one of post-election charts being whipped around by CNN and reposted around social media sites – alas, I am yet to locate the original for an appropriate citation – suggests that the same percentage of registered Republicans, 94%, voted for Trump in both 2020 and 2024.
This is a stupid strategy. This is a failing strategy. This is a strategy that can do nothing but depress and suppress your own base, not the least because, will wonders never cease, core Democratic voters, at least in terms of numbers if not party influence, prefer Democratic policies, not Republican ones. And this is a strategy that the Democrats have doubled and tripled down on, reaching the heights of absurdity when a public endorsement of Harris by Dick Cheney, the earthly personification of evil itself to any Democratic Party activist active in the 2000s, which were not all that long ago, was touted by the Democratic media as a positive for the Harris campaign. Harris openly campaigning with Liz Cheney, one of Dick’s daughters and a former Republican member of Congress, was just extra whipped cream on this particular turkey.
I am not, nor have I ever been, an avid fan of former President Obama. I did not like nor agree with many, many of his domestic policies, which ultimately set the stage for Trump’s right-wing populism; his foreign policy was downright irresponsible, and continues to harm US interests, never mind the world as a whole, to this day; and only the selfish shortsightedness of congressional Republicans, especially during the so-called “Grand Bargain” negotiations in 2011, prevented him from doing even more harm to the American people or the American society. Yet the man knew, and presumably still knows, how to win elections, how to campaign, how to present himself to voters. And especially during the 2008 campaign, he presented himself not as a “Liz Cheney Republican”; he cast himself as the heir to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a champion of, if you will, a new New Deal for the American people, a bipartisan pragmatist, to be sure, but one whose values and policies descend directly from the Democratic Party of old, and speak to every conceivable concern of rank-and-file Democrats. He was lying, of course, as became clear even in the very first few weeks of his Presidency. “My administrations is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” said he to a group of bank CEOs4 just as the financial crisis of 2007-2008 was bottoming out, and he meant every word. But on election night, the people were not voting for a “moderate Republican in the 1980s” – a comment, by the way, he made only after making certain of winning the 2012 election. They were voting for what they had thought a Democratic President is supposed to be. And the results speak for themselves.
Now, the Democrats do not even pretend, or lie, at least nowhere near as effectively as they used to, and for some unimaginable reason, the proverbial dogs refuse to eat the equally proverbial dog food, and Democratic turnout suffers. No-one could ever have predicted such a thing.
Why do you want to be President?
Political campaigns, to a significant extent, are about presenting the voters with something concrete to latch onto. It may be something that, in reality, is quite inane, or completely unworkable, or will never get past Congress, or will actually harm, not help, the particular voters. But the idea is that most general slogans are only so much noise. Instead, a voter must hear some tangible promise that will address, in their mind, their specific problems, real or imagined, in the here and now.
In other words, slogans such as “many eminent economists have endorsed my economic plan” will mean nothing to most voters. Certainly not as much as – “we are going to put a 200% tariff on China, bring back our industry, and create well-paying jobs”. The latter statement may make no economic sense, at least in the current economic and political circumstances, and the policy described may actually be harmful for the average American, in effect constituting a regressive tax. But it gives the voters something to believe in, even if in error, a tangible event or chain of events that will address an equally tangible problem, namely the rising cost of living and falling real incomes. “Some eggheads you’ve never heard of liked my plan that I will not elaborate on” does nothing of the kind.
It was not all bad for the Harris campaign. When the campaign website finally put up a policy section, after weeks of being scolded for not doing so by even the most mainstream of media sources, I sat down and read it, and, without diving into a detailed breakdown, in particular as the election is now over, there were some – a few – a mere handful, really – tangible proposals there. Pretty much all of them in the form of tax cuts or tax credits for this or that constituency, and none of them speaking to a large proportion of working-class voters. Restore the Child Tax Credit? Well and good, and it should not have been permitted to lapse in the first place, but how about those who have not yet had children, or those whose children have already grown? A $50 thousand tax credit for startups? Fine, but how many of the average working-class voters in, oh, say, rural Pennsylvania even dream about starting the next Microsoft in their garage as opposed to simply getting through the daily grind at their less than well paid job? There was literally no “there” there, no big “hook” of a proposal, no concrete measures promising to address concrete problems, just a set of promised giveaways – empty promises, at that, as even before the Republicans captured the Senate yesterday most of these tax cuts were unlikely to get through Congress – separated by reams of largely empty rhetoric. Indeed, well over three quarters of the so-called policy bullet points provided no specifics whatsoever, instead focusing primarily on how Trump was a Very Bad Guy. And speaking of which…
The banality of lesser evil
My favorite election slogan of all time is an old online joke from some fans of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. “Vote Cthulhu – why choose the lesser evil?”
The problem with the so-called lesser evil elections, of which we have seen plenty in the past few decades, is that they give people nothing to vote for, especially if the purported “greater” evil does not seem all that frightening. We have all collectively survived the first Trump term; calling Trump a Nazi, a threat to Democracy, the coming of the Antichrist, whatever else, and defining one’s candidacy as “I am not that guy”, may feel good, and may even register with voters on some level. But it did not even really work in 2016, when roughly 40% of all voters chose to stay home and take their chances. It certainly did not work in 2024. People want to vote for something, not against something. The Trump voters did not so much vote against “comrade Harris”, as for what they believe, however wrongly, Trump will do for them. Even in 2020, voters did not so much vote against Trump as for someone, ironically, Joe Biden of all people, who would save them from the terrible threat that was the Covid-19 pandemic.
To be sure, because the Democratic Party establishment has moved far enough to the right to be virtually indistinguishable on major policy positions from their Republican colleagues, at least once you strip away the flowery rhetoric and account for some tactical differences, they cannot simply promise the voters something they have absolutely no intention of delivering. Well. Obama could, I suppose, and so can Trump, but that’s different. Those guys actually win elections, at least a majority of the time. Irony aside, in the past few electoral cycles the Democratic Party has increasingly run up against a reckoning with its rightward shift. Witness the Bernie Sanders insurgency in 2016 and 2020, and at the end of the day, the actual platform he campaigned on was not much more than a return to the Democratic Party platform of 1965. Will this mean, as some would speculate, that the Democrats will eventually share the fate of the antebellum Whigs, and split apart altogether? Will the Democrats consign themselves to eking out an occasional narrow win with their “lesser evil” strategy and the odd helpful exigent circumstance? Here is not the place to speculate on such matters at any significant length, however in the meanwhile, occasional narrow victories seems to be all the party is capable of, or even wants.
Footnotes:
- Geraghty, J., “Chuck Schumer: Democrats Will Lose Blue-Collar Whites but Gain in the Suburbs”, National Review, July 28, 2016, retrieved November 6, 2024[↩]
- Swanson, I., “Obama says he’d be seen as a moderate Republican in the 1980s, The Hill, December 14, 2012, retrieved November 6, 2024[↩]
- Stokols, E., Wren, A. Shepard, S., Haberkorn, J., “6 takeaways from Trump’s stunning win over Harris”, Politico, November 6, 2024, retrieved November 6, 2024[↩]
- Javers, E., “Inside Obama’s bank CEOs meeting”, Politico, April 3, 2009, retrieved November 6, 2009[↩]