The Ultimate Analysis of the Election and What Democrats Need to do Next

Since everyone has taken a shot at it, here’s mine.

Donald Trump eked out almost a point and a half plurality over Kamala Harris. A margin this small can be explained by any number of factors. In no particular order:

• Trump’s charisma and lies
• Sexism/racism
• Mistakes in Harris campaign
• Late anti-trans ads
• Trump’s scuttling of the immigration bill
• “woke”
• Changes in preferences of Hispanic men, other demographic groups
• Inflation
• The war in Gaza
• Dying towns in the Midwest
• Social media
• Election day bomb threats
• Leftist purity tests
• Centrist insistence on blandness

Some of those contain quite a bit, and I’ve probably left out others. You may expand in the comments. Certainly several of these added together can make a point and a half difference. So everyone got it right! Congratulations, here’s your participation trophy!

There are a number of possible ways to respond to this. James Carville and other of the older generation of Democratic consultants have suggested throwing trans people under the bus. This sort of analysis can be applied incrementally to any individual point or combinations of points in the list. We could also throw women, Palestinians, and people stuck in dying towns in the Midwest under the bus, but excluding potential voters seems like poor strategy. But if you get it right, it can add up to two points! Unless you also lose some of that by narrowing down others.

I do think that Trump is a unique candidate, so that lessons from this election may not carry over to others. That’s another danger of addressing factors incrementally. Court Hispanic men, but they may be put off by whomever Republicans choose next time around.

The role of policy seems very muddled. Voters like Democratic policies when they are not labeled “Democratic.” They also impute them to Trump, even when he expresses the opposite. Again, this may be a phenomenon peculiar to Trump, although many Republicans are willing to lie.

Rather than an incremental approach, we might look at the people who have been winning elections for Democrats. Some of the wisest commentary I see on Bluesky comes from people who have organizing experience, two of whom don’t make a big splash there, and another being Mistermix from Balloon Juice.

Two organizers are running to be the chair of the DNC: Ben Wikler and Ken Martin. They’re turning things around in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Wikler has a campaign page up, and here’s more about Martin.

Unite. Fight. Win. I like that. I also have always liked that the party in Minnesota is the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.