Initial Election Thoughts

I saved any real commentary on the election until now so I could try and have something useful to say. Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. What I can say is that I basically agree with everything happening at this site, whether the posts of my fellow front pagers or most of the comments. There’s been a refreshing lack of nonsense or bad takes. As I will get to shortly, bad takes are everywhere right now and coming from the most insider Democrats or some rando equally. It’s kind of amazing. Anyway, I agree with my fellow front pagers, whether on posts of despair, of rage, of understanding the election in context. There’s a lot to process!

Personally, I’m extra pissed right now that thanks to the election making me sleep poorly on both Tuesday and Wednesday night, I fell asleep on the couch in the third quarter of the Ravens-Bengals game last night and I missed that complete insanity! FUCK YOU TRUMP!!!!!

However, I feel somewhat less despair than others, I think in part because Americans had a choice and by God they made their choice. And now they have to live with it. I feel more like I did in 2004 than I did in 2016. For me, that latter election is when Americans tore the mask off as to what they were. So I am ready to move on and work toward something better. We can talk about this later though.

So here’s 20 early thoughts. May expand on some of them later, depending on the comments.

1. I 100% agree with Scott and others that any examination of the election has to start with the fact that every democratically elected government that governed during the late pandemic and inflation that followed has been defeated, and most if not all by greater margins than Harris. If we don’t start with the broader context, we allow hot takes to take over AND miss the places in which we might do better in similar situations in the future. So it all has to start right there.
2. The second obvious point is that despite his excellent policies, people just hated the Biden administraiton and Harris was just too connected to it for those people. I don’t have many complaints about her campaign.
3. I had expressed a lot of doubt about the takes in these comments that abortion was going to put Democrats over the top and I was unfortunately correct. Hopium is always, always, always a bad idea. Never get high on your own supply. I don’t blame anyone for this; it’s a natural reaction to your hopes and probably to the conversations you are having with people around you. But I am not even remotely surprised that voters would vote for abortion rights and for politicians who oppose abortion rights. We have seen this for years and years with ballot measures on the minimum wage. The fact of the matter is that the low information voters who decide these elections simply don’t make the connection and they probably never will. That’s a fact we all have to deal with and organize around. If there’s one thing this election should do for us, it’s to reveal what the average American voter actually is. But you have to remember that you are a highly engaged person. You know what Trump is going to do because you pay attention. You are rightfully scared, angry, horrified, disgusted. The average voter? They don’t have a clue. They aren’t evil. Save that for the actual MAGA voters. The other group are people who are just totally disconnected. That we might be able to work with. But more to the point, you are not the average voter and you have to keep that in mind.
4. What is that average American voter? Not a fascist, no. A moron, yeah maybe. It’s really important here to separate out the MAGA fascist and the everyday voter who doesn’t pay any attention to any details at all. More on this below, but this is where you have to start your analysis. It’s completely fine to be angry with these voters. It’s completely fine to be outraged that these people chose Donald Fucking Trump for a second time after
5. There is no single thing that would have brought Harris over the top. I remain highly skeptical of ground game politics–sending postcards and giving tons of money to the consultant-industrial complex is not going to bring any candidate home. We need a different kind of electoral politics. But there’s no question that Harris did better in swing states where voters really knew it mattered than in non-swing states and on the margins, in a very tight election, that ground game would have made a difference. Whether that was the right way to spend all that money is a question that I’d like to see more positive proof for because we now have lots of examples of everyday people pouring ridiculous amounts of money into elections and it not making much difference.
6. All that said, none of the broader context has stopped anyone from giving their hot take as to What is Wrong with the Democratic Party and every single time it happens to be their preexisting position on the Democratic Party before the election. This is as true of some rando on Twitter as it is of the most deeply connected Democratic insiders. It makes me want to drown myself in a vat of chili. Even Cincinnati chili. Will it shock you that Bernie Sanders thinks Democrats have abandoned the working class, while Third Way people think it is that Democrats are too far to the left? It is a never ending spew of total bullshit. I think there are some lessons here, but they don’t match up with much of anything around my preexisting positions, I don’t think. You’d like to think that the people representing us in Washington and the people running these campaigns would have a more sophisticated take than angry Twitter dude, but they do not! It’s so frustrating.
7. There is one only type to take around the election that I am outright angry about and that is something we see too often in these comments, which is the idea that unions have abandoned the Democratic Party. There are so many lies about this that go back to the 70s! You know who a majority of union voters voted for in 1972? George McGovern. You know who a majority of union voters voted for in 1984? Walter Mondale. You know who a majority of union voters voted for in 2024? Kamala Harris. In fact, the vote share of union members between 2020 and 2024 was almost totally unchanged. Quit with the anti-union bullshit. Yes, we would obviously like union members to be more Democratic, but they are not the problem, despite class traitors such as Teamsters head Sean O’Brien. The problem though is that unions only represent 10% of the American workforce, so they can’t turn out the people they used to. Talk of the Democrats abandoning unions is actually true and we are paying for it today–Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Jerry Brown, even Barack Obama, a whole generation of Democratic leaders created this situation. Biden tried to do something about that, but his power is limited. But don’t blame the unions. They do the right thing every single time.
8. At the same time, there’s no question that Democrats did lose the working class vote and the middle class vote. Amazingly, the one area where Democrats actually increased their vote share was among rich people! Harris carried an outright majority of households that bring in over $100,000 a year. Meanwhile, she lost both the under $50K and $50-100K, both of which Biden had won, It was a complete flip! So we have to figure out why that is and then act on it. Democrats cannot become the party of the wealthy, if for no other reason that there are not enough of them, not to mention bad policies preferred by rich people. Of course, over $100K covers a LOT of ground and it’s unlikely Harris won billionaires, but in terms of sheer numbers, it does make sense to create a split here.
9. Part of the problem goes back to even Democratic insiders and campaign managers just missing who the voters are. The problem with the Harris campaign going all in on Liz Cheney and other Republican elites who hate Trump is not that this alienated progressives. There’s no evidence that this made any difference. The problem is that average voters have no clue who Liz Cheney is. Or even Dick Cheney. How many Trump voters even know that JD Vance is his new VP? I’d guess half or so? It’s just a waste of energy but yet Democratic campaign people seem to believed that anti-Trump Republicans exist. And they don’t. Again, the voter you have to bring on board is very low information and this stuff is just completely lost on them. Even the most highly paid and experienced Democratic campaign managers seem to not understand this.
10. One word on identity politics. A couple of things can be true at the same time. Transgender rights did not cost Harris the election while at the same time I think it’s pretty clear you can’t build a winning political coalition based around rights-based movements around relatively small numbers of people. Moreover, Democrats make the mistake of assuming that identity-based politics around their own group matter more to minority populations than the pocketbook. This is just objectively incorrect, especially with people of Latin American heritage. The Black vote came home for Harris, including Black men, so OK. But the same people who are going to be deported by Trump in 6 weeks voted for him, or would of if they could vote! In any case, I don’t see any evidence that somehow Democrats should abandon identity politics, but I do see plenty of evidence that it can’t ride as a central organizing theme of the party. No reason to throw anyone out of the coalition, on both moral and electoral grounds. But the Party needs to do a better job of creating connective tissue that meets voters where they are at, not where we are at.
11. This leads me to perhaps the most important point. The first principle of organizing is meeting people where they are at. Democrats have sucked at this. We often tell people what they should believe instead of listening to them and working with them. We can point to all the economic data we want to. If voters think the economy sucks, then the economy sucks. The truth doesn’t matter, not when its these low-information voters are who deciding the election.
12. As for the issue of how low information voters can act on their economic opinions by voting for the fascist, this is easy to answer–they simply don’t pay attention to any of that stuff. They aren’t you. They are vibe-voting.
13. So what do we do about this? Create our own vibes. It’s pretty clear that Democrats need to stop listening to their economic advisors when it comes to elections. It’s also pretty clear that Democrats need to do a much better job of building on their economic policies. This piece at TPM is a good view into the latter. Here you have all this amazing stuff the Biden administration did for the people of North Carolina. But the people of North Carolina have no idea that it was the Biden administration who did any of it. It would really behoove Democrats to go back to the New Deal and look at the government generated propaganda the Roosevelt administration engaged in to remind every voter that it was FDR who did this for you. LBJ learned a lot about that too. We have completely forgotten about it. The FDR propaganda makes Trump’s operation look like chump change. It’s so over the top. Meanwhile, the Biden administration even places signs on IRA-funded infrastructure projects that credit the “bipartisan infrastructure bill.” Huh? Talk about just giving away the game. In any case, this has always been my problem with the type of liberal who wants to improve people’s lives by, say, increased the Child Tax Credit. Everyday voters just aren’t going to connect that with you. It can be good policy, but if you don’t convince low information voters that it was YOU who did this, you gain nothing on it! FDR would never have made that mistake.
14. On the former point, let’s again go back to meeting voters where they are at. If you are an incumbent president and voters are complaining about the price of eggs, then you need to do something about that, going all the way to price caps if you have to. If they are complaining about the price of gas, declare war on the gas stations. These don’t even have to be good ideas from a policy perspective. If the point of a Democrat being elected is to protect immigrants and abortion rights and transgender people and everyone else vulnerable from Republicans, then you need to do what you need to do to ensure your reelection, including doing things that the Federal Reserve hates. And give Trump some credit, he knows that no one cares about the Federal Reserve. Attack them all he wants, no negative implications. Democrats need to learn this to, You can’t engage in good policy if you don’t win.
15. This also includes getting rid of some liberal pieties. This Rachel Cohen Twitter thread about why Biden’s Child Tax Credit wasn’t more popular is good because it gets to a key point–liberals didn’t want work requirements and that made the CTC less popular among those who are its recipients. Producerism and hard work is a very real thing! This is one thing that Democrats have struggled to understand about Latino voters. A story: a good friend of mine married a Mexican American woman. Her parents are from Mexico and he runs some agricultural operation in eastern Washington. My friend asked him about Covid shutdowns and he was like, what are you talking about, we are Mexican, we work. In other words, people who immigrated have taken their lives into their own hands in a hell of a lot more dangerous situations than Covid and I firmly believe that Democrats’ completely correct Covid response actually has hurt the Party long-term with Latinos for the same reasons that it was good policy. Work culture really matters. And they see Trump as a strong businessman who is going to put them to work. Just ask any Mexican American in south Texas why they voted for Trump and they will give you some version of this answer. Again, you have to listen to voters and then act on it.
16. So in short, I think we need to temper any thoughts about what to do within the broader context of global elections. But if do want to try and create lessons, it’s around connecting an actual economic populism with our current coalition. That doesn’t have to mean tariffs, but it does have to mean reaching to connect with people, not with smart policies per se, because they don’t care about that. It means connecting with big gestures, even if there’s a post-election price to pay when reality sets in. Because in the end, if you want to pull in voters, you have to listen to their concerns and act upon them. I don’t actually think this is impossible, but it’s pretty counter to Democratic governance for the last several decades.
17. There’s more to say about how to do all of this–media, propaganda, institution building, etc. Let’s save that for later.
18. Trump is going to blow this big time. A lot of people will suffer and will be surprised they are suffering. They are going to be shocked that their family members are being deported? After all, they just want to work! If he does create these tariffs and if he does deport the entire agricultural workforce, it will explode the economy and make inflation under Biden look like child’s play. So we can be ready to take the House in a big way in 2026 and temper some of this stuff.
19. Also, there is only one Donald Trump. This was his last election. It will take about 5 minutes for various characters to start infighting to have advantages going into 2028, all at the same time that Trump’s brain continues to turn to mush. People have tried to be Donald Trump. It never works. It didn’t work for Kari Lake and it didn’t work for Mark Robinson. Democratic Senate candidates consistently outperformed Harris because those Republican candidates just don’t have the Trump Thing that appeals to the low information voters.
20. Be depressed now. Be angry. Be despondent. This is the time for it. But by January 20, it will be time to fight and fight we must! This is a good time to study organizing. You know who have dealt with a hell of a lot worse than losing a presidential election? Every minority group in the United States. There’s a very long history of oppression in this country. And yet people found the will to fight back, You can do that too. Let’s work on it together.