Post Election Thoughts
What happened on Tuesday was surprising, though, in retrospect, perhaps it shouldn’t have been. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t expect Trump and the Republicans to win. I thought it was going to be close, but that in the end Harris would barely squeak by with a victory, and I was already preparing myself for the struggle with the liberal order. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. Far from it, the Republican party managed to not only win 312 electoral college votes, but were also able to also secure the popular vote by nearly 4 million votes. Furthermore, it appears as though they will also gain control of the Senate and House and will more than likely be able to extend the existing super-majority they hold in the Supreme Court once Thomas and Breyer retire. In short, this election was a bloodbath for the Democrats.
But why? The proximate cause is that the Democrats simply couldn’t turn out enough people to their side. As of writing, the total number of votes for Harris is 70,980,347 compared to Trump’s 74,708,848, while in 2020, Biden got 81,283,501 votes with Trump receiving 74,223,975. Thus, it appears that Trump’s base remained as large as it had been four years prior, but that the Democrats shed some 11 million voters.1
This may very well be true, but it has the same ring to it as being told that the Yankees lost because the Red Sox scored more points. Cool. A better explanation would, at the very least, tell us why the Democrats were unable to mobilize their base, and a full explanation—at least one that I think would be worth paying attention to—would be able to answer that question while grounding it in a material analysis. I am afraid that I don’t have the skills or knowledge to give this full, grounded explanation, but I want to posit some answers that attempts to go beyond the trivial.
First, I think it’s fair to say that despite the numbers posted above, the Biden administration did not have anything close to a mandate to rule over the last four years. For some significant majority of Donald Trump’s supporters, the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and, for perhaps an equally significant majority on the Democratic side, the Democratic primary was likewise stolen. One can’t forget that going into Super Tuesday, Biden was nowhere near the top choice.
In short, Biden was nobody’s first or preferred choice, but there was a tenuous agreement within the Democratic coalition that despite all the Super-Tuesday fuckery, a democratic presidency would be preferrable to another Trump term. So, people held their noses and voted for Biden on the unstated assumption that a) he would be a one-term president whose term would allow the Democrats to build their bench for 2024, and that b) he would make some attempt to address the issues around the primary (e.g., COVID, healthcare, college debt, immigration policy, minimum wage, Trump’s brazen criminality, etc.)
Over the next four years it became apparent that none of the items of b) would be addressed affectively: COVID relief was stopped; Universal healthcare was off the table despite the continuing pandemic; the minimum wage remained at $7.25; Trump’s immigration policy became the Democrats’ immigration policy; attempts to forgive college debt were stopped by the Supreme Court; Trump’s legal charges weren’t addressed in time. Furthermore, a whole lot of other things that weren’t on the table got much worse: Roe was overturned and there was never any clear plan as to how something like it could be reinstated2; the railroad workers strike was broken; inflation skyrocketed; the war in Ukraine devolved into a meat grinder; Israel began its ethnic cleansing campaign of Gaza; student protests on campus were brutally repressed. At every turn, whether accurately or not, the Biden administration was perceived as either incompetent at handling a crisis (e.g., handling inflation and securing women’s reproductive rights) or unwilling to do anything (e.g., student protests and Gaza).
For each of these problems some limp defense was offered: the COVID relief checks already included the $600 sent out under Trump; college debt relief had to be means-tested; the railroad strike would have ruined Christmas; there really were too many immigrants at the border; inflation was due to disruption in supply-chains; Israel has a right to defend itself; and so on. Whether any of these defenses were justified didn’t matter because none of them made a difference to the fact that most people felt like things were getting worse. It doesn’t matter, for example, if the much touted infrastructure bill helped reduce inflation in such-and-such sector if, at the same time, a box of cereal still costs $10 and every time you look at your phone you see a Palestinian man carrying the remains of his children in a plastic bag.
All this was made worse when it became obvious that he was reneging on the assumed promise of being a one-term, interim president, and doubly worse when it became apparent that he was in severe cognitive decline. After it became obvious that the Democrats would lose if they ran Biden on the ticket they made a further mistake: they didn’t hold a primary in which candidates could have distinguished themselves from the disastrous Biden administration, but instead picked a deeply unpopular member of that very same administration by selecting Harris as the new candidate.
For a moment it looked as though this might work, but I was always struck by how quickly people seemed to forget that a) when Harris ran for President in 2020, she was even more unpopular than Biden, that b) she was mostly known as being incompetent and seemingly drugged out during her tenure, and that c) when she wasn’t shuffled off to do the most unpopular and degrading tasks by he bosses she was d) never thought about at all. This was the position she was brought into and it’s not clear that anything was done to try to correct this broad impression that people had other than, of course, to insist that it simply wasn’t true! More than anything, however, what made Harris’ candidacy abortive from the start was that she was simply never able to separate herself from Biden, for whom she still worked, and whose goals and projects she was associated with. She could neither criticize the policies that made Biden unpopular nor, incredibly, offer any alternatives to them, retroactively, or for the future.
If you were a disaffected Democratic voter who had been disappointed with Biden and for whom it looked as though things were getting worse and worse, the Harris campaign’s message that essentially nothing would fundamentally change could not possibly have been a mobilizing one. There simply was nothing there for you—no positive vision you could conjure to motivate you to vote for the party.3
Instead, such folks were told to imagine how much worse things could get under Trump, and to not-so-subtly insist that everyone, regardless of their politics, material conditions, or values, had a moral obligation to continue the status quo, not because it would be good to do so, but because of what the alternative would be. Such an argument might have worked twice before, but it’s obvious that even it can’t be used indefinitely, and not because it’s false that the alternative would be worse, but because people become inured to abstract fear and pay more attention to their actual, concrete worries.
Worse, the party’s response was not to adjust in response to this fact, but to pivot to catering to moderate Republicans. For the life of me, I can’t understand why the campaign decided that the endorsement of the Cheneys would solve their problems. How many people did they genuinely think there were who wouldn’t have voted for Harris but for the endorsement of one of the most unpopular former congresspersons and her war criminal father, associated with one of the most disastrous Republican administrations in recent memory? Were there as many as ten such people in the country?4
So, going into election night the Democratic Party had run an unpopular candidate, with no positive vision of the future, promising that nothing would change to an electorate who thought things were already going badly. As it turns out, the cost of these mistakes is 11 million voters along with all the things that we were rightly told we should be afraid of with a Trump administration. A job well done.
We will have to live with the consequences of these mistakes for at least two years and perhaps as long as a generation.
That’s my initial diagnosis, but I don’t want to leave you, dear reader, completely depressed. I do think that we’re in a terrible situation, but I want to share the two things about which I’m oddly optimistic.
First, it’s important to remember that we tend to imagine the Trump Republican party as marching in ideological lock-step. I think this is far from the case. I suspect that there are a number of factions within the Republican camp, all of whom are fighting for influence in the new administration, and all of whom are under the whims of the ideology-free Trump. Some will be able to flatter their way to being in his inner circle, but I doubt any given faction will be able to both soothe his ego and get their plans through. The biggest worry we, on the left, should have are those places where the various factions agree (e.g., favoring business, gutting federal regulations, and so on). Even there, it’s important to note that agreement in principle doesn’t necessarily mean agreement about priority, and that, too, will be important for a Trump administration being effective.
Second, although I’m not holding my breath, it is possible for there to be a radical Democratic Party realignment in a more progressive direction. If such a realignment is to occur, I doubt it will be because of some internal soul-searching. Rather, I think it would come from outside—either from having to respond to other left-leaning parties’ pressure, or from a general populist revolt from the Democratic base who is unwilling to compromise with policies of the existing party. In either case, this creates a great opening for leftist agitation and for a revival in working-class politics. As much as I hate to say it, maybe it’s possible that the accelerationists are right about at least some things, and maybe something better will come from this ignoble failure.
In any case, a lot more work will have to be done.
Stay strong, everyone.
In 2016, 65,853,514 people voted for Clinton while 62,984,828 did for Trump.
The best plan I could work out seemed to be to continue to elect Democrats for the next 40+ years, with the hope that every Supreme Court justice who retired would be replaced with a progressive until…uh…I guess a different case were brought up? I’m honestly not sure what the plan was supposed to be and I’m even at more of a loss about what it’s supposed to be now.
Least of all if you were one of the young people beaten by police on campus who would have been expected to canvas and turn out the vote!
The only approximately reasonable thing I could work out was that the Democrats were so delusional about their eventual success that they were already trying to consolidate power over the two parties on the assumption that the bourgeois elements of the Republican party would flee once Trump lost again. What a way to count your chickens before they hatch!