The Morning After

I left my Watch Party at 9:30pm, it felt too much like 2016 over again.  And I don’t like to cry in public (fact is, I don’t cry, I get angry at my own team’s fecklessness).

John F Kennedy took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, lo these many decades.  Since then, what person in the public eye, especially among politicians, has taken responsibility for any screw-up?  You have a week to come up with one name!

Hillary Clinton wrote a book pushing blame on others for her loss to Donald Trump in 2016.  FBI director James Comey making news in the last days of the campaign, deliberately intended to damage Clinton.  Fact is, in the last weeks of the campaign, while Trump held in-person rallies in battleground states, Clinton hosted fund raisers, to pay for what exactly?

Democrats blame Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s loss to George W Bush in 2000.  Nader won some 92,000 votes in the state whose Secretary of State was in Bush’s camp and a Supreme Court that voted party-line, all the while declaring that their decision should not be used as precedent in the future.  Bush won by some 500 votes because SCOTUS refused to allow a recount that was mandated under Florida law.  Fact is, Gore lost Tennessee, his home state, he didn’t need to win Florida had he won Tennessee.

Now this.  How in hell did Kamala Harris not whip Donald Trump?  Stupid, uninformed MAGA voters?  Fact is, Trump received no more votes than 2020, adjusting for inflation; and Harris fell ten million votes short of Biden’s numbers in 2020.  Harris didn’t make Clinton’s mistake of minimizing the importance of retail politicking.  And she was fierce!   What, then, went wrong?  For starters, Joe Biden’s approval numbers were never good (perception always trumps reality in politics; it was Harris’s job to prove that things were better than four years ago), and her numbers were worse than his.  And she only had three months and change to make her case and change peoples’ minds.  Her message was change, but she didn’t distance herself from her boss’s record, and she did that rather clumsily.  She was explicit about only a few things: a ban on price gouging (especially in grocery stores).  How, exactly?  She advocated $50K federal loans for small business startups and a $25K down payment assistance for first-time homeowners.  Oh, and a middle-class tax cut.  But how would she pay for all these goodies?  It was a Republican, Dick Cheney to be exact, who claimed that “deficits don’t natter,” that they don’t hurt politically, because voters could care less about deficits and the Debt.  Last, but surely not least, Harris ducked interviews with Joe Rogan, Time magazine, CNBC and Bloomberg News.  My "formula" (see my book, Stop the Steal) for what wins elections is: Principles + Messaging + Retail Politics + Fight --> Trust.--> Winning.  In sum, Harris failed at messaging, big time.  She messaged poorly and voters interpreted that to mean she didn’t know what she stood for.  Fatal to winning voters’ trust and winning her election.

Like Clinton and Gore, Harris had only herself to blame for her defeat.  Sad.  I had such high hopes for not having Trump win the White House.  The moral of this story is: you can't fault the winners (Trump, his campaign, and MAGA voters) for winning! We Democrats have our work cut out for us!

Addendum: Sunday, 11/10/2024

My nephews sent me this article, Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? The author's thesis is simple: blame the right-wing media for Trump winning. But the right-wing media didn't get going in 2020, it has been a factor for decades. And it feeds low information voters, what Trump calls his "poorly educated" base. Here is my reaction.

• Democrats since JFK don't like taking the blame for their own failures, like most of us.
• What Jeff Bezos did, overruling his editorial staff's endorsement of Harris, was unforgivable. But did it cost Harris votes? Not in DC, not in Maryland, not even in purple Virginia (240,000 Harris plurality).
• It is not like TV's Fox news has no liberal TV competition. MSNBC, CNN, all the networks. But they all aim at educated voters. Democrats began to abandon white working class voters decades ago. Why would they NOT watch a news source (Fox) that doesn't think they are stupid?
• Trump won Arizona by about 200,000 votes, but Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for the Senate, as MAGA as it gets, lost her race by 50,000 votes. Explain that, Michael Tomasky (author of the New Republic piece).
• Newspapers across the country endorsed Harris overwhelmingly.
• Trump supporters are aware of liberal bias and liberal doesn't work for them anymore. Fox didn't capture them, Fox gave them a place where they feel safe. This is from my book, Stop the Steal.

Nearly two generations ago, Democrats abandoned their core constituency – the working poor and middle-class whites. Democrats traded this constituency for getting out the vote and identity politics (non-male, non-white, non-Evangelical, not straight, and well-educated). It hasn’t worked out so well, has it? We lose more elections than we win, even though we outnumber Republican voters by a large margin. I am NOT suggesting that we embrace what Trump calls his base, “the poorly educated.” But if we want to win big again, we should consider educating our poorly educated fellow citizens.

Tomasky, you are wrong: Fox News was not the reason that Harris lost, Fox News is a symptom of American disaffection with liberalism. Of poorly educated voters – with real "grievances" – that the Democratic Party abandoned decades ago. There is only one solution that will work for the Democratic Party going forward: they need to lead the charge of educating our fellow-citizens, big time. As long as our "poorly educated" can wear that slight as a badge of honor, we are in trouble, not only as a political party but as a nation. Fix THAT!