Post Mortem

Here we are

I’ll start with a couple of brief notes on the election itself. First, so much for what I said in my last pre-election post about Trump’s 47% ceiling. It looks like he’ll finish with between 50-51% of the popular vote. That’s not a landslide, but it is an outright win, electoral college aside. And on a related note, even the great ones have an off night. And boy did the highly touted pollster Ann Selzer have an off night with her final pre-election Iowa poll, when she had Harris up by three in a race Harris lost by double digits.

As happens after any win, no matter how close, the analysis purports that the win was foreordained and a reflection of deeper forces that not only explain what just happened, but point toward a future inescapably defined by what just happened. Jon Stewart has a good reminder of why that kind of thinking often looks very silly in retrospect. I’ll have more to say about that in future posts.

With that out of the way, let me try to identify, as a very rough first cut, some of the longer term dynamics that poked through in this election and which I think we need to take seriously.

As the political philosopher Corey Robin wrote on Facebook yesterday (yes, people do philosophize on there!), scholars, politicians and activists have spent the better part of the past two centuries wondering/lamenting about why the less well off are so often attracted to parties of the right, when those parties so consistently pursue policies antithetical to the material interests of the less well off. This observation is often tied to the notion of “false consciousness,” the idea that people would naturally vote for parties of the left if only they understood how much better off they would be if parties of the left had power.

It’s obvious to me that the Republican economic agenda is bad for the less well off, including many who voted for Trump and other Republicans in 2024 (and for decades before). I’m not trying to make excuses for that, so much as to try to make some sense of it in the context of our politics. But the premise of this kind of determinism is that people think, or ought to think rationally and facing forward. In reality, we think in terms of narrative, by telling ourselves stories about how we got to where we are and what that might mean about where we’re headed.

The three issues that Republicans emphasized the most in 2024, at least judging by the 600 billion ads I was subjected to these past three months, were inflation, the demonization of immigrants and the demonization of transgender folks. I can explain why each of these issues does not reflect what Trump and his ilk say they do, why none affect people’s lives in the way Republicans have told them to imagine, especially the latter two. About inflation, it spiked dramatically in 2021-22 largely because of supply shocks related to the pandemic and then very predictably receded, though prices remained elevated for some goods and services, like car insurance, that people can’t help but notice. On immigration, the story is nearly the opposite of the nauseating version Trump has championed - immigrants make our country better off, including by ensuring lower prices(!), not worse off. And whatever policies exist to accommodate transgender folks have miniscule to non-existent consequences for anyone else.

But the story that Trumpists were able to sell to many Americans was that all of these things meant that something was being taken away from them - that ordinary Americans’ well-being was being sacrificed on the altar of profligacy, chaos and wokeness Democrats promoted. People are naturally defensive and especially sensitive to a sense of loss, making a resource-scarcity mindset easy to activate. This has certainly been true in the time of Covid. That doesn’t mean every person who voted for Trump did so primarily for these reasons. But that framing clearly landed with many people. For their part, Democrats’ most potent issue, the end of Roe and the denial of women’s basic rights to bodily autonomy (in their case, in actuality) also prompted a powerful, defensive reaction. But the Harris campaign and Democrats generally were not able to place the rollback of Roe and its attendant deprivations in the context of a larger narrative of loss in the way that Trumpians were their key lines of attack. And for a whole host of reasons, I don’t believe parties of the liberal-left can ever win consistently by appealing exclusively to narratives of loss. They have to make an affirmative case for the public good that goes beyond demonizing and punishing their enemies.

A long time ago, the pundit Matt Yglesias coined the notion of the “pundit’s fallacy,” which is "the belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively." In the current context, that has meant that a lot of people who have long believed Democrats need to move more to the center have taken Trump’s victory on Tuesday as proof that, lo and behold, Democrats need to move to the center. And many people I read and admire who have always thought Democrats need to move to the left have taken Trump’s victory Tuesday to mean that, yes, Democrats need to move to the left, specifically in a more economically populist direction.

Neither account sufficiently integrates material concerns with feelings of psychic security. To take one example, it’s true that the immigration issue is killing center-left parties everywhere, including in places where there’s barely any immigration at all. Democrats have to face that reality, not just by hoping the issue will go away or by belatedly mimicking the right. They need to make a positive case for the benefits of immigration, including to folks’ pocketbooks, while also acknowledging that without some limits and order to any functioning immigration system, it will be easy to prey on that feeling of precarity that is always available to exploit, making the issue toxic to Democrats’ entire agenda. I’m not an expert on the issue, and I am not trying to lay out a policy paper. I am trying to articulate what I think is the importance both of recognizing the potency of the issue, like it or not, and not to cede all of the rhetorical framing to the right. Indeed, Democrats need to spend much more time than they have explaining clearly how cynical and in bad faith Trumpian framings of the issue are. Anti-immigrant demagoguery serves one overriding purpose - to convince people that the demagogues are on the side of the common person against the elites, when the opposite is true. Democrats need to say that, all the time.

It’s always been something of an overstatement and mischaracterization of Trump’s base to say that he does better among the less well off. Even categories like the “white working class” belie how complicated our social divisions are. There are plenty of well-off folks who don’t have college degrees, for example. But it is true that over the past decade, especially, that the Democrats have become the party of the college educated and particularly the post-graduate educated. Meanwhile, the preliminary exit polling data suggests that Trump made inroads in 2024 among more moderate and low income voters including, it appears, a larger share of non-white, especially Hispanic voters, than he had in 2016 and 2020, though the least well off, by and large, did not vote for him.

Ezra Klein wrote today that those of us on the losing end of this election can feel either contempt or curiosity for those who voted for Trump and admonished that if “these last years have proved anything, it’s that liberals don’t get to choose who is marginalized.”

I’m not here to lecture people who feel resentful or contemptuous of those who would vote for such an obvious con man. Believe me, I get the feeling. But mindful of Klein’s admonition, I do think we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Specifically, that on the one hand, we unrelentingly point out the lies, the corruption and bad faith, the contempt in which Trump and his coterie so obviously hold so many of his own supporters. And on the other, we fight not only for humane policies but that we take seriously the feelings of vulnerability of at least some of our Trump-curious compatriots and make the case, ceaselessly, for why we’re better prepared to address those than the Trumpists are. It’s nothing earth shattering. Just a reminder that we cannot just let policies that we think will help people, like expanded Obamacare subsidies, speak for themselves.

To paraphrase the old saying, people do not live by bread alone. Delivering material goods will not, by itself, win people over. And this isn’t just because the United States and its center-left party delivers less to the less well off than other countries. On domestic policy, I do think the Democratic Party has become better at thinking and trying to act big than it did two or three decades ago. But it’s doing worse among a significant chunk of those that somewhat more robust policy agenda is designed to help. I know plenty of folks think that’s because it’s still so inadequate and others who think it’s because liberals have leaned too heavily into “identity politics.” But the fact is that in Germany, France and elsewhere, all places with more solid (if under duress) safety nets and where identity politics look very different, many of the same kinds of dynamics are at play. While a significant slice of the electorate actively thrills to Trump’s mendacity, there are plenty who voted for Trump *in spite* of that, because they feel other needs aren’t being met.

Let’s get smarter about how to talk about that.

Constructive comments welcome.