Eeyore
Remember all those gloomy posts I wrote when Joe Biden was in the race? Remember how you all told me I was an Eeyore who was bumming you out with my knee-jerk pessimism? Now we know: I was right. I was right about how compelling a figure Donald Trump continues to be in the eyes of 75 or 80 million voters. I was right to be pessimistic, and it's clear that I should have remained pessimistic even after Kamala Harris entered the race.
Trump is seen by millions as a capable problem-solver because most Americans experienced at least the first three years of his presidency as a reasonably nice time, and because decades ago he was the main character in fictionalized books and a fake reality TV series that told us he has the magic power to make great deals without breaking a sweat. They don't know that he knows nothing and that he lucked into a good economy, and that he presided over a sustained period of relative stability because he'd surrounded himself with capable people of a kind he'll never hire again.
Democrats and Republicans agree that Democrats are bad
A couple of days ago, Frank Wilhoit wrote something in the comments here I largely agree with:
People vote their emotional compulsions, which, by definition, are purely destructive; that is why all voting is negative-partisan. Trump will get one vote: his own. The votes that are recorded as his will be votes against, not Kamala Harris, but the Democratic Party and its constituencies. Comparably, Harris will get no votes at all; the votes that are recorded as hers will be votes against, not Trump, but the Republican Party and its constituencies.Republicans have controlled American politics since 1980, either from positions of power or as a minority party blocking liberal and moderate change. Millions of Americans see the Republican Party as the normal party and the Democratic Party as the party responsible for all bad things. It's for the reasons Frank gives: Republicans denigrate Democrats every day, while Democrats offer olive branches to Republicans and praise at least some of them incessantly.
History is on the side of the Republicans here, because they understand what is going on; that is why they focus exclusively upon degrading the Democratic brand. We do not understand.... We should have spent every moment of the past forty-five years screaming total rejection of the "conservative" pseudophilosophy, and nothing else.
I don't know whether Kamala Harris's outreach to Republicans cost her votes, but it sent the message that being an ordinary Democrat is bad. It says that Democrats are good only when Republicans approve of them.
In this election, Harris lost and Democrats lost winnable Senate seats while voters embraced Democratic positions in referendum after referendum. In Florida, a referendum overturning the state's six-week abortion ban failed to win a 60% supermajority, but it won 57% of the vote. Florida also voted to return Trump and Senator Rick Scott to office by double-digit margins. Missouri approved constitutional protection of reproductive rights -- and gave both Trump and Senator Josh Hawley double-digit wins. Trump won Kentucky by more than 30 points, but an amendment to allow private and religious schools to use public funds lost by 30 points.
Democrats never tell voters, You support abortion rights. The Republican Party doesn't. You support universal background checks on guns and an assault weapons ban. The Republican Party is unalterably opposed to any restrictions on guns. You support higher taxes on billionaires. The Republican Party wants taxes on billionaires lowered. You support public education and oppose book banning. The Republican Party opposes public education and supports book banning.
Frank goes on to say,
It is too late now; one cannot suddenly "discover" a problem that has been in being for decades and try to whip up any urgency around it.I'm not sure that's true -- but I suspect we'll never find out, because Democrats will never stick up for their party or regularly enumerate the flaws of the GOP.
Maybe ground game is meaningless
Every reporter who looked at the story agreed: Kamala Harris had a very good get-out-the-vote operation. Donald Trump's was outsourced to Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk, and it was terrible.
But apparently that didn't matter. As late as yesterday, I was reading stories and social media reports telling me that a typical Pennsylvania voter might get seven door knocks. But does that work? Many of us who aren't in swing states but give money to Democrats get repeated texts and email messages asking for more and more money. Don't we all find that annoying? Then why wouldn't a Pennsylvania voter who's being bombarded with TV ads, web ads, and mailers find it annoying to get multiple door knocks, phone calls, and texts?
Trump's get-out-the-vote operation was himself. It was being on TV every day, and appearing with surrogates his voters liked, Elon Musk in particular. Being visible is how he won.
But didn't voters think Trump is crazy?
I think Trump's voters see him as an angry Andy Kaufman. You don't know what he'll say on any given day when he takes the stage.. You can't tell whether he's doing a bit or has actually lost his mind. But you can't look away.
At the end of the campaign, Trump looked tired and his rants sometimes seemed incoherent, but he wasn't Joe Biden, who frequently stops speaking while he gropes for the right word or phrase. Trump just keeps going until his sentences and anecdotes end somewhere, then he looks pleased with himself and moves on. I think millions of people think he sounds like a normal guy on a talking jag, not like a dementia patient -- or, actually, a normal funny guy. They laugh at his jokes. I can't explain it.
Which brings me to Biden
This race was lost years ago. It was lost when inflation soared and President Biden didn't seem focused on the problem.
I criticized Matthew Yglesias's recent New York Times op-ed, which argued that any other Republican would have won this race easily. (As it turned out, Yglesias was wrong about Trump -- Trump actually was winning the race easily.) Yglesias's argument was this:
... almost everywhere you look in the world of affluent democracies, the exact same thing is happening: The incumbent party is losing and often losing quite badly.We now know that Harris's well-run and engaging campaign couldn't overcome this. But the race might have been different for her or Biden if Biden had been able to persuade voters that he cared and was working hard to make their lives better.
It appears that the unhappy electorates are unhappy in fundamentally the same way. Inflation spiked, largely because household spending patterns seesawed so abruptly during and after a global pandemic, and though it’s been tamed, prices of many goods have not fallen to what voters remember, and what’s more, the process of taming has involved higher interest rates, which in their own way raise the cost of living.
In 2012, voters were dissatisfied with the slow pace of recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. In late August 2012, 61.3% of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track, according to the Real Clear Politics average.
But Barack Obama could talk. He could make an eloquent case for himself and against his opponent. He seemed vigorous and hardworking. Joe Biden never persuaded voters that he had a handle on the problem of inflation. You and I know there's not much he could have done, but if he'd seemed engaged, Democrats might not have been in quite as deep a hole.
Interest rates are terrible now. I lived through the era of double-digit inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but credit card interest rates are higher now than they were then. In 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president, inflation was 12.5% and credit card interest rates averaged 17.3%. Now inflation is only 2.4% -- but credit card interest averages 21.76% for existing cards and 23% for new cards. And:
Half of credit cardholders surveyed in June as part of Bankrate's latest Credit Card Debt Survey said they carry balances over month to month. That is up from 44% in January....We needed a president who seemed to get this. Biden didn't, and so Trump won.
One-third of U.S. adults (36%) have credit card debt that's higher than their emergency savings, according to Bankrate's findings. That's the same amount as a year ago and the highest since the personal finance site began asking the question in 2011.
And also, America is massively sexist
Sixty countries have had female heads of state, but it's starting to seem as if America never will. It's not just the two Democratic women who have lost -- Republicans consistently reject female candidates in presidential primaries. Many of us think Sarah Palin is no longer taken seriously as a Republican leader because she's ignorant, because she talks nonsense, and because she's a tabloid-friendly drama addict -- but how does that make her different from Trump? Palin is Trump with a vagina. He's dominated the last decade of American politics. She's a has-been.
America is full of Christian conservatives who genuinely don't believe women should hold leadership positions. It's also full of young and not-so-young men who feel disgust when women seem powerful or step into what they regard as male spaces. Hire female leads for a remake of a beloved buddy movie and they wail, "You're ruining my childhood!" How do you get an Angela Merkel or a Jacinta Ardern past all that?
In the days before Barack Obama, I assumed that the first Black president and the first female president would be Republicans. Now I don't think I'll live to see a female president. There are too many trad Christians and too many whiny boy-men -- and they just elected the biggest whiny boy-man of them all.
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