LEARNED HELPLESSNESS IS A HELLUVA DRUG

It's appalling that people still need to be persuaded of this:

Trump’s popular-vote margin has shrunk to about 1.5 percent—one of the tightest in the past half century—and because some votes went to third-party and independent candidates, he’ll fall just short of winning a majority of the vote nationwide. Compared with incumbent governments elsewhere in the world, Democrats’ losses were modest. And in the House, they gained a seat, leaving the GOP with the second-smallest majority in history.

This is good news, but we've known it for weeks! The Cook Political Report's popular vote tally had Trump below 50%, and his margin of victory below 2%, a month ago.

As votes continue to be counted, Trump has fallen below 50%. More Americans voted against him than for him for the 3rd election in a row. #NoMajorityNoMandate

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— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek.bsky.social) November 16, 2024 at 10:09 AM

Why hasn't this penetrated Democrats' consciousness?

Sure, things looked bad shortly after Election Day:

Five days after last month’s election, Senator Chris Murphy rendered a damning verdict on his party’s performance. “That was a cataclysm,” the Connecticut Democrat wrote on X. “Electoral map wipeout.” Donald Trump had won both the popular vote and the biggest Electoral College victory—312 to 226—for any Republican since 1988; Democrats had lost their Senate majority and appeared unlikely to retake the House. The Democratic Party had lost touch with far too many American voters, Murphy concluded: “We are beyond small fixes.”

But we have updated numbers and Murphy is still talking this way (as are many other Democrats), telling The Atlantic,

“There becomes a real dishonesty and inauthenticity within our party if we look at this last election as too close to call or good spots and bad spots.”

And Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris, tells Semafor,

“You don’t get a national eight-point shift to the right without losing hold of culture.”

We have no idea what's about to happen, and we can't be at all certain that there'll be contested elections in the future. But if there are, remember: There was a 26-point shift to the Democrats in 1964: after what was effectively a tie in 1960, Lyndon Johnson won in 1964 by a 61.1%-38.5% margin. Had Republicans "lost hold of the culture"? Maybe Goldwater Republicans had (although they'd seize the zeitgeist sixteen years later). But the GOP gained 3 Senate seats and 47 House seats in 1966, then won the presidency back in 1968, then won a 1964-size landslide in 1972.

Did stuff happen between 1964 and 1972 to change the political landscape? Of course -- it was the Sixties (and early Seventies). Lots of stuff happened! Do Murphy and Flaherty think nothing consequential will happen in the next four years? Under Donald Trump? Do they think the 2028 election, if we have one, will be conducted in the same political climate we have now? Why would that happen when Trump intends to change nearly everything about how government functions, in an extreme and corrupt way?

Many Democrats appear to want 2024 to have been "a cataclysm." If it was a cataclysm, then there's no point in making small but insistent gestures of resistance like, y'know, saying it's a bad idea to have a vaccine denialist in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, or a Russian fellow traveler as our intelligence chief. You'd imagine that "cataclysm" thinking would inspire Democrats to be fighting Trump harder right now, but it seems to be inspiring the opposite: the thought that there's no use even trying right now -- everyone hates Democrats. If you say that the party needs a total overhaul, you're saying that the actually existing party shouldn't bother to act as opposition. For a party that often shrinks from a fight, that's awfully convenient.

This is learned helplessness, plain and simple. If you think the party needs a major overhaul before it can get back into the game, and you know not everyone believes that process needs to begin right now, you have a perfect excuse to do nothing. And that's the real problem Democrats have, not a small decline in cultural relevance.