I figured this was as good a time as any to come clean about reasons Democrats are fretting the 2024 election results despite some quite positive signs for Kamala Harris, so I wrote them up at New York:
One of the most enduring of recent political trends is a sharp partisan divergence in confidence about each party’s electoral future. Democrats are forever “fretting” or even “bed-wetting;” they are in “disarray” and pointing fingers at each other over disasters yet to come. Republicans, reflecting the incessant bravado of their three-time presidential nominee, tend to project total, overwhelming victory in every election, future and sometimes even past. When you say, as Donald Trump often does, that “the only way we lose is if they cheat,” you are expressing the belief that you never ever actually lose.
The contrast between the fretting donkey and the trumpeting elephant is sometimes interpreted as a matter of character. Dating back to the early days of the progressive blogosphere, many activists have claimed that Democrats (particularly centrists) simply lack “spine,” or the remorseless willingness put aside doubts or any other compunctions in order to fight for victory in contests large and small. In this Nietzschean view of politics, as determined by sheer will-to-power (rather than the quality of ideas or the impact of real-world conditions), Democrats are forever bringing a knife to a gun fight or a gun to a nuclear war.
Those of us who are offended by this anti-intellectual view of political competition, much less its implicit suggestion that Democrats become as vicious and demagogic as the opposition often is, have an obligation to offer an alternative explanation for this asymmetric warfare of partisan self-confidence. I won’t offer a general theory dating back to past elections, but in 2024, the most important reasons for inordinate Democratic fear are past painful experience and a disproportionate understanding of the stakes of this election.
It’s very safe to say very few Democrats expected Hillary Clinton to lose to Donald Trump in 2016, or that Joe Biden would come so close to losing to Donald Trump in 2020. No lead in the polls looks safe because in previous elections involving Trump, they weren’t.
To be clear, the national polls weren’t far off in 2016; the problem was that sparse public polling of key states didn’t alert Democrats to the possibility Trump might pull an Electoral College inside straight by winning three states that hadn’t gone Republican in many years (since 1984 in Wisconsin, and since 1988 in Michigan and Pennsylvania). 2020 was just a bad year for pollsters. In both cases, it was Trump who benefitted from polling errors. So of course Democrats don’t view any polling lead as safe. Yes, the pollsters claim they’ve compensated for the problems that affect their accuracy in 2016 and 2020, and it’s even possible they over-compensated, meaning that Harris could do better than expected. But the painful memories remain fresh.
If you believe the maximum Trump ‘24 message about Kamala Harris’s intentions as president, it’s a scary prospect: she’s a Marxist (or Communist) who wants to replace white American citizens with the scum of the earth, which her administration is eagerly inviting across open borders with government benefits to illegally vote Democratic. It’s true that polls show a hard kernel — perhaps close to half — of self-identified Republicans believe some version of the Great Replacement Theory that has migrated from the right-wing fringes to the heart of the Trump campaign’s messaging, and that’s terrifying since there’s no evidence whatsoever for it. But best we can tell, the Trump voting base is a more-or-less equally divided coalition of people who actually believe some if not all of what their candidate says about the consequences of defeat, and people who just think Trump offers better economic and tougher immigration policies. While the election may be an existential crisis for Trump himself, since his own personal liberty could depend on the outcome, there’s not much evidence that all-or-nothing attitude is shared beyond the MAGA core of his coalition.
By contrast, Democrats don’t have to exercise a lurid sense of imagination to feel fear about Trump 2.0. They have Trump 1.0 as a precedent, with the added consideration that the disorganization and poor planning that curbed many of the 45th president’s authoritarian tendencies will almost certainly be reduced in 2025. Then there’s the escalation in his extremist rhetoric. In 2016 he promised a Muslim travel ban and a southern border wall. Now he’s talking about mass deportation program for undocumented immigrants and overt ideological vetting of legal immigrants. In 2016 he inveighed against the “deep state” and accused Democrats of actively working against the interests of the country. Now he’s pledging to carry out a virtual suspension of civil service protections and promising to unleash the machinery of law enforcement on his political enemies, including the press. As the furor over Project 2025 suggests, there’s a general sense that the scarier elements in Trump’s circle of advisors are planning to hit the ground running with radical changes in policies and personnel that can’t be reversed.
An important psychological factor feeding Democratic fears of a close election is the unavoidable fact that Trump has virtually promised to repeat or even surpass his 2020 effort to overturn the results if he loses. So anything other than a landslide victory for Harris will be fragile and potentially reversible. This is a deeply demoralizing prospect. It’s one thing to keep people focused on maximum engagement with politics through November 5. It’s another thing altogether to plan for a long frantic slog that won’t be completed until January 20.
Trump has been working hard to perfect the flaws in his 2020 post-election campaign that led to the failed January 6 insurrection, devoting a lot of resources to pre-election litigation and the compilation of post-election fraud allegations.
Though if you look hard you can find scattered examples of Democrats talking about denying a victorious Trump re-inauguration on January 20, none of that chatter is coming from the Democratic Party, the Harris-Walz campaign, or a critical mass of the many, many players who would be necessary to challenge an election defeat. Election denial in 2024 is strictly a Republican show.
As my colleague Jonathan Chait recently explained, the odds of Republicans winning control of the Senate in November are extremely high. That means that barring a political miracle, a President Harris would be constrained both legislatively and administratively, in terms of the vast number of executive-branch and judicial appointments the Senate has the power to confirm, reject, or simply ignore.
If Trump wins, however, he will have a better-than-even chance at a governing trifecta. This would not only open up the floodgates for extremist appointments aimed at remaking the federal government and adding to the Trumpification of the judiciary, but would unlock the budget reconciliation process whereby the trifecta party can make massive policy changes on up-or-down party-line votes without having to worry about a Senate filibuster.
Overall, Democrats have more reason to fear this election, and putting on some fake bravado and braying like MAGA folk won’t change the underlying reasons for that fear. The only thing that can is a second Trump defeat which sticks.
As I was looking through the detailed National Election Pool exit poll data, I came across the following question:
OPINION OF BUSH ADMINISTRATION:
Category %Total Kerry Bush Nader
Angry 23 96 3 1
Dissatisfied 26 82 16 1
Satisfied 26 11 89 0
Enthusiastic 22 2 98 0
In other words, a 49-48 plurality of voters was either angry or dissatisfied with the Bush administration.
I think this settles the question of whether the election was a “mandate” for Bush’s policies.
Yep JC, I agree with you and it is distressing. The only ray of hope I see is if they go too far right that the public opinion poll will shift against them. For this to happen we need to get the idealogues to stop harping on this election, take a balanced look at what is going on in Congress, and report it to the people though a mechanism that the common man can appreciate (sans rhetoric).
The fact that Bush won despite a below 50% approval rating and the decline of one important demographic, the female vote, should be a clue about what happened in this election.
The attacks on 9/11 and subsequent wars have put the fear in the electorate. That situation can’t help but favor the incumbent. Details about pre-9/11 negligence, inept management of an unneccesary war aside, I believe the public is possessed with fear. The incredibly negative campaign against John Kerry raised just enough doubt to allow a Bush win.
For those two reasons, I think the demographics gathered in this campaign are of no real value.
Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg has come up with some rather amazing data in his post-election survey that is directly relevant to the ‘mandate’ business:
“There was not a shift to the right. This was a tolerant, outward-looking, change-oriented electorate that elected George Bush. The country was not looking for a conservative president or a conservative regime, though that is what it has achieved.”
“What you’ll see in this data is that there was a large majority of the electorate and particularly pivotal portions of the electorate that were not looking for an election that was going to be settled on issues of security and safety, but were looking for an election that was about their lives and about economic issues and about health care. But in the end they did not think that they were given that choice in this election. And many of those voters held back until the end, and what we see in the end is many rural voters, many older blue collar voters and seniors who moved sharply toward the president on moral issues. The were clearly not going to vote that way until they did not get the choice that would have made it possible.”
“By 52 to 41 percent the voters who ended up voting for George Bush said the country was on the wrong track. They said what they were looking for was a candidate that was going to talk about things central to their lives–the economy and health care– as opposed to safety. In my view, this debate did not get joined in a central enough way, to keep the cultural issues from becoming dominant and moving these voters at the end.”
There *might* be one reason to doubt that Bush will *succeed* in his mission to force a radical agenda down our throats. Fillibuster. The 55 Dems plus a couple of the blue state moderate Republicans might be all we need to stop SS privatization, tax “simplification” and right wing judges. But we have to be able to make sure all our Senators can hold up under the pressure. Surely that’s *possible* if Bush goes too far too fast.
I’m not particularly hopeful:-(
Keith
The Democrats need to retake the senate now! Here’s how…
The background:
Several events in the past few days have shown that the most
radical members of the senate are planning to move aggressively
on their agenda, especially with regard to judicial appointments
and tax cuts.
For example, Arlen Spector is now in trouble for stating that the
senate may not be willing to confirm anti-abortion Supreme Court
judges. This was not a threat, just an observation, but the radicals
are already planning a punishment.
On the other side the senators from NY, CT and NJ are thinking of
dropping out in favor of becoming governors in 2006. They think
they might be more effective, since there is very little they can
do in the senate.
Several moderate Republicans have expressed concern about the
size of the deficit and the balance of trade. The radicals,
however, are threatening to give anyone who is independent the
“Daschle” treatment.
The solution:
The Democrats need to make an appeal to the moderate Republicans
to leave their party and join the Democrats. In addition to
Spector, good candidates are Chafee, Snowe, Voinovich and Collins.
For this to work the Democrats need to find six Republicans that
will all switch together. This will give the Democrats a majority
in the senate and enable them to negotiate the coming legislation
and nominations from an equal position of strength.
This is not as far-fetched as it may seem, several of these
senators are unlikely to run again (Spector has just be
re-elected, for example) and thus don’t have to fear the
lack of election support. With the Democrats in the majority
they also won’t have to worry about retaliation from the
Republicans for support of local projects.
As an incentive, the Democrats should offer these members new
powers such as committee chairmanships and other perks. If
the Republican senators have a problem with declaring themselves
as Democrats (such as what happened with Jeffords) they could
instead create a non-party structure to affiliate these new
allies with. Some name suggestions: “The alliance of responsible
legislators”, “The non-partisan alliance”, “The fiscal moderates
caucus”, etc. This group will caucus with the Democrats and vote
as a block for committee assignments and for those issues on
which they have overall agreement. The Republican members would
still be free to vote with their prior party when they feel they
have to for political or local reasons.
By sweetening the offer enough the Republican moderates will come
as a winners both in terms of their power in the senate and with
their voters back home. They can point to their newfound powers
as a way to promote the interests of their state. While in the
present alignment they are barely tolerated.
The Democrats need to stop despairing and get to work!
I may be incorrect, but while the article is definitely true, and I agree completely that the idea there is a “mandate” is absurd, there is also the practical political reality – and it seems to me this political reality is that the Frist, Hastert, Delay, and the White House, ARE going to be able to push pretty much anything they want through the Congress. Just as a matter of power politics, this seems to be the case, irregardless of whether the public lines up with the goals.
If there are reasons to doubt my above assertion, I would be MOST pleased…