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.
Okay, let us have that “intra-progressive” debate then.
I’ll start. My fear is that the way this legislation is shaping up, it is going to turn out to be every bit as disastrous to individuals in need of health care as The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 — an abominable piece of legislation that turned out to be a gift to the credit card companies and a disaster, a complete disaster, for people who are burdened with massive unmanageable debt due to medical expenses, unemployment, or other unavoidable or avoidable losses. Remember Ted Kennedy offering amendment after amendment after amendment as he stood alone on the floor of the Senate attempting to mitigate the impending disaster this abomination visited upon ordinary Americans. The legislation turned out to be so disastrous for consumers that even the credit card and mortgage banking industries decided it was too much of a good thing.
Two things: have you actually done the math with respect to premiums and co-pays and how they would impact an individual’s actual take-home pay? I have, and I invite you to do it too. My math tells me that for someone earning in the neighborhood of $65,000 to $75,000 per year, with a chronic disease that needs consistent medical care, out-of-pocket expenses look to be in the neighborhood of $20-25,000 per year with the current Senate bill. Already Medicaid share-of-cost can be prohibitive in high-cost areas of the country. You think that is going to make people, i.e. voters, happy about health care reform?
Secondly, you can look to the experience in Massachusetts for how the current proposed model of HCR is going to work, and it isn’t very encouraging. Trudy Lieberman over at CJR has an exceptional series on HCR that explores the impact of the Massachusetts experiment here: Health Reform Lessons from Massachusetts, Part VII : CJR. I encourage you and your readers to read the whole series.
Let’s look at your priorities:
1) “covering most of the uninsured” — in my view, any program that will (affordably) cover most of the uninsured is the whole point. Of course, a public health insurance option is the best way of doing that; we cover most seniors with Medicare; we cover most poor children and pregnant women with medicaid, SCHIP covers most children of working families who earn less than 250% FPL. Fine, but the experiment in Massachusetts shows that even with a mandate, the private insurance industry cannot affordably cover “most” of the uninsured. Instead, they opt to pay the fine for not buying it.
2) “more important than the level of subsidies to make coverage practically affordable” — amusing that you use the term “practically affordable” — like in hand grenades, eh? Let me ask you, why do you think that high levels of subsidies to the private health insurance industry is more acceptable — or a better deal — than a competing public insurance program? The public insurance program is CHEAPER for individuals and in the aggregate than high levels of subsidies. Is the point to save the private health insurance industry? We’d be better off dumping pallets of cash in their lobbies, as we did for the banks. Please look at the Healthy Families program in California for a successful public health insurance program that works.
3) “more important than regulation to end highly discriminatory insurance practices” — if there is anything in the bill to support, it is this, of course. This kind of regulation is badly needed, let’s do it. Let’s do it as a health insurance regulatory bill, then. It would be easier to pass standing alone, wouldn’t it?
4) “more important than how and when health reform is phased in” — I suspect this is just a throw-in, this isn’t really an issue but just nuts and bolts. Do you really think that this particular issue should take priority over the actual nature of health care reform itself? To me, it is almost irrelevant as a substantive issue, and certainly should not take precedence as a priority over the actual reform. Please explain why you think that “how and when health reform is phased in” is more important than the issue of whether there is an alternative publicly funded health insurance program available for consumers of health care.
One additional point: Please give public option advocates credit for good will. I find it patently offensive that the “pass anything” crowd dismisses us as unthinking my-way-or-the-highway rigid ideologues. If you really want to have a debate, it helps to treat the other side as if their opinions are worthy of debate. We can surely disagree on the merits of this legislation without your side being so dismissively arrogant, I would hope.
Cheers.
The intra-progessive debate that needs to begin is about formulating a strategy to reduce the super-majority requirement in the Senate, just as that was the necessary condition for the Civil Rights era. The current 60 vote requirement for passage of anything important is a relic of the incomplete job done in the early 60s to pass civil rights legislation — before that the requirement was 66 votes! But as a nation, we really didn’t want Jim Crow forever.
Similarly, we don’t want the prejudices of 12 percent of the people in rural states to determine the direction of a rich, modern country, but that’s what the current 60 vote filibuster does.
How do we move to end this without destroying all checks on short term majority enthusiasms?