It really doesn’t help Democrats recover from the 2024 election defeat to exaggerate its dimensions. So I issued a few cautionary notes at New York.
As is inevitable in any losing presidential effort, a lot of the fingers being pointed at Democratic culprits are aimed at the Harris-Walz campaign, with a big negative assist from the former Biden-Harris campaign that was terminated in July. Some critics think Kamala Harris failed sufficiently to “pivot to the center” when the Trump campaign was pounding her as “radical communist”; others believe she erred by failing to go hard-core lefty populist. Still others seem to be certain she should have junked her billion-dollar ad blitz and instead appeared on a few dozen podcasts.
The reality is that while the Harris-Walz campaign was national in scope, its efforts (as were those of the Trump-Vance campaign) were concentrated to an extraordinary degree on the seven universally recognized battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that decided the election. So if her campaign had any positive net impact, you should be able to see it there. And as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump calculated a couple of days after Trump was declared the winner, you actually can see it if you compare these states to the country as a whole:
“The Post’s model estimates that, when all of the votes are counted, only one state, Colorado, will have seen its vote margin shift to the left. Every other state and D.C. will have shifted to the right.
“The last time an election saw that uniform a shift was in 1992, when all but one state shifted to the left as Bill Clinton was elected president…..
“On average, states are likely to end up having shifted about 4.6 points to the right since 2020….
“[T]he states where the shift toward Trump was the smallest included many of those that were the closest in 2020 — that is, the swing states. States that had a margin of 3 points or less in 2020 moved to the right by 3.4 points on average. States where the margin in 2020 was larger than that moved to the right by an average of 4.8 points.”
There are three significant implications of these patterns. First, the shift to Trump was indeed a national wave, albeit a limited one in most states (big exceptions being Florida, Texas, and New York, where Trump’s gains were supersize); his national popular vote margin has already fallen to 1.9 percent with votes still out. Second, the Harris campaign appears to have mitigated the swing to Trump precisely where it (and she) had the most intense activity. To the extent the campaign mattered, it was a net positive.
The third implication, which is more implicit than explicit in the numbers, is that the Democratic ticket was battling a national political climate that was fundamentally adverse, making the campaign a painful uphill slog that was disguised by slightly askew polling and the famous Harris “vibes.” As Cook Political Report editor-in-chief Amy Walter told my colleague Benjamin Hart in a post-election interview, for all the initial excitement, Harris began her late-starting campaign at a significant disadvantage:
“Fundamentally, it does come back to Biden and the administration. He’s an unpopular president, and an unpopular president doesn’t win reelection. The only thing possibly preventing the unpopular president from losing is that he’s challenged by a more unpopular candidate. Where Trump fits into this is that, yes, he’s still unpopular. But — and we noted this before Biden dropped out and then it started happening again in October — in retrospect, people think of Trump’s presidency more favorably than they did even when he was president. They may have not liked Trump and what he stands for or what he does, but as they put it in context now, thinking, Well, compared to what we have now, was it better or worse? — they say, ‘Well, at least stuff was less expensive.’
“And the only way you counter that is if you have a candidate on the Democratic side who’s not part of the incumbent party.”
Harris worked hard to depict herself as a “change” candidate, but that was always going to be a tough sell. With a little luck, she might have been able to squeak by in the Electoral College (she lost the three “Blue Wall” states by less than 2 percentage points) even while losing the national popular vote, just as Trump did in 2016. But nobody should blame her for failing to overcome the dead weight of an administration too many voters considered a disappointment if not a failure.
If you want to have historical discussions these takes coming from all over the ideological spectrum are actually rooted in history:
https://hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/the-declining-leverage-and-status?fbclid=IwY2xjawGkQGpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdPxZqsergjluFFC3-ERPGwKMBtx6DD3x68SuKZGLqhFhihnk5aQel2fpA_aem_EZLAgtLziEwXVPBFYzVVmA
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritocracy-college-admissions-social-economic-segregation/680392/?fbclid=IwY2xjawGkQL5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHcJCyxwNipZOJdaz-dmCLqsOp9i8uq88twhhEOA_Dm0EYvi91oiAwgKfUg_aem_rSra7x5Nob6TsJBXeujyuA
https://jacobin.com/2024/11/economic-inequality-political-philosophy-history/?fbclid=IwY2xjawGkQLhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHUOi9-vZ6EjPEP9N3BvtqcgW3t_WPXeHp_FqToge90DV5iPWCGfac9gQgg_aem_43YbYijXCRtodzJ1oJDiIw
Kamala was wrong to go against this trend:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/29/majority-of-americans-take-a-dim-view-of-increased-trade-with-other-countries/?fbclid=IwY2xjawGkPndleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWbwjU1jYDCznjHROKE13h1d5bMpjweYziMKZIlZaXhVJI9bg6tX2A_XYA_aem_7QtDqbYbm8oUZqfkjZUDwg
If we are going to keep following the neoliberals, at least take a look at good ideas:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-blue-cities-must-be-fixed?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=35345&post_id=151531665&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ecbqk&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwY2xjawGkPl9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdvrwdRVcu609TEqB5wrzQYNB5yQBhWDhwmOffkk3eLeitPCQ3yH–vqvQ_aem_A2AB6WrGKu3EKUhnY0T06w
“A century of global history makes clear that right-wing populists cannot be beaten with left-wing populism.”
This has got to be the most intellectually dishonest take I have read about this election so far.
Reagan was not a right wing populist, so Clinton didn’t beat him. (Also, Clinton only won because a right wing populist -Perot- took away votes.)
In any case the purpose of the politics of beating him gets lost if one beats conservatism, neoliberalism or right wing populism just to continue implementing their policies or just to keep the status quo ante that leads to the election of the right.
Bush II was certainly not a right wing populist. In fact he ended up governing more to the left than Clinton. The wars don’t fall neatly into the left-right spectrum.
Obama didn’t beat Bush II in any case. The wars and the Great Recession did.
It took the Great Recession to get back a Senate supermajority for a while.
So that’s for very contemporary history, the last few decades.
What is a terrible lie about this take is that it talks about a century back look.
A century back means we should look at the origins and response to the World Wars and the Great Depression.
Where Democrats not populists then? Was there not an even better organized progressive movement? Where unions not in their heyday?
What do Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt stand for if not left wing populism?
Third Way is bankrupt on how to move forward.
Blue Labor didn’t work, by the way.
I don’t disagree with moving to the right culturally, but it’ still the economy, stupid and the status quo doesn’t cut it.
Bill Clinton didn’t win because Perot took votes from Bush, though Perot did give Clinton a boost by advising his voters to listen to Clinton’s speech. If you check the October 1992 polls before Perot rejoined the race, Clinton was winning by 5 to 7 points.
Thank you, Staff, for the link to the Politico article. It’s not just worth a read, it is worth a re-read.