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.
Most of Democrats’ factions are opposed to any change in party objectives, strategy or even tactics.
Regular “regular”/consistent voters and the overwhelming majority of elected officials (including almost all of the party elite) are aligned on this.
Pelosi has again spoken on behalf of the party apparatus rebuking Bernie.
Democrats are split between several factions:
1. swing voters who usually vote Democrat (less ideological, low information);
2. The mainstream partisan electorate that mostly cares about wins but is unable to steer the party anywhere except by the time and in the context of presidential and other major turnout primaries (more moderate, less ideological);
3. The partisan get out the vote operation which also cares very much about wins but that is often involved in liberal advocacy too and is therefore resistant to critiques of liberalism (more liberal, specially on culture);
4. leftwing artists, journalists and other cultural workers (liberals but mostly care about culture);
5. the professional advocacy staff of the liberal “groups” (mostly cultural issues and environment);
6. the staff of leftwing ideological media and politicians, many academics (progressive);
7. liberal-progressive voters (leftwing on culture and economics);
8. economic-progressive voters (more focused on economics e.g. 2016 Bernie);
9. anti-American leftists (minority nationalists, cosmopolitan humanitarians, pacifists, anti-capitalists, anti-imperialists, etc);
10. elected officials (mostly lacking ideology or willing to take any risks that don’t personally and immediately benefit themselves -beholden to their funders and to party elites-);
11. party elites (former very high ranking officials and permanent party leadership -DNC- and funders, mainstream media personalities -same as #10-).
There is a need to reduce the organizational influence of the advocacy groups and the cultural influence of anti-American leftists, but also of the party elite.
The problem is lower ranking politicians have absolutely no backbone and very little incentive to stick their necks out (in a wave election the remaining electeds live in deep blue places, while potential candidates in purple places have to care more about funders and party elites and can’t be seen as rocking the boat).
Democrats have become as internally autocratic since the Clintons as Republicans since Trump.
The Biden re/de-nomination debacle showed just how broken the governance and culture of the party are.
If the Bernie wing is going to increase its influence and the Warren wing going to keep its current influence, they must push the party further in the direction of a formal coalition model of governance.
The way the DNC (and its several bodies) is elected must be reformed as a first step.
The way the House and Senate Caucuses operate also need to change.