Nate Cohn at The Upshot makes a useful observation in his newsletter today (gift link)
There’s a lot about politics that’s hard to predict, but there’s something you can count on every four years: One party loses a presidential election, and the recriminations begin.
Every four years, the post-election fight seems to play out the same way. Every move of the losing campaign is questioned and scrutinized. The party’s center blames the activists for alienating swing voters. The activists blame the center for failing to mobilize the base.
And no matter what, you’ll find each pundit concluding that the party’s way forward is to do exactly what that pundit has been arguing for all along.
While you might not guess it from my tone, these debates do matter. They shape the strategy of the next midterm campaign, they can change the policies supported by elected officials, and they even influence how ordinary voters cast their ballots in future presidential primaries.
Still, there’s a reason you could probably tell my eyes roll at the prospect of most election postmortems. In hindsight, they don’t usually look great.
In fact, many look so bad that there may be more lessons for today’s Democrats in the failure of past postmortems than in any analysis of Kamala Harris’s campaign.
He recaps the postmortems of 2004, 2012, 2016 and 2020 and notes correctly that they were all wrong. That’s not to say they this time the insistence that Democrats abandon their allegedly “woke” agenda (which Harris did not run on) and hit immigration and crime as hard as possible is wrong. (Today, I’m hearing a lot of bellyaching about Biden’s commutation of federal prisoners in order to deprive Trump of yet another bloodthirsty execution fest.) But I doubt it. None of the autopsies strike me as adequate to explain what happened or the give very good advice about what to do next. So much will depend on events that haven’t happened yet.
Cohn points out that the election was actually very close but also that trying to reclaim voters that have gone over to the other side is harder than it looks. But still, over the past few cycles, the out party has succeeded in coming back anyway. He writes:
Finally, there’s the most important reason the autopsies haven’t panned out: the desire for change. The president’s party has retained the White House only once since 2004, mostly because voters have been unsatisfied with the state of the country for the last 20 years. No president has sustained high approval ratings since Mr. Bush, in the wake of Sept. 11.
As a result, losing parties haven’t needed to make brilliant changes to return to the White House, even though the postmortems almost always imply such changes are necessary. The implication is that the most important factors shaping the next election probably aren’t in the hands of the loser, whether it’s the state of the economy or the conduct of the party in power.
Looking even further back, the president’s party has won only 40 percent of presidential elections from 1968 to today. With that record, perhaps it’s the winning party that really faces the toughest question post-election: How do you build public support during an era of relatively slow growth, low trust in government and low satisfaction with the state of the country?
Here, the ball is in Mr. Trump’s court. If he and his approach are popular in four years, there might be little Democrats can do. Recent history suggests, however, that Democrats might well have an opening…
Whatever the case, a simple desire for change might be all Democrats need to return to the White House. Of course, they would need a theory of what’s wrong with America during their campaign, and one that contrasts with the vision of the party in power.
We are living in a very turbulent time in which incumbents are being kicked out all over the world. Here in the US we’ve been going back and forth in both the presidency and the congress for over 30 years. People are perpetually unhappy with the status quo and it’s been turbo-charged by the rise of social media which makes everybody outraged and angry all the time.
If very bad things happen (a recession, inflation, war…) during Trump’s term, which is certainly possible, change will almost certainly be called for. But even if things go along as they are, the Trump show is already stale. People may very well want to change the channel and yet Republicans will necessarily have to push his anointed successor.
In any case, it’s much too early to make any decisions about what the “message” should be for 2028. Nobody knows what the world and politics are going to look like then. Everyone needs to take a breath and let things unfold for a bit.