A lot of early analysis of the 2024 presidential election has suffered from three overlapping problems.
First, that vote margins can be influenced by changes in turnout as well as changes in vote preference. If voters stay home, the candidate they would have supported receives fewer votes. And it looks like a lot of 2020 voters stayed home in 2024.
But — second — not as many as one might have thought in the first few days after the election. Many immediate analyses of what happened exaggerated the decrease in Democratic votes or suggested that Donald Trump won an outright majority of votes cast, both errors that were a function of failing to consider (particularly) California’s sizable, slow-to-count vote total.
The third problem is that the shift to Trump in the voting — real and widespread — is being conflated with broad support for Trump, which is far less dramatic. It’s the difference between noting that exit polls show Trump fared much better with voters under 30 than he did in 2020, and acknowledging that he lost that age group to Vice President Kamala Harris. He didn’t lose them by as much, but he still lost them.
Which, again, overlaps with other problems. Our analysis suggests that this improvement came as the number of younger voters fell relative to 2020. Harris lost votes relative to Biden; Trump got about the same number of votes from people under 30 that he got four years ago — according to exit polls, anyway, which is a big caveat.
He goes on to describe the strutting and chest pounding about Trump’s alleged landslide which is predictable. He said he wont 2020 in a landslide too. But even when it comes to the electoral college, it’s anything but a landslide:
In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote but won 57 percent of electors — thanks to fewer than 100,000 votes nationally. In 2020, Joe Biden won 57 percent of electors, thanks to a slightly larger number of votes in several states. Now, in 2024, current data indicate that Trump will win 58 percent of electors, thanks to 233,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Take those away (or see improvement to that extent for Harris) and Trump’s victory vanishes.
As the votes have come in we’ve now seen that Trump didn’t even win a majority. “It’s the narrowest margin for a Republican since 1968 — ignoring the two times since then that candidates (including Trump) won the presidency while losing the popular vote.”
Bump concludes:
We understand why Trump and his supporters want Americans to think that he is overwhelmingly popular and has received America’s acquiescence to do what he wants. He has that power, certainly, but he doesn’t have that mandate.
Sadly, power is all he needs.
By the way, as votes are still being calibrated, Trump’s popular vote lead conmtinues to shrink:
Newly tabulated ballots in New Jersey slightly narrow Trump's popular vote lead. Today's additions:
So, what do we do when we fight & lose? Never Give Up! Never surrender!
People admire that about a leader and a cause. We don’t just fight the fights we can win. You fight the fights that need fighting!” Martin Sheen, The American President (1995)
We expect people to follow the norms of losing. Like we do. Accept the loss. Don’t flip the board over.
And when we WIN? We are supposed to accept the win. So we stop fighting. We reach out to the losing side & shake hands. We follow the norms of winners. Say, “Good luck! It’s great to have a strong opponent!”
We aren’t supposed to be a sore winner! Don’t spike the football. Don’t mock them for losing. Don’t brag about the win everywhere. “Don’t get cocky kid!”
I’m getting into too many sports and movie metaphors here, so I want to talk about a specific win and why when we fight & win against RWers we must keep fighting, because the norms of winning aren’t enough against today’s RW.
Ruby Freeman & Shaye Moss won a $148 million judgement against Giuliani after he defamed them
Rudy delayed turning over his assets to them for over a year.
Inside court, under oath, Rudy & his lawyers were rebuked and chastised by the judge for their failures to follow the law. Rudy was threatened with contempt
Outside the court, when he was NOT under oath, Rudy lied about the case.
The MSM ran the video of Rudy lying. Those lies were shared everywhere on social media.
There was no video of the lawyer for Freeman & Moss reminding people of the harm Rudy did, his failure to comply, debunking his new and reoccurring lies, and what was revealed UNDER OATH in the court.
On Thursday of last week Rudy’s lawyers quit working for him. Rudy Giuliani’s Lawyers Tell Judge They Want To Quit On Him (This is a GREAT story about it by Brandi Buchman in the Huffington Post. She focused on how the victims were harmed. )
People think they quit because they were worried about getting paid, but I asked Glenn Kirschner about that Sunday and he said, judges don’t grant that kind of request, because they should have known that going in. More likely it was because they didn’t want to commit crimes for Rudy and they didn’t want to get disbarred, like Rudy.
Outside of court Rudy whined he didn’t have enough money to afford food, and his followers donated $127,000 to him. (Money that should be seized by the court and given to Freeman and Moss.)
Friday, we learned he’s been hiding over $40,000 in joint checking accounts in multiple LLCs, in court he didn’t want to tell the judge who was in those LLCs with him, but because it was in court, he was ORDERED to do it. (BTW, why did he say he couldn’t give their name? He claimed they would be threatened and harassed. They expect that the tactics THEY use to intimidate others will be used by the left.)
Rudy was ALSO supposed to turn over a signed, framed Joe DiMaggio jersey. That was supposed to be settled on Nov 15. But Rudy’s new lawyer didn’t turn it over and engaged in legal f*ckery.
See the Jolting Joe jersey hung over his fireplace in his penthouse apartment? Rudy got it in 2002 at the 3rd Annual Joe DiMaggio Awards Gala Honoring Rudy Giuliani. When the lawyer for Freeman and Moss got the keys to the penthouse, it wasn’t there.
There was a bunch of back and forth with Rudy’s lawyers about exactly where it was, asking for a list of inventory and how the Freeman/Moss lawyers could access them. The old lawyers quit, the new lawyer sent a letter saying something like,
‘Oh yeah, that framed Joe DiMaggio jersey that was in his penthouse apartment? According to OUR interpretation of the law in the state of New York, that shirt is ‘wearing apparel’ and is exempt.’
ARE YOU Fking KIDDING ME? WEARING APPAREL? RUDY LOST THE CASE! It’s been adjudicated! IN COURT! He did the crime, pay the fine!
What I see today is a lot of people giving up. I get it. When Trump never went to prison for his crimes, people think “What’s the point of fighting him?” It’s hard to think about fighting NEW fights over his lawbreaking, when we failed to punishing him for his OLD attacks. But I want to remind people to focus on the victims who have succeeded in fighting Trump, Rudy, RW media and MAGA nuts.
Learn from what they did right. Learn what to do when they refuse to accept defeat. Anticipate their doubling down. Know that winning in court is not the end of fighting them. They have to be fought OUTSIDE the court too.
Learn how knock back their own narrative in their own media and on social media when we win. “Political prosecution?! We’re the real victims here!”
But in civil cases, we can talk about the case while it is happening. We can comment about their lies right outside the courthouse. We can get the last word. We can remind people about what was said UNDER OATH in court, and who is the real victim.
These women were DRIVEN from their HOMES and neighborhood of the death threats based on the DEFAMATION of Rudy, OAN, Gateway Pundit and Donald Trump. They had to go into HIDING because people were POUNDING on their doors and pushed their way into their homes to confront them.
GA election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss speak after a jury orders Rudy Giuliani to pay nearly $150 million in damages for defaming the mother and daughter pair after the 2020 election.
I’ve looked at what kind of cases against Trump & MAGA have succeeded, the civil cases. One reason was there was a financial pay off for the people fighting, so that they can fund the ongoing case against an opponent, especially against one that uses delays & financial resources to overwhelm people.
At the highest levels on the right when someone does something immoral or illegal for Trump they have been getting away with it. But when he thinks someone is ripping him off or doing something that costs him money, THAT is when he gets pissed and will cut them loose. Trump expects to PROFIT from everything. If someone is a big earner, they can get away with ANYTHING.
Fighting Trump, the RW media & MAGA in this century requires us to understand what levers work on them and why. We have seen that when something costs corporations massive amounts of money, the change their behavior. (Then they buy politicians & change the laws so that it doesn’t cost them money anymore, but that’s another story)
With Trump, like a mob boss, if someone stops being a big earner for him they lose power in the organization.
When we win against them, we need ways to take their money and use it to build our side. That means, activists, our media, our lawyers, our influencers, our messaging experts or technology experts. We use that to build and win our future cases against them.
We work the narrative to show our side that when we win, we fight.
This piece by Roxanne Gay in the NY Times spoke to me. I‘ve included a gift link for the whole thing but here’s an excerpt:
Mistakes were made in the Harris campaign because mistakes are always made in presidential campaigns. Democrats are now reflecting on those mistakes and figuring out how to manifest a different outcome next time, if there is a next time. The recriminations have been numerous — too many celebrities, echo chambers, ignoring the economy, no alternative to the conservative media ecosystem, too much embracing of conservative politicians, too much identity politics, too big a tent, the price of eggs.
But to suggest we should yield even a little to Mr. Trump’s odious politics, to suggest we should compromise on the rights of trans people, for instance, and all of the other critical issues we care most about, is unacceptable. It is shameful and cowardly. We cannot abandon the most vulnerable communities to assuage the most powerful. Even if we did, it would never be enough. The goal posts would keep moving until progressive politics became indistinguishable from conservative politics. We’re halfway there already.
Mr. Trump’s voters are granted a level of care and coddling that defies credulity and that is afforded to no other voting bloc. Many of them believe the most ludicrous things: babies being aborted after birth and children going to school as one gender and returning home surgically altered as another gender even though these things simply do not happen. Time and again, we hear the wild lies these voters believe and we act as if they are sharing the same reality as ours, as if they are making informed decisions about legitimate issues. We act as if they get to dictate the terms of political engagement on a foundation of fevered mendacity.
We must refuse to participate in a mass delusion. We must refuse to accept that the ignorance on display is a congenital condition rather than a choice. All of us should refuse to pretend that any of this is normal and that these voters are just woefully misunderstood and that if only the Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently. While they are numerous, that does not make them right.
These are adults, so let us treat them like adults. Let us acknowledge that they want to believe nonsense and conjecture. They want to believe anything that affirms their worldview. They want to celebrate a leader who allows them to nurture their basest beliefs about others. The biggest challenge of our lifetime will be figuring out how to combat the American willingness to embrace flagrant misinformation and bigotry.
Read the whole thing. Her view is not very optimistic but it is bracingly clear-eyed. Maybe Jamie Raskin’s Thomas Jefferson quote below will come true and this will all pass. But I suspect that won’t happen without a fight.
If you are a person of means who can move to another country I totally understand it,but I don’t know that that will save you. The world is a small place now and I don’t think there’s any escape. Withdrawing to gardening and Animal Planet (as I woud like to do) won’t work either. We’re just going to have to meet the challenge whether we like it or not.
It’s so weird how so many Putin critics fall out of high rise buildings. Just bizarre.
Vladimir Shklyarov, a world-renowned Russian ballet star, has died after falling from the fifth floor of a building on Saturday.
His death was confirmed by the Mariinsky Theater, a venue in the city of St. Petersburg where Shklyarov was the highest-ranking dancer.
“This is a huge loss for the entire Mariinsky Theater team,” it said.
While Russian authorities have launched an investigation into Shklyarov’s death, the “preliminary cause” has been judged an accident, Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti reported.
“He died a natural death. It’s not a crime,” a source in the emergency services told RIA Novosti.
Uh huh:
In the days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Shklyarov was quoted as speaking out in support of peace.
“I am against the war in Ukraine! I am for the people, for a peaceful sky above our heads!” he was quoted as saying in a Facebook post by Alexei Ratmansky, a Russian-Ukrainian former ballet dancer.
Ratmansky, a former director of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, had been collecting anti-war messages from other figures in the ballet world.
Trump and Tulsi admire Putin’s strongman approach. This is how he does it.
I’m seeing quit a bit of slippage on this. People “reaching out” to Trump to find “common ground.” That’s a mistake. We’ve got to hang tough. They will give no quarter.
From a tiny office behind a Haitian grocery store on Springfield’s South Limestone Street, Margery Koveleski has spent years helping local Haitians overcome bureaucratic red tape to make their lives in the Ohio city a little bit easier.
But Koveleski – whose family is Haitian – has noticed a major change recently.
Haitians are now coming to her to figure out how to leave.
“Some folks don’t have credit cards or access to the internet, and they want to buy a bus ticket or a plane ticket, so we help them book a flight,” she told the Guardian recently. “People are leaving.”
Koveleski, leaders in Springfield’s Haitian community, and others have relayed reports of Haitians fleeing the city of 60,000 people in recent days for fear of being rounded up and deported after Donald Trump’s victory in the 5 November presidential election.
“The owner of one store is wondering if he should move back to New York or to Chicago – he says his business is way down,” Koveleski remarked.
Trump has repeatedly said he would end immigrants’ temporary protected status (TPS) – the provision through which many Haitians are legally allowed to live and work in the US – and deport Haitians from Springfield once in office.
For many, the threats are real.
A sheriff in Sidney, a town 40 miles (64km) north-west of Springfield that is home to several dozen Haitian immigrants, allegedly told local police in September to “get a hold of these people and arrest them”.
“Bring them – I’ll figure out if they’re legal,” he said, referencing Haitian immigrants in the area.
Don’t worry they’ll all be whining that the economy that was doing so well is failing because of some other racial or ethnic minority. It’s never them.
This is what Trump and his cult want — they want to rid the country of immigrants. And if they get that done they’ll turn their attention to Black and Brown Americans. That’s what this is really all about.
Haitians fled a desperate situation in which criminal gangs have taken over their country. They’re here in the US legally, working at jobs they couldn’t find locals to do, becoming part of the community as law abiding, taxpayers. And now they’re being chased out of town by a bunch of right wing losers all because Donald Trump needed to run for president again to salve his wounded ego.
I happened to catch the movie “The Apprentice” recently about the relationship between Donald Trump and his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer who was involved in many of the mid 20th century’s most high profile political events. I don’t know that the film told me anything I didn’t already know but it did remind me of just how vicious Cohn was and how much Trump loved that about him. He learned his lessons well. The thru line between Cohn’s nefarious career and Trump’s own ruthlessness is about to manifest in this second term. It’s almost as if it’s coming full circle.
Cohn’s first big splash in national politics took place when he was only 23 years old when he was one of the lead prosecutors in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He was so well-liked by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that he recommended him to be the lead counsel for Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations communist witch hunt. (McCarthy had launched his famous crusade in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950, by waving around a piece of paper which he claimed held the names of 205 Communists in the US State Department and he was off to the races.)
Cohn became a household name and was known as the “subcommittee’s real brain” according to Time Magazine and he and McCarthy instigated a massive investigation and purge of government employees whom they accused of being communists or outed as homosexuals. (The latter was especially cruel on Cohn’s part since he was gay himself.) This was the second Red Scare, the first having been in the years after WWI. But the focus on expelling people from the government, including the military, on thin suspicions of disloyalty was a specialty of McCarthy and Cohn.
When the fever finally broke, (“at long last sir, have you no decency…”) McCarthy was censured and died before he could complete his second term. Cohn, on the other hand, went on to hob nob with the rich and famous including just about every powerful politician in America. He mentored the young Donald Trump in the ways of the world of business and politics and Trump took to his cutthroat philosophy very naturally.
Facing his second term in office today, Donald Trump and his transition team have hit the ground running with a series of stunning cabinet appointments that have knocked the political establishment for a loop. Trump is drunk with power having staged an epic comeback after leaving office as ignominiously as any president in history, being indicted for federal and state crimes as well as losing lawsuits charging him with fraud and defamation. He believes he is invincible.
According to variousreports ,while he’s enjoying the fealty and attention of the richest man in the world who seemingly never leaves his side, he is making these decisions impulsively, totally relying on instinct which he believes are what got him to where he is today. No longer restrained by the need to get elected or fear for his freedom, he can do anything, And right now he appears to be obsessed with setting up the conditions for his revenge on the “Deep State” and the people he believes stabbed him in the back during his first term.
But there’s a lot going on in Trumpworld aside from his high profile appointments. And, interestingly enough, one of the most important projects harkens back to Cohn and McCarthy’s government purge in the 1950s. And it has been worked on for several years by outside groups preparing the ground for a Trump restoration. This time there’s no national security pretense or a rationale that people are betraying the country. It’s all about loyalty to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. But then in Trump’s mind, “l’etat c’est moi” so it adds up to the same thing.
CNN reported that just before the election the Department of Transportation received a pile of FOIA requests asking that emails and text messages pertaining to Elon Musk be turned over. Apparently, this was just the latest wave of such requests that have been received by all the various federal agencies sent by Trump aligned groups over the last two years demanding to identify “perceived partisans.” They have used a variety of methods to determine that including DEI programs or even just emails with the key words “climate change” in them. CNN calls it a “massive fishing expedition.”
One of the groups is the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project, another is the America First Policy Institute, a group with close ties to Trump’s transition team and there are more, all with the intention of rooting out anyone suspected of not being sufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. They are looking at whether employees have ever donated to Democrats, written anything critical on social media or claimed that they have done something suspicious such as “helped immigrants who arrived in the US seeking legal status.” The Heritage Oversight Project has even attempted to find out if any employees might be trying to subvert this investigation by aseeking evidence of plots to subvert the president-elect’s expected purging by asking for emails that include the words “Trump” and “reduction in force.”
Trump signed an executive order at the end of his first term called Schedule F which allowed him to order mass firings of employees he believed he could not trust to do his bidding. Joe Biden rescinded it but Trump plans to reinstate it upon taking office. But since there are millions of federal employees who could conceivably be disloyal to the Dear Leader, it was extremely helpful of these groups to do the investigative work ahead of time.
Unions and other advocacy groups say they are determined to fight, hoping they can find some allies in congress to step up and “hoping public shaming and outrage may protect them.” I’m pretty sure that’s no longer operative in American politics but I suppose it’s worth a try. The courts will undoubtedly be asked to determine whether a mass purge of employees because of perceived partisanship is constitutional but in the meantime it’s scaring the hell out of many of them fearing that they are about to lose their jobs if they happened to have said something Donald Trump and his minions thinks is disloyal.
Roy Cohn would be so proud of his boy today. His witch hunt had to be conducted in the name of saving the country from communism. This one is a purge for the sheer pleasure of punishing people Donald Trump doesn’t like and a message to all who might think of opposing him in the future. It’s pure depravity, just the way Cohn taught him.
Friends have already secured permanent residency in Canada. Others are headed there in January. But then they have the means. Following post-election racist texts targeting Black people come a spread of similar intimidating texts targeting Hispanic and LGBTQ people. They warn recipients they have been “selected for deportation or to report to a re-education camp.” The FBI still does not know their origin. “The FBI did not say whether it believes the offensive messages to LGBTQ and Hispanic recipients are from the same source as the previously reported messages,” NBC News reports.
Some of my LGBTQ friends were concerned even before this report.
The Guardian investigative journalist acknowledges that her list is an homage to Timothy Snyder and his 2017 “On Tyranny.” His first rule for surviving a tyranny is the now-famous: “Do not obey in advance.” Serendipitously, Snyder called her as she was crafting her own list on how to survive what comes next (for however long it lasts). Snyder’s updated piece of advice: “Know what you stand for and what you think is good.”
Many of Cadwalladr’s rules are familiar. Others, more practical than one might see elsewhere, since she was been the target of a SLAPP suit over her 2019 TED talk. A couple in particular caught my attention:
8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age ofSurveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.
And this:
11 Think of your personal data as nude selfies. A veteran technology journalist told me this in 2017 and it’s never left me. My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen.
Cadwalladr has been there.
You’re next
But the message that stood out to me most in Cadwalladr’s list, and may to those of us not (immediately) planning on leaving the country, is this:
10 Listen to women of colour. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.
I wrote The Niemöller Countdown a week ago and urged readers not to wait to speak out until they get to the Jews.
Listen. Digby and I treated the threat letter I received from a Trump lawyer in August 2019 largely as a joke. Standard Trump operating procedure. Threaten a lawsuit against someone without pockets deep enough to resist to get them to back down. We simply got caught in the fallout of a Trump tantrum against NBC-Universal.
That was then. Now Trump is drawing up enemies lists that we are not likely high-profile enough to be on. Then again, I would have thought we were too small to notice in 2019. As Cadwalladr warns, “Know that you’re next.”
“The thing you’ve gotta know is everything is show-biz!”
Longtime readers recall Cokie’s Law. Digby coined the term in 2008 for how skillfully the right wing tosses smears into the air to be carried by the media like the wind. Smears, lies, and disinformation become a “legitimate” subject of mainstream reporting not because they are true or meaningful but because they are “out there.” The law is named for the late NPR/ABC reporter Cokie Roberts:
“At this point,” said Roberts, “it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”
Thus right-wing smears, lies, and disinformation become, in campaign parlance, “earned media.”
James Fallows on Saturday did not reference Digby’s law, but essentially conceded that “the death-cloud of misinformation, ignorance, lies, myths, fears, stereotypes” has come to represent, like the shadows in Plato’s cave, an “artificial reality playing out in the minds of citizens.”
—It’s not a new problem in American democracy. Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, published when Warren Harding was in the White House, was about people’s inevitable reliance on “pictures in our head,” often stereotypes or half-truths, to judge events they had not witnessed themselves. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, about the convergence of information and entertainment (with entertainment coming out on top), was published nearly 40 years ago but grows ever more prophetic-seeming.
—It’s not even a new insight into this election. In the past week, while traveling, I’ve seen excellent essays by Nathan Heller, Julie Hotard, Brian Beutler (and Beutler again), Michael Tomasky, and a growing number of others on the “news” problem that extends far beyond the official “news media.”
Facts no longer define reality in a post-truth world. “All anyone was talking about” does. The right is more skilled than the left at ensuring its version of reality is in circulation at the beauty parlor and part of the culture. Watch any The Good Liars or Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse videos shot at Trump rallies. The MAGA faithful absorb extremist disinformation like sponges and, like sodden sponges, refuse to accept anything more, like objective fact.
There is a sad irony to the phenomenon. I’m so old that I remember rednecks beating up hippies for having long hair. Until country music discovered the mullet. Lefty New Agers later inhabited their own alternate reality of unseen energies and aliens (and QAnon-esque conspiracies):
As Larry Massett observed in “A Night on Mt. Shasta” (recorded during the Harmonic Convergence), “I met a lot of people I liked and almost no one I believed.” People following their spiritual journeys seemed alienated by modernity, and suckers for whatever snake oil came peddled by people who seemed genuine enough.
Today it’s the right’s turn to be alienated by modernity. For their tastes, a bigoted, 34-time felon/reality star and showman seems more genuine than a world of uncomfortable facts and neighbors who seem alien. Nothing feels right anymore. They’ve given themselves over to a cargo cult of truthiness supported by Trump rallies and right-wing influencers. News is curated disinformation. It’s the right’s version of the New Age only, considering Jan. 6 and Project 2025, far less benign.
Fallows again:
In essence, “news” is everything you don’t see or experience yourself. And with each passing year, a growing share of the “news” on which people base their sense of reality has come neither from personal experience2; nor from “regular” news organizations, flawed as they may be; but instead from the surrounding climate of social media and other sources that have been skewed in a nihilistic, suspicious-and-hostile direction. A large part of that skewing is intentional—a supercharged version of Fox News, as those I’ve linked to above all argue. Part of it just comes with the technology. And evidence suggests that in 2024 this mattered more than anything the official news media did.3 People had “heard” that the economy was terrible and no one could find a job and illegal immigrants were everywhere and Kamala Harris was an affirmative-action cipher. And they could see that eggs were expensive—and that Donald Trump had come up, fist-first, after the bullet whizzed by. No contest.
The result explains a lot about these past week in public affairs. If nothing matters, if everything is terrible, if elections are just about swapping one liar for another, why not just shake it all up? Or burn it all down? At least it will be entertaining along the way.
In 2016, actress Susan Sarandon, an advocate for Sen. Bernie Sanders, suggested to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that a Trump presidency would, in Marxist terms, hasten the revolution:
“If you think that it’s pragmatic to shore up the status quo right now, then you’re not in touch with the status quo,” Sarandon said. “The status quo is not working … I think it’s dangerous to think that we can continue the way we are.”
Right on cue (roughly a decade later), the Trumpist right is ready for its revolution. It’s Mullet Time. In his War Room, Steve Bannon is humming Springtime For Hitler.
“The thing you’ve gotta know is everything is show-biz!”
After the shock of the 2016 election, as I felt I was emotionally drowning, I recall writing more than once that the only thing I could do going forward was try to see things as clearly as possible and convey that to the best of my ability. It’s not easy at times like this, and it’s especially difficult when your own friends and allies are often siezing on the opportunity to validate their priors and ride their hobby horses without a whole lot of evidence. It’s human to do that but I’m rarely persuaded by those arguments at times like these and I suspect most of you aren’t either. It’s just too soon and there are too many variables to be sure of any particular analysis.
By now, everyone knows why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump: because she didn’t do the thing I wanted her to do.
As with every other crushing Democratic defeat since 2000, the usual suspects have emerged to say precisely what you would expect them to. Right on cue, Bari Weiss, former New York Times columnist and founder of The Free Press, claimed that running on “extraordinarily niche issues like gender fluidity or defunding the police” was out of touch with “ordinary Americans.” Since the number of Democrats who ran on these issues was precisely zero, and since Harris herself made a point of touting her career as a prosecutor, one suspects that this strange utterance might in fact be code for “Democrats refused to throw trans people under the bus,” in which case, they are guilty as charged — though in the coming months, they will surely be urged by other familiar voices to do precisely this.
On the left, two hot takes have gained serious traction. One is that Harris lost because of Gaza; the other is that she lost because the neoliberal technocrats of the Democratic Party have given up on the working class. The first of these is hard to substantiate, though the broader criticisms of Harris’ position on Gaza have merit. The second is demonstrably wrong, and wrong in a way that points to a deep and long-standing problem on one wing of the American left.
He takes on Gaza with sensitivity and I think it’s well worth reading so click over to do that. I’m more interested in the economic argument because I feel like we’re about to party like it’s 2000 and 2016 and that’s not good:
If the Gaza argument is vexing, the economic populist argument is simply maddening. It has a 20-year history, dating back to Thomas Frank’s influential book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” It was always dismissive of cultural and social issues, seeing the culture wars as a sideshow meant to distract the rubes from their exploitation by plutocrats. In an oft-cited passage, Frank claimed that right-wing culture warriors aren’t really serious about the things they crusade on: “The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. … Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished.” I’m guessing that Frank would like a do-over on that take today.
This year, the economic-populist left came out of the gate storming, as Bernie Sanders issued a day-after statement that “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” As MSNBC columnist Michael A. Cohen noted, this “amounted to the proverbial act of coming down to the battlefield and shooting the survivors.” As Cohen also noted, it “simply isn’t true.”
Still, if one wanted to debate this claim on its merits, one could start by looking at Harris’ policy proposals: things like childcare tax credits, earned income tax credits for families without children, subsidies for first-time homebuyers, incentives for building affordable housing, an increase in the minimum wage, tax cuts for the middle class and tax increases on people making over $400,000 a year, support for unions and protection for workers seeking to unionize, lower costs for health care and prescription drugs, student loan forgiveness, support for in-home medical care and legislation to combat price gouging (which was immediately ridiculed by sensible centrist commentators like The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell). In what world is this not an economic plan targeted to the working class?
More importantly, one could look at recent history — not just some candidate’s wish list, but the real, demonstrable accomplishments of the Biden administration. As Nicholas Lemann recently pointed out, those accomplishments not only mark a decisive break with 40 years of neoliberalism; they are also astonishing political achievements, given the razor-thin congressional margins Biden was working with. “On Biden’s watch,” Lemann writes, “the government has launched large programs to move the country to clean energy sources, to create from scratch or to bring onshore a number of industries, to strengthen organized labor, to build thousands of infrastructure projects, to embed racial-equity goals in many government programs, and to break up concentrations of economic power.”
Let’s zero in for a moment on the fact that so-called “Bidenomics” focused on reenergizing American manufacturing and strengthening unions. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act created 700,000 manufacturing jobs. Biden also managed some oh-by-the-way victories like saving the 40-hour work week and resolving a longshoremen’s strike that threatened to tank the economy at the worst possible time. (That resolution alone should have sparked coast-to-coast celebrations.) And on the symbolic-and-therefore-important front, Biden was the first U.S. president to walk a picket line, in support of the United Auto Workers strike in September 2023. You would think that things like this might be important to economic populists.
But don’t take my word for it. Check out someone with much more experience with economic populism:
The Biden administration, as a result of the American Rescue Plan, helped rebuild the economy during the pandemic far faster than economists thought possible. At a time when people were terrified about the future, the president and those of us who supported him in Congress put Americans back to work, provided cash benefits to desperate parents and protected small businesses, hospitals, schools and child care centers.
After decades of talk about our crumbling roads, bridges and water systems, we put more money into rebuilding America’s infrastructure than ever before — which is projected to create millions of well-paying jobs. And we did not stop there. We made the largest-ever investment in climate action to save the planet. We canceled student debt for nearly five million financially strapped Americans. We cut prices for insulin and asthma inhalers, capped out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs and got free vaccines to the American people. We battled to defend women’s rights in the face of moves by Trump-appointed jurists to roll back reproductive freedom and deny women the right to control their own bodies.
Who, you ask, spoke so generously — and accurately — about Biden’s economic record? If you guessed “Bernie Sanders, in the pages of The New York Times this past summer,” you win today’s “spot-the-political- opportunism” prize.
The reason this matters — the reason that Sanders’ postelection statement isn’t just garden-variety political opportunism — is that Biden was, remarkably, almost precisely the kind of president that economic populists said they wanted. (I say “remarkably” partly because I was an Elizabeth Warren supporter in 2020 and didn’t expect much from Biden. I was pleasantly surprised at almost every turn.) Perhaps Sanders was simply more simpatico with Biden than with Harris; it certainly sounds like it, since his op-ed was explicitly an argument for keeping Biden as the nominee. I will not offer hypotheses about this possibility. I will simply point out that the Bernie Sanders who wrote that op-ed knew perfectly well how to argue that the Democratic Party had not abandoned the working class.
The economic populist left is not wrong on the merits. Quite the contrary. It has been clear for four years that working-class and middle-class people were feeling the effects of inflation, that their pain was real and that the costs of everything from eggs and gas to childcare and housing weren’t just opportunities for right-wing demagoguery. They were lived experiences, day to day. That issue, together with immigration (fanned by hysterical xenophobia and propaganda), turned out to be decisive for this election. Should Biden himself have done more to promote and publicize his administration’s considerable achievements? Absolutely — although communicating them was not his strong suit. That’s where the economic populists with better communication skills should have stepped up and said, “Folks, we feel your pain, and we really do have a plan. Some of it is already in place, and there’s more like that to come.”
Don’t get me wrong. This would have been the right message, and it would have done justice to Bidenomics. But I’m not saying that messaging would have worked. On the contrary, I’m fairly sure it would not have. To return to Michael Cohen: “under Biden, Democrats adopted one of the most pro-working class policy agendas in recent political memory, enacted much of it — and accrued no electoral benefit.” I’m just saying that the argument that Biden and Harris neglected the working class is false.
Instead, I’m in the camp that believes my side lost because every incumbent party in every wealthy democracy paid a political price for presiding over post-COVID-19 inflation, whether they deserved it or not. Granted, it’s galling that the American version of this global phenomenon entailed losing to a petulant and amoral individual with a criminal record, who continually flirts with the idea of political violence. That loss is incalculable, and may wind up being worse than the debacles of 1980 and 2000. I hope for the sake of future generations that it is not.
But I’m also in the camp that believes that although Harris didn’t run a perfect campaign (most likely because there is no such thing) and should at least have given voters a clearer sense of how she would be different from Biden (because of the stench of incumbency), the 2024 election was looking like a Trump landslide four months ago. The amazing thing, then, is that a Black woman fighting the headwinds of racism, misogyny, gale-force far-right disinformation and the mainstream media’s “sanewashing” of her opponent managed to boost her favorability rating in record time, crushing her only debate with Trump, ably battling Bret Baier’s bullying on Fox News and coming within a whisker of holding the Blue Wall states that would have secured her the presidency.
The question shouldn’t be: “What did the Democrats do wrong?” The question should be, given the profoundly inauspicious political conditions they faced as an incumbent party in a country where two-thirds of the population thinks that things are on the wrong track: “How did they come so close?”
It is always tempting to believe that your candidate lost for the reasons you care about most. I feel that temptation every single time. But there was so much more going on in this election: Latino men moving to the right, the widening gender divide among white voters, the struggle for reproductive rights and affordable health care being muted by the delusional belief among low-information voters that Trump would protect these things, and the stubborn, unavoidable fact that long-term investments in working-class families mean less to many people, on a day-to-day basis, than the cost of groceries and gas.
We are now left to live with the bitter irony that many of those long-term investments in American manufacturing and infrastructure will bear fruit during Trump’s second term. Sometime in late January 2025, I suspect, we will begin to hear how Trump tamed inflation and reinvigorated the American working class simply by taking office. And we will continue to hear, as Bidenomics takes root and Trump takes the credit for its successes, that the Democrats lost by turning their backs on that working class.
I don’t want to give up on the idea that another, better world is possible. It’s all that keeps me going. For now, I just want the left to remain in the world it once claimed as its own — the world of the reality-based community.
That’s pretty much where I’m at. I will point out that there is another hot take gaining traction on the left, or center-left, and that is that the Democrats must win (duh) and therefore it is imperative that they move to the center on culture war issues. We’ve been there before too. And it’s a post for another day.
I’m not going to get too worked up about this (yet) because I think it’s mostly a primal reaction to losing to that freak again. It’s understandable that people would grasp for any explanation for that except the idea that way too many people believe the garbage that Trump spews and really like what they are hearing. It’s disorienting. So we need to believe that it isn’t that they like him it’s that the Democrats just aren’t “messaging” right or “delivering” enough.
But I’m afraid our problem is bigger than that. I’m trying to keep the faith that we’ll all calm down soon in the face of what these monsters are doing and accept the truth that that isn’t the real reason people keep voting for the Trump circus. They aren’t living in the same reality the rest of us are living in and figuring out what to do about that is far more important than fashioning a better economic message.
