It’s likely most of the Monday-morning quarterbacking on why Trump won last week is little more than speculation based on pundits’ existing biases. What novelist Joseph O’Neill offers The New York Time Review of Books is as good as any. Maybe better for being skeptical of conventional wisdom:
The current prevailing theory about Trump’s victory is that most Americans, irked by an unpleasant encounter with inflation, cast an anti-incumbent vote without giving much thought to the consequences of that vote for US democracy. I don’t totally buy this whoops! theory. My sense is that, in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think, young men in particular. And I believe that many more millions are fascinated by Trump not for his supposed business prowess but for his transparent wish to hurt others. He is an evil guy, a villain—and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment. Nihilistic consumerism, as much as authoritarianism, prevailed. Of course, political science is not designed to investigate this kind of stuff. The clearest insights we have come from the realm of philosophy and literature. Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi did not rely on focus groups.
Regarding Arendt and Levi, somewhere last week I saw a comment that half of Americans outed themselves as the kind of people who would turn over Anne Frank.
Likely, a large portion of that half are simply grossly misinformed on immigration, crime, and the economy, Dean Baker points out with the help of a graph, but which portion? Is being misinformed on policy a cause or a symptom of Trumpism?
It’s not about policy no matter how much people insist that it is. We know this because in places like Missouri voters just passed initiatives for abortion rights, an increase in the minimum wage, and paid sick leave, all Democratic policies, while overwhelmingly voting for a Republican senator and a president who strongly oppose these things. This is about aesthetics and attitudes. A majority of Americans want an autocratic strongman show and Donald Trump and the Republicans are happy to give it to them.
Referencing several sources, Heather Cox Richardson notes (I added links for you):
[Salon’s Amanda] Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Postshowed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Mattersput it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”
For decades, in fact, as I wrote at Huffington Post in 2009 about guys in my office back in the 1990s.
“We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era,” Adam Serwer explained in “The Cruelty Is the Point” six years ago. “It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.”
Serwer wasn’t done:
Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
You see it in the gleefulness of online taunts from Trumpers after his reelection. Others phoned theirs in to our local Democratic headquarters last week. Here’s a classic from 2020:
What do you think the first hundred days of Trump’s term will look like? Are there any specific policies or obsessions that you think will occupy him?
I think we can expect an attempt to round up, incarcerate, and deport tens of thousands of suspected undocumented immigrants. We can expect a flurry of executive orders designed to transform and weaponize the Department of Justice. We can expect business leaders to gather in the Oval Office to pay homage to the president. We can expect Elon Musk to be horribly prominent, possibly as an enforcer of Trump’s promises to impose tariffs on imported goods. I’m going to assume that the Democratic Party, as we speak, is preparing for these and other eventualities. I am sure Trump will overreach. It is up to the opposition to make him pay for his overreaches. It is not our job to help him “succeed.” It’s not our job to “unite the country” or, as President Biden has suggested, “turn down the temperature.” It’s our job to make Trump fail, fail again, fail worse.
Trump’s already signalling that overreach.
Donald Trump says he will sign an executive order to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal migrants on his first day in office. pic.twitter.com/M7Y8OAWpOZ
I always suspected Trump couldn’t read (/s): “But citizenship by birth is established by the mere fact of birth under the circumstances defined in the Constitution. Every person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, becomes at once a citizen of the United States, and needs no naturalization.”
Nevertheless, Trump expects (and has reason to) that the MAGA majority on the Roberts Supreme Court will reject precedent again and make the Fourteenth Amendment say what their king wants it to say.
I believe this is true:
“Many people would like to be relieved of the burden of choice…”
“Over and over again around the world, people discovered that this brought disaster upon the country.”
“The strongman has to have a personality cult, and the illusion of competency is… pic.twitter.com/M59lYxmuuz
I am re-posting this piece in observance of Veteran’s Day. -DH
(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on November 11, 2021)
Dress me up for battle When all I want is peace Those of us who pay the price Come home with the least
–from “Harvest for the World”, by the Isley Brothers
Earlier today, my brother posted this on Facebook:
While going through my father’s stuff after his passing we found a large stack of envelopes. They turned out to be letters from junior high students thanking him for the talk he gave the students on Veteran’s Day. It turned out there were over 14 packed envelopes. One for every Veteran’s Day he spoke with the students. My brothers and I were very close to throwing these out with many of the other miscellaneous papers in my Dad’s cabinets but, without even looking at the contents I decided to keep them. I finally opened them up today and started going through them.
I used to kid my late father about being a pack rat but I am grateful that he was. I recall him telling me about giving classroom talks as part of his work with a local Vietnam Veteran’s group, but today was the first time I have ever seen one of those letters. I remember listening to those cassettes he sent us during his tour of duty in Vietnam.
That mention of the Secret Service refers to the 1968 Presidential campaign. Our family was stationed near Dayton, Ohio that year. For the first 17 years of his military service, my dad was an E.O.D. (Explosive Ordinance Detachment) specialist. Whenever presidential candidates came through the area, members of his unit would work with the Secret Service to help sweep venues for explosive devices in preparation for rallies and speeches.
I remember that he helped prepare for appearances by Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace. I remember him showing me a special pin that he had to wear, which would indicate to Secret Service agents that he had security clearance (I’m sure they are still stashed away in one of those boxes).
Today happens to be Veteran’s Day, but every day is Veteran’s Day for those who have been there and back. In honor of the holiday, here are my top 10 picks for films that deal with the aftermath of war.
Americana – David Carradine and Barabara Hershey star in this unique, no-budget 1973 character study (released in 1981). Carradine, who also directed and co-produced, plays a Vietnam vet who drifts into a small Kansas town, and for his own enigmatic reasons, decides to restore an abandoned merry-go-round. The reaction from the clannish townsfolk ranges from bemused to spiteful.
It’s part Rambo, part Billy Jack (although nowhere near as violent), and a genre curio in the sense that none of the violence depicted is perpetrated by its war-damaged protagonist. Carradine also composed and performed the song that plays in the closing credits. It’s worth noting that Americana predates Deer Hunter and Coming Home, which are generally credited as the “first” narrative films to deal with Vietnam vets.
The Best Years of Our Lives – William Wyler’s 1946 drama set the standard for the “coming home” genre. Robert E. Sherwood adapted the screenplay from a novella by former war correspondent MacKinlay Kantor.
The story centers on three WW2 vets (Fredric March, Dana Andrews, and Harold Russell), each from a different branch of military service who meet while returning home to the same small Midwestern town. While they all came from different social stratum in civilian life, the film demonstrates how war is the great equalizer, as we observe how the three men face similar difficulties in returning to normalcy.
Well-written and directed, and wonderfully acted. Real-life WW 2 vet Russell (the only non-actor in the cast) picked up a Best Supporting Actor Oscar; one of 7 the film earned that year. Also starring Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, and Virginia Mayo.
Coming Home – Hal Ashby’s 1978 drama was one of the first major studio films to tackle the plight of Vietnam vets. Jane Fonda stars as a Marine wife whose husband (Bruce Dern) has deployed to Vietnam. She volunteers at a VA hospital, where she is surprised to recognize a former high-school acquaintance (Jon Voight) who is now an embittered, paraplegic war vet.
While they have opposing political views on the war, Fonda and Voight form a friendship, which blossoms into a romantic relationship once the wheelchair-bound vet is released from assisted care and begins the laborious transition to becoming self-reliant.
The film’s penultimate scene, involving a confrontation between Dern (who has returned from his tour of duty with severe PTSD), Fonda and Voight is one of the most affecting and emotionally shattering pieces of ensemble acting I have seen in any film; Voight’s moving monologue in the denouement is on an equal par.
Voight and Fonda each won an Oscar (Dern was nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category), as did co-writers Waldo Salt, Robert C. Jones and Nancy Dowd for their screenplay.
The Deer Hunter – “If anything happens…don’t leave me over there. You gotta promise me that, Mike.” 1978 was a pivotal year for American films dealing head on with the country’s deep scars (social, political and emotional) from the nightmare of the war in Vietnam; that one year alone saw the release of The Boys in Company C, Go Tell the Spartans, Coming Home, and writer-director Michael Cimino’s shattering drama.
Cimino’s sprawling 3 hour film is a character study about three blue collar buddies (Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and Jon Savage) hailing from a Pennsylvania steel town who enlist in the military, share a harrowing POW experience in Vietnam, and suffer through PTSD (each in their own fashion).
Uniformly excellent performances from the entire cast, which includes Meryl Streep, John Cazale, Chuck Aspegren and George Dzundza.
I remember the first time I saw this film in a theater. I sat through the end credits, and continued sitting for at least five minutes, absolutely stunned. I literally had to “collect myself” before I could leave the theater. No film has ever affected me quite like that.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) – John Frankenheimer’s 1962 Cold War thriller (with a screenplay adapted from Richard Condon’s novel by George Axelrod) stars Frank Sinatra as Korean War veteran and former POW Major Bennett Marco. Marco and his platoon were captured by the Soviets and transported to Manchuria for a period, then released. Consequently, Marco suffers PTSD, in the form of recurring nightmares.
Marco’s memories of the captivity are hazy; but he suspects his dreams hold the key. His suspicions are confirmed when he hears from several fellow POWs, who all share very specific and disconcerting details in their dreams involving the platoon’s sergeant, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey, in a great performance). As the mystery unfolds, a byzantine conspiracy is uncovered, involving brainwashing, subterfuge and assassination.
I’ve watched this film maybe 15 or 20 times over the years, and it has held up remarkably well, despite a few dated trappings. It works on a number of levels; as a conspiracy thriller, political satire, and a perverse family melodrama. Over time I’ve come to view it more as a black comedy; largely attributable to its prescience regarding our current political climate.…which now makes it a closer cousin to Dr. Strangelove and Network). (Full review)
Sir! No Sir! – Most people who have seen Oliver Stone’s Born On The Fourth Of July were likely left with the impression that paralyzed Vietnam vet and activist Ron Kovic was the main impetus and focus of the G.I. veterans and active-duty anti-war movement, but Kovic’s story was in fact only one of thousands. Director David Zeigler combines present-day interviews with archival footage to good effect in this well-paced documentary about members of the armed forces who openly opposed the Vietnam war.
While the aforementioned Kovic received a certain amount of media attention at the time, the full extent and history of the involvement by military personnel has been suppressed from public knowledge for a number of years, and that is the focus of Zeigler’s2006 film.
All the present-day interviewees (military vets) have interesting (and at times emotionally wrenching) stories to share. Jane Fonda speaks candidly about her infamous “FTA” (“Fuck the Army”) shows that she organized for troops as an alternative to the more traditionally gung-ho Bob Hope U.S.O. tours. Eye-opening and well worth your time.
Slaughterhouse-Five – Film adaptations of Kurt Vonnegut stories have a checkered history; from downright awful (Slapstick of Another Kind) or campy misfires (Breakfast of Champions) to passable time killers (Happy Birthday, Wanda June and Mother Night). For my money, your best bets are Jonathan Demme’s 1982 PBS American Playhouse short Who Am I This Time? and this 1974 feature film by director George Roy Hill.
Michael Sacks stars as milquetoast daydreamer Billy Pilgrim, a WW2 vet who weathers the devastating Allied firebombing of Dresden as a POW. After the war, he marries his sweetheart, fathers a son and daughter and settles into a comfortable middle-class life, making a living as an optometrist.
A standard all-American postwar scenario…except for the part where a UFO lands on his nice manicured lawn and spirits him off to the planet Tralfamadore, after which he becomes permanently “unstuck” in time; i.e., begins living (and re-living) his life in random order. Great performances from Valerie Perrine and Ron Leibman. Stephen Geller adapted the script.
Stop-Loss – This powerful and heartfelt 2008 drama is from Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Peirce. Co-written by the director along with Mark Richard, it was one of the first substantive films to address the plight of Iraq war vets.
As the film opens, we meet Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), an infantry squad leader leading his men in hot pursuit of a carload of heavily armed insurgents through the streets of Tikrit. The chase ends in a harrowing ambush, with the squad suffering heavy casualties.
Brandon is wounded in the skirmish, as are two of his lifelong buddies, Steve (Channing Tatum) and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). They return to their small Texas hometown to receive Purple Hearts and a hero’s welcome, infusing the battle-weary vets with a brief euphoria that inevitably gives way to varying degrees of PTSD for the trio. A road trip that drives the film’s third act becomes a metaphorical journey through the zeitgeist of the modern-day American veteran.
Peirce and her co-writer (largely) avoid clichés and remain low-key on political subtext; this is ultimately a soldier’s story. Regardless of your political stance on the Iraq War(s), anyone with an ounce of compassion will find this film both heart wrenching and moving. (Full review)
Waltz With Bashir – In this animated film, writer-director Ari Forman mixes the hallucinatory expressionism of Apocalypse Now with personal sense memories of his own experiences as an Israeli soldier serving in the 1982 conflict in Lebanon to paint a searing portrait of the horrors of war and its devastating psychic aftermath. A true visual wonder, the film is comprised of equal parts documentary, war diary and bad acid trip.
The director generally steers clear of polemics; this is more of a “soldier’s story”, a grunt’s-eye view of the confusion and madness of war, in which none are really to blame, yet all remain complicit. This dichotomy, I think, lies at the heart of the matter when attempting to understand what snaps inside the mind of those who carry their war experiences home.
The film begs a question or two that knows no borders: How do we help them? How do we help them help themselves? I think these questions are more important than ever, for a whole new generation of psychically damaged men and women all over the world. (Full review)
A War – This powerful 2015 Oscar-nominated drama is from writer-director Tobias Lindholm. Pilou Aesbaek stars as a Danish military company commander serving in Afghanistan . After one of his units is demoralized by the loss of a man to a Taliban sniper, the commander bolsters morale by personally leading a patrol, which gets pinned down during an intense firefight. Faced with a split-second decision, the commander requests air support, resulting in a “fog of war” misstep. He is ordered home to face charges of murdering civilians.
For the first two-thirds of the film Lindholm intersperses the commander’s front line travails with those of his family back home, as his wife (Yuva Novotny) struggles to keep heart and soul together while maintaining as much “normalcy” she can muster for the sake their three kids. The home front and the war front are both played “for real” (aside from the obvious fact that it’s a Danish production, this is a refreshingly “un-Hollywoodized” war movie).
Some may be dismayed by the moral and ethical ambivalence of the denouement. Then again, there are few tidy endings in life…particularly in war, which (to quote Bertrand Russell) never determines who is “right”, but who is left. Is that a tired trope? Perhaps; but it’s one that bears repeating…until that very last bullet on Earth gets fired in anger. (Full review)
Just hours after Donald Trump won the election, Elon Musk was already flexing his power over the new administration, joining a phone call with the man he helped elect to office and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Axios reported that the world’s richest man made a guest appearance on a phone call between Trump and Zelenskiy on Wednesday, even chiming in at several points during the discussion…
Musk’s surprise addition to the call is a troubling sign, to say the least. Like Trump, the billionaire has a close relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. A bombshell report last month revealed that Musk is in regular contact with Putin, and the Kremlin may have even implicitly threatened him. That could explain his past refusal to let Ukraine use his Starlink internet network to carry out a surprise attack on Russian forces, or his public ridicule of Zelenskiy’s requests for aid.
They report that Trump and Musk didn’t tell Zelensky to get ready to capitulate but it’s just a matter of time. Trump has made that very clear and he’s indoctrinated the GOP cult to believe that abandoning Ukraine is the only answer.
It is curious that Trump hasn’t already ended the war, however. He promised over and over again that it would end the day after he was elected (not inaugurated.)
Maybe this has something to do with it:
Bob Woodward shared a warning about Donald Trump in the hours after his election win.
Speaking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the longtime journalist was asked about his thoughts on Trump’s election, having interviewed the president-elect more than 20 times. Woodward mentioned Trump’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I talked a couple of months ago to Dan Coats, the former director of national intelligence under Trump, and I said, what’s going on in this relationship between Trump and Putin? And Dan Coats said, ‘It’s almost, it’s so close. It seems like it might be blackmail,’” Woodward said.
“CIA director Bill Burns said Putin manipulates. He’s professionally trained to do that,” Woodward added. “Putin’s got a plan just to do this exactly, and it’s what he did when Trump was in office previously, and he’s planning it again at playing Trump.”
Woodward’s warning came as Putin himself stayed silent on Trump’s victory, waiting until the next day to congratulate the president-elect in what could be a power play for the Russian leader. Putin’s congratulatory message came on Thursday and didn’t include any acknowledgment of Trump’s promise that he could end the Ukraine War in “24 hours,” and perhaps signaled the opposite.
There won’t be any investigation into any of this this time, of course. Even the press will probably be much less motivated to go after these stories. We just have to hope that Trump is too stupid to succeed at his worst plans and that the rest of the world is able to maneuver around him and his strongman buddies enough to keep the world from blowing up.
The globe’s leaders prepare for a rogue superpower
The world’s leaders all know he is a clown and an imbecile. But he’s demonstrated that he was no fluke and that he’s got an almost supernatural ability to escape accountability for anything he does. I suspect that they will tread very carefully as they plot their next moves:
When Prime Minister Keir Starmer met Donald J. Trump at Trump Tower for dinner on Sept. 26, it was part of a British charm offensive to nurture a relationship between a left-wing leader and a right-wing potential president. So when Mr. Trump turned to Mr. Starmer before parting and told him, “We are friends,” according to a person involved in the evening, it did not go unnoticed.
Whether they stay friends is anybody’s guess.
For months leading up to Mr. Trump’s political comeback — and in the heady days since his victory was confirmed — foreign leaders have rushed, once again, to ingratiate themselves with him. Their emissaries have cultivated people in Mr. Trump’s orbit or with think tanks expected to be influential in setting policies for a second Trump administration.
Some leaders, like President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, are drafting their pitches to appeal to Mr. Trump’s transactional nature; others, like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, have deployed teams of officials to the United States to visit dozens of Republican leaders in the hope that they can moderate Mr. Trump’s most radical instincts on imposing tariffs.
History suggests that many of these bridge-building efforts will fail. By the end of his first term, Mr. Trump had soured on several leaders with whom he started off on good terms. His protectionist trade policy and aversion to alliances — coupled with a mercurial personality — fueled clashes that overrode the rapport that the leaders had labored to cultivate.
“There were two misapprehensions about Trump,” Malcolm Turnbull, a former prime minister of Australia, said in an interview. “The first was he would be different in office than he was on the campaign trail. The second was the best way to deal with him was to suck up to him.”
In January 2017, Mr. Turnbull had a notoriously hostile phone call with Mr. Trump over whether the United States would honor an Obama-era deal to accept 1,250 refugees, which Mr. Trump opposed (the United States did end up taking them). Mr. Turnbull said he later found other common ground with Mr. Trump, even talking him out of imposing tariffs on some Australian exports.
The difference this time, Mr. Turnbull said, is that “everybody knows exactly what they’re going to get. He’s highly transactional. You’ve got to be able to demonstrate that a particular course of action is in his interest.”
Well before the election, leaders began anticipating a Trump victory by seeking him out. Mr. Zelensky met him in New York the same week as Mr. Starmer. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel traveled to Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., estate, Mar-a-Lago, in July, as did Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary.
A populist whose autocratic style is a model for some in Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement, Mr. Orban has come, perhaps, the closest to cracking the code with Mr. Trump. The two meet and speak regularly by phone; they heap praise on each other in what has become a mutual admiration society.
Mr. Orban, Mr. Trump has said, is a “very great leader, a very strong man,” whom some do not like only “because he’s too strong.” Mr. Orban, for his part, has praised Mr. Trump as the only hope for peace in Ukraine and for the defeat of “woke globalists.”
Trump is at the helm of the world’s only superpower and there is virtually no internal institutional resistance to him at this point. The world will be wary for awhile to see how this sorts itself. But I doubt very seriously that America’s adversaries are not going to be able to manipulate him. He’s very shallow and very stupid. The allies will no doubt pay lip service as necessary while they arm up and form closer bonds with each other. The US is no longer a reliable friend.
Trump’s post came a day after Newsom said state lawmakers would convene to take immediate legislative action to counter Trump’s expected attacks on abortion, electric vehicles, immigration and federal disaster aid.
California is one of several blue states that have announced preemptive moves to defend against Trump’s policies. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James have pledged to beef up coordination between their offices to “protect New Yorkers’ fundamental freedoms from any potential threats.” And state leaders in Illinois and Massachusetts have pledged to take action to protect undocumented immigrants, access to abortion and the rights of LGBTQ+ people.
[…]
Newsom and prominent Democrats in Sacramento have vowed the Golden State will once again lead the resistance to Trump’s policies — reviving its role from the first Trump era. During that time, state officials filed more than 120 lawsuits challenging the Republican administration’s actions and passed a sweeping law limiting local authorities’ cooperation with federal immigration officials.
“The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack — and we won’t sit idle,” Newsom said Thursday, in a statement announcing the special session. The governor was a central surrogate for Vice President Kamala Harris and is considered a likely contender for president in 2028.
With the extremist Republicans now controlling every branch of the federal government, including the Supreme Court, the only institutional “check and balance” is the states. It’s not enough to stop the worst of Trump’s atrocities. But it may help at least some of the people who live in those states.
Newsom came out with rhetorical guns blazing but I have to say that Illinois Gov. Pritzger had the best line in his speech: “You come for my people, you come through me.” Isn’t it pretty to think so?
For the nicer neighborly approach to resistance, Gov. Tim Walz:
The anti-abortion activists kept their mouths shut during the election. Now they want payback:
Anti-abortion advocates say there is still work to be done to further restrict access to abortion when Republican Donald Trump returns to the White House next year.
They point to the federal guidance that the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden released around emergency abortions, requiring that hospitals provide them for women whose health or life is at risk, and its easing of prescribing restrictions for abortion pills that have allowed women to order the medication online with the click of a button.
“Now the work begins to dismantle the pro-abortion policies of the Biden-Harris administration,” the Susan B. Anthony List, the powerful anti-abortion lobby, said in a statement Wednesday. “President Trump’s first-term pro-life accomplishments are the baseline for his second term.”
The group declined to release details about what, specifically, they will seek to undo. But abortion rights advocates are bracing for further abortion restrictions once Trump takes office. And some women are, too, with online abortion pill orders spiking in the days after Election Day.
Trump will never have to run again so he’s free to reward his friends without any fear of electoral repurcussions.
We’re deep in the “bargaining” phase now, as Democrats look for coalition members to blame, positions to dump, and language to police that will win them back the millions of voters they lost across the country on Tuesday.
That’s a healthy part of any electoral loss, and it’s why we have free and fair elections — politicians only know when they touched the hot stove when voters tell them. But I’m also skeptical of almost every early explanation for Harris’ defeat I’ve seen so far that hinges on Democrats making a tweak or two and fixing their problems.
It’s not that they aren’t smart recommendations in the mix, it’s that they’re far less relevant than the likeliest factor in any Democratic turnaround: Time.
Democrats are smart to listen to the voters who rejected them and stay humble about what they might learn. But the emphasis here is “listen” — the actual answers as to what to do next will likely only reveal themselves once they see how Trump governs and how the public responds. In the meantime, there are a few reasons why they shouldn’t leap to cure-all explanations so quickly.
The issues of the next election will not be the issues of today. Amid the finger-pointing about campaign tactics, one thing everyone in both parties seems to agree on is that President Biden’s unpopularity — especially his record on inflation and immigration — was a major drag.
But those two issues will not look the same going forward, nor is it clear they’ll even be high up in the voter priority list come 2026 or 2028. Biden will be gone in January. Democrats are now relieved of responsibility of governing and free to retake the Trump role of critic-in-chief when the other side screws something up, or over-reads their mandate, or faces a no-win problem that requires upsetting some people — and they will. It’s easy to win votes on Israel, for example, when simply saying Biden’s approach is bad, with little further detail, is an appealing message to a slice of Jewish and Muslim voters. It’s harder to do that when you’re the one in charge and own the decisions.
But, of course, Israel-Gaza might not even be a significant issue in 2026. What will? It’s hard to say. Take 2004, when Democrats despaired that President George W. Bush — who also won his first election without a popular vote mandate — had found a winning combination of faith and national security voters. Almost immediately, his Social Security privatization push began dragging down his approval, and then a worsening Iraq War and a widely criticized response to Hurricane Katrina dragged the party down further, then various scandals in the White House and Congress, and finally an economic collapse nobody saw coming led to a landslide. By 2006, Democrats had a unifying set of issues to run on, by 2008 they had identified a charismatic candidate who fit the moment.
This isn’t an exceptional story, it’s the typical one after every party loss: The form of their eventual comeback rarely is obvious the day after the election. And it’s rarely as simple as “Go on Joe Rogan.”
Parsing a Harris loss isn’t as easy as it looks. The Harris campaign is getting nitpicked to death in the aftermath of the election, as is natural after a loss. Some of these criticisms may prove correct, but it will also take time to identify which ones are more solidly backed by data and reporting and come up again in future elections. There are also some specific reasons to be wary of early reads on her performance.
For one, there’s a really simple problem in evaluating Harris: It’s not entirely clear her campaign was bad, or was merely doing its best in a terrible national environment she inherited at the last minute from her predecessor. In the battleground states where the campaign devoted its time, resources, and ground game the race was mostly close and turnout was stronger — while votes are still being counted, it looks like a 2-point swing would have won her the Rust Belt and the presidency, and just a little more would have added Georgia. Meanwhile, states with little attention from the campaign, like New York or Texas, swung hard to the right by much wider margins, while only a single state (Washington) appears to have moved left at all.
It strongly suggests that, like so many other incumbent parties worldwide after the pandemic, the campaign faced strong headwinds that it was unable to overcome. There was polling evidence (and yes, the polls were more accurate this time) ahead of the election that Harris campaign’s economy-focused ads at least helped mitigate her weakness on inflation, for example. Her favorables also shot up during the race, so there’s some evidence her biographical ads really did help her image. It didn’t add up to a victory, but figuring out the delta between the battlegrounds and the rest of the country, and which attacks on her stung and could sting again, is going to be a long process for Democrats.
The top of the ticket’s traits may not be transferable. One oddity of the election is that it was the most resounding Republican win in 20 years in the popular vote, including an unprecedented breakthrough with Latino voters, and yet the picture down-ballot looks much more like the status quo. Republicans are still set to win the popular vote among House candidates, but their expected majority looks narrow and Democrats held up surprisingly well in places like New York where Harris collapsed. In the Senate, up to four states may have split their tickets for Democrats — Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona — and in Pennsylvania, Sen. Bob Casey looks poised to lose by a narrow margin.
In North Carolina, Gov.-elect Josh Stein easily won his election over scandal-plagued Mark Robinson, but Democrats won key races elsewhere on the statewide ticket as well. The Republican wave was real, but relatively weak, in state legislatures around the country.
Some of this can be attributed to favorable district lines. But other elements include Republicans voting for Trump and a Democrat, or (as seems prominent in Nevada, for example) not voting for anyone at all in races down the ballot.
What does it all mean? Hard to say. But it complicates some easy takeaways that the Democratic “brand” is fatally compromised, at least for now. Contrary to popular assumptions, Trump proved uniquely popular with some voters, thanks in part to his perceived economic success in the White House, and tended to outrun others in his party. In the last nine years, no Republican has quite replicated Trump’s power in battleground races — and those who try the most typically do worse than less MAGA alternatives. Predicting how a post-Trump nominee would fare (which right now looks like JD Vance) is very hard; they might not be able to draw out his voters, they might have greater upside with voters he’s repelled, and a ton of their appeal will depend on his record in office.
Similarly, concerns voters had with Harris did not always attach themselves to other Democrats this cycle. One possible theory is that many of the attacks on cultural issues, immigration, and transgender rights that dogged her in Republican ads were largely dredged up from her presidential campaign in 2019, which came at a time when politicians with national ambitions were racing to the left. But many down-ballot Democrats either skipped that process, emerged later, or adjusted to the backlash years ago: You’ll hear a lot of criticisms about “defund the police” or saying “Latinx” on TV, but as David Weigel notes, few recent examples of actual elected Democrats using or entertaining this language.
There are difficult and divisive questions for the party ahead, like how to respond to the hundreds of millions of dollars in transgender-related ads (though some winning senators faced the same attacks), as well as Trump’s inevitable immigration crackdown. But the next round of candidates will not be so burdened by what has been — future recruits and presidential hopefuls may have more flexibility to adopt new ideas and rhetoric without a parade of clips and opposition research undermining their new message.
No one who already had an ideological nit to pick with the party will heed that advice. The people who are jockeying for power or who are angry that the campaign chose this or that tactic will make sure their thoughts are known. But the rest of us would do well to just take a beat, assess the lay of the land — and let this unfold. We can’t change what happened and Trump is going to fuck up. Those things are immutable.
If you don’t show up to play, you forfeit. Step into many fast food joints in rural America and the TV is likely tuned to Fox News. Drive across rural America east and west and radio is dominated by RW talk. Democrats have let this situation stand for years without responding. Will they this time?
Ryan Cooper argues that so-called “liberal media” was in the tank for Donald Trump. A lot of factors contributed to Donald Trump’s win, he writes:
But the information environment—the combination of traditional journalism, social media, party propaganda, and so on—is preposterously biased and inadequate. Trump brushed aside any of about a thousand scandals that would have sunk any previous politician. Democrats need to take a long, hard look at what their information strategy should be, and more importantly, how their messaging can be reliably and consistently put in front of voters.
Cooper recommends that “Democrats need a party publication—something to bypass the traditional media and deliver progressive messaging directly.”
Fine idea. Not going to happen. The underlying assumption is that RW outlets like Fox News, OAN, and all those other RW propaganda vehicles are arms of the Republican Party. They are not. The GOP doesn’t have the money to support them any more than Democrats do. They may be owned and operated by deep-pocketed Republicans, but are not party operations.
Cooper wants to see the left abandon mainstream outlets to build their own information ecosystem:
Websites, radio stations, podcasts, and so forth ought to be stood up by party members with access to money—the Harris campaign and associated groups, by the way, spent about $5 billion losing this election—particularly if they can replace genuine local news that has been gutted by private equity and Facebook, or if they are centered on subjects typically neglected by liberals like sports or gaming. The core strategy is to set up publications with progressive views but likely to have broader appeal. Honest partisanship should be the standard, rather than a pretend above-it-all “objective journalism” that in practice means bending reality completely beyond recognition to benefit Donald Trump.
Fine idea. Not going to happen. Too expensive up front and high maintenance. Ask Air America. Perhaps something smaller and stealthier.
What donors might support is something less ambitious but still with reach and penetration. As a pilot project in 2008, I ran local AM radio spots for months. A couple times a day on a local progressive station and during drive time on the local conservative talk station. Rather than issue- or party-driven, the 30-sec ads were more “good citizeny” but with a progressive meta-message. 1,100 spots then cost about $8k (Lather, rinse, repeat.)
As it worked out, the spots I wrote and produced were not so different from the digital ads Anat Shenker-Osorio and women from Amplify now put together (Way To Win, ASO Communications, Moira Studio, Gutsy Media, We Make the Future Action).
Perhaps Amplify might consider taking their messaging beyond the digital space into AM radio. The left has almost no presence in AM radio spaces, for example, in places like rural Arizona, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Right-wing talk and country music dominate in rural America.
AM spots are cheap earworms, and if they’re not so in-your-face about the message, even conservative station owners will run them because lefties’ money is green too. This requires no huge investment for infrastructure, just periodic purchasing and production. Amplify already has the tools, the talent, and a track record. Why reinvent the wheel? What they lack is budget for it.
An acquaintance of mine once did something similar (though not as sophisticated and tested as Anat’s work) in targeted rural radio markets on a budget of only ~$100k. The point is to deliver a tight progressive message over and over and over until people absorb it without even realizing it. That’s how commercial advertising works, isn’t it?
Please don’t spread conspiracy fantasies about the election, okay? TikTok and X are rocking with these two videos below (at least). They are — let’s not be polite about it — bullshit.
Before I even debunk them, let’s be clear again: This is bullshit, a live-fire exercise in a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing.
The TikToks allege that these people looked up their ballot status on Vote dor org and found nothing: “Please go check your ballot status. I just checked mine and my vote did not count! ”
Look, I’ve been doing election work a long time. What typical voters don’t know about the election process could fill libraries.
Item #1:
I'm hearing from many Kamala Harris voters who had the same experience as this woman. How the fuck can this happen in the United States of America? 😡😡😡👇 pic.twitter.com/pGbKy8lmj2
The video above has (of now) 1.2M engagements and 2k comments on TikTok, and 206k views on X. Her followup video notes that she’s in Washington state (voting there is virtually all by mail). She reports that her ballot status shows only “ballot mailed” and “ballot received, but not that it’s reviewed and accepted.
“As far as I am concerned, no. It doesn’t mean that it’s accepted,” says thewindwitch.
That much is right. The election is not official in Washington until after the canvass, Tuesday, November 26, 2024 and certification “twenty-one days after a general election” (Thursday, December 05, 2024). Ballots that arrive late may not be reviewed and counted for several days after Election Day. The process for Washington is outlined here. “Ballots continue to be processed, signatures verified, and votes tabulated until the election results are officially certified.” (I don’t know what their process is for “curing” late-arriving ballots.)
Thewindwitch urges people to go check their ballot status. But if they voted in person, the tool at Vote dor org won’t show anything. It’s for by-mail ballots only. My state (NC) publishes — if you know where to find the ftp site — who’s voted ea. day of early voting, as I did. Yup. I’m right there, with place and date. I’ve downloaded virtually the entire state, and still that list won’t be complete for weeks.
The video above has (of now) 1.3M engagements and 1.1k comments on TikTok and 245k views on X.
Bigbootyspookycutie figured out after posting her first video that she was in fact spreading misinformation and followed up with clarifcations. No, she didn’t do mail-in. She voted in person. So no, what she found out on the Vote dor org tool is meaningless. But she’s contributed to spreading election misinformation and further undermining faith in the election process. The damage is done.
What in the fuck is going on. This is the hundredth of these I’ve seen today. How many thousands more are there like this… something is really fucking rotten here. I’m not a conspiracy theorist but how do you explain this many inconsistencies and chance variables all happening at the exact same time.
For all the childless cat ladies a little ray of sunshine. It’s from last January but it illustrates that humans aren’t all bad:
Lake Effect, Whiteout, and Erie were born at the Ten Lives Club location in Blasdell.
BLASDELL, N.Y. — Ten Lives Club has now received over $270,000 in donations in support of Buffalo Bills kicker Tyler Bass, and the organization shared that every dollar will be going right back to saving more cats.
“I was crying on the phone today, I just can’t believe it,” said Ten Lives Club Public Relations Manager, Kimberly LaRussa. “I’m just so happy for the cats.”
These kittens were born the day before the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills playoff game and have never known a day without Tyler Bass helping them out.
These three kittens have now watched over $270,000 in donations come in since Monday night.
“We are all speechless at Ten Lives Club and can’t believe this is happening,” Kimberly said.
“I hope it brings him a smile to know how many cats he is saving right now,” Kimberly said.
Kimberly shared this has been their largest amount ever received by far, topping even their largest fundraiser ten times over.
“It’s not a fundraiser, this is just the community saying they want to donate and they’re doing that, the Bills Mafia.”
What prompted this dedication is the $400,000 in donations Ten Lives Club received in support of Bass, who saw Bills fans rally around him days after his missed field-goal attempt would have tied the AFC divisional game against the Kansas City Chiefs.
In the aftermath of the missed kick, Bass receive threats and abuse on social media. When fans learned about Bass’ connection with Ten Lives Club, they called the group wanting to pledge $22 in his name. Within days nearly $30,000 was raised.
Bass was a part of Ten Lives Club’s Show Your Soft Side campaign, and while other athletes who were involved chose to support dog shelters, Bass was all about cats.
