Every 2024 Election Narrative Is False

The Democratic Party is fundamentally sound.

By now, it’s old news that Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Donald Trump. If you’ve been living on Mars for the last week, in a cave, with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears, and you’re reading this now for the first time, I’m sorry to break it to you, but it’s true.¹ As my mortal enemy turned strange bedfellow Jeff Tiedrich put it: “welcome to these United States of Dumbfuckistan.” (Say, maybe that would be a good new name for the blog?) I wanted to wait at least a week until after the election before writing a post-mortem because I wanted to see first how the apparatchiks of each side would respond to the outcome.

And, oh boy, is it bad.

Most explanations for Harris’s loss have fallen into either of two categories. One — the pundit’s fallacy — confidently asserts that whatever Harris needed to do to win is whatever the author wanted her to do substantively. Bernie Sanders, who would have preferred if industrial policy champion Joe Biden had stayed in the race and lost 400 electoral votes, says Harris got walloped because Democrats turned their backs on the “working class.” (As someone remarked on Twitter, it’s well past time Bernie got some new material.) Sam Harris — no relation to Kamala, as far as I’m aware — says Democrats lost because of trans people and identity politics. (Gee, I haven’t heard that one before!) If you have a memory longer than two and a half months, you might remember that after the Democratic National Convention in August, all the pundits were saying Kamala Harris had finally buried identity politics and woke was dying because she barely ever mentioned that she would be the first woman president. No word where Sam was when that was happening.

The second category states that Harris’s loss was inevitable due to factors outside of her control. Some commentators say voters are just too racist and sexist to elect a Strong Independent Black Womxn of Melanated Femme Experience. Others say Harris was too closely tied to Biden and couldn’t distance herself from the administration’s record on inflation, the border, and foreign policy. Incumbent parties have been losing all over the world this year, and no matter how poorly Trump ran, or how strongly Harris ran, she was always destined to lose. This perspective is best summed up by political scientist Daniel Drezner, who argues that:

Kamala Harris lost but she is not a loser. She was campaigning against gale-force winds and did the best she could. Americans, like other voters across the world this year, decided to throw the bums out.

What unites both these perspectives is the premise that the election was a Republican blowout. Basically everyone across the political spectrum agrees on this because of their own peculiar perverse incentives:

• Democratic insiders and peddlers of the pundit’s fallacy want a reason to remake the party in their own image.

• Harris partisans and the newly resurgent “BlueAnon” faction of the party’s base want to pretend as if it was always impossible for Harris to win so they don’t have to face the fact that she ran anything other than a literally perfect campaign.

• Republicans want to act as though there’s a mandate for their immensely unpopular agenda and pretend like they’re the country’s new permanent majority party.

Every one of these narratives is false. The Democratic Party is basically a sound political institution, the Harris campaign lost because it was horribly mismanaged, and Trump and the Republicans didn’t win in anything close to a landslide.

Let me start with the last part, since it’s core to all three of the election narratives and I seem to be the only person on Earth who’s willing to say it: Trump didn’t win in a landslide. He made some impressive gains across the board, especially in traditionally Democratic states like New Jersey — but he just barely won the election. His electoral vote margin is only a hair wider than Biden’s margin in 2020 and his own in 2016. It’s smaller than Barack Obama’s margin in 2012. His popular vote margin, currently around two percentage points, keeps shrinking as more votes come in from California. Right now, it’s less than half of Biden’s margin in 2020 and Obama’s margin in 2012, and smaller than George W. Bush’s margin in 2004 and Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016. None of those was a landslide election. Compared to the only real landslide of this century — 2008 — Trump’s electoral vote margin is less than one-half of Obama’s and his popular vote margin is less than one-third.

In Congress, Republicans are once again clinging on to a razor-thin majority in the House. And in the Senate, they benefit from a massive structural advantage and had the good fortune of competing on a map where Democrats enjoyed unusually strong performances in red states for the past three cycles. Even then, they lost four of the eight or nine seats that were genuinely up for grabs.

Harris would have eked out a victory with 270 electoral votes if she had flipped Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The combined margin in those states is about 240,000 votes, and all of them voted for Trump by between one and two percentage points. In each of the three states, Democratic Senate candidates ran about two points ahead of Harris. And in two — Wisconsin and Michigan — Democrats actually won their Senate races. If Harris had carried the four states across the country that elected a Democratic Senator but voted for Trump, she would have come within spitting distance of the White House, at 268 electoral votes.

This hardly jibes with any of the prevailing narratives about the election outcome, and it ought to make us doubt the existing explanations for Harris’s loss. Let’s take them on, one-by-one, below.

1. The Democratic Party is fundamentally unsound.

Take the Democratic chattering class opinion. Is the party’s coalition too narrow? Is there a crisis of wokeness in the ranks? We’ve heard this all before, and it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. As I wrote a few weeks ago, there’s a standard history of the past decade of Democratic politics that goes something like this:

Sometime after the 2016 election, Democratic strategists lost their minds. For whatever reason — probably because Hillary Clinton never visited Wisconsin — they all became slaves to their rose emoji-dominated Twitter feeds and came to believe that the only way to beat Trump was to veer far to the left on economic and social issues.

According to the standard history, the main things Democrats have run on since Trump took office have been the Green New Deal, defunding the police, and putting tampons in the boy’s bathroom. Even worse, they’ve smeared anyone who disagrees with these positions as a racist or a transphobe and pushed them out of the party’s coalition.

The problem with the standard history is that it’s just not true. There was no Democratic race to the left during the first Trump administration. If there was, then why did Democrats run on widely popular issues in the 2018 midterms, like preserving the Affordable Care Act and reversing Trump’s tax cuts for the rich? Why were the best-funded Democratic Senate candidates all moderates like Jon Ossoff, Amy McGrath, and Beto O’Rourke? Even if you’re just looking at the presidential race: Why were there as many candidates in 2020 who ran to the center as there were who ran to the left? Why did the moderates, like Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar, consistently do better than their respective progressive counterparts like Sanders and Harris? Why was the candidate with the single best breakout performance, who won Iowa and tied for first in New Hampshire — Pete Buttigieg — one of the moderate policy wonks?

What happened in the Trump era is that a few marginal members of the party’s left flank entertained crazy ideas, and the right-wing mediasphere amplified those ideas to a massive audience. You can criticize the Democrats for not shutting down that radical faction of the party more aggressively, but that would have cost them a lot of support from their small-dollar donors, staffers, and volunteers. It’s common to say Twitter isn’t real life, but it isn’t not real life, either. During the 2020 primary, Democratic Twitter users were three times more likely than the average Democrat to donate to a candidate or political organization, and four times more likely to attend a protest. Courting these sorts of highly engaged voters isn’t a terrible idea as long as it’s part of a balanced campaign strategy, which is what the Democrats have been running throughout the entire Trump era.

So far, the only people who have really abandoned the Democrats because they’ve failed to shake their unearned reputation as wokescolds have been low-trust, low-information voters: People who like Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who Richard Hanania calls the “Gribbles.” It’s been suggested — for example, by local blogger Bentham’s Bulldog — that if Democrats want to win, “they need to regain the Rogan vote” by ceasing to “[pander] to woke radicals with fringe views on issues of race, gender, and sexuality.”

Forget that most Democrats never really pandered to those types of people in the first place. If you were paying attention this cycle, you would know that Democrats all but repudiated the “woke radicals.” Harris played up her background as a prosecutor, touted her support for border security, and dodged questions about trans rights. And that did nothing to stop the Trump campaign from airing hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-trans attack ads. Nor did it stop the Gribbles from totally realigning with the Republican Party.

A result like this should make commentators understand that it’s a fool’s errand for Democrats to try to win back the Gribbles: It’s not going to happen, and fortunately, it doesn’t need to happen; Democrats haven’t exactly struggled to put together a winning coalition centered around the professional managerial class. They did it in 2018, 2020, and 2022. And this year, they could have done it again if they didn’t own a widely disliked economic record, or if they didn’t run two uniquely poor candidates in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In sum, it’s not at all apparent that becoming the party of social and economic elites is electorally unsustainable.

2. Kamala’s flawless campaign.

The second popular election narrative — that Harris ran a flawless but doomed campaign — gets one thing and exactly one thing right: The Democrats faced some very strong headwinds this year. Voters blamed Biden for a lot of things that he had minimal control over — or, ironically, that Trump was at least partially responsible for — like inflation and the outbreak of war in Ukraine and Palestine. Throughout the campaign, Biden’s favorability rating was at least 15 points underwater. Harris had just over 100 days to run a campaign, and she hadn’t even gone through the wringer of a Democratic primary.

A popular refrain among online liberals is that, even if Harris lost, it was only because she faced insurmountable challenges, and she actually ran a perfect campaign. The day before the election, one of the Pod Save America guys — I can’t tell them apart — described Harris’s campaign as “nearly flawless.” On election night, MSNBC’s Joy Reid marveled that Harris had “flawlessly run” her campaign because she managed to capture the coveted Queen Latifah endorsement.

By the next day, once Trump’s victory had set in, the mood online became decidedly less cheerful. A now-deleted Tweet from a prominent Democratic activist reads: “Kamala Harris was not a flawed candidate. America is a flawed country.”

Sorry, but that’s not how it works. The object of a campaign is to get enough people to vote for you that you win the election, not to capture the most celebrity endorsements or just say the things that your Twitter followers want to hear. Even if you think the voters are wrong, you still need their votes to win. It’s very odd that the supporters of a campaign whose central theme was “democracy” wouldn’t understand this.

In any case, if you really believe Harris ran a flawless campaign, then you have to think victory was never possible. And if victory was never possible, you owe a mea culpa to everyone you chastised before the election for doubting Harris, or being too apathetic about the Democrats, or voting third party, or staying home. If Harris was never going to win, then what was the point of voting for her? What was the point of even running a campaign in the first place? Choose one: This was the Most Important Election of Our Lifetime™ or Harris lost even though she was the perfect candidate. You can’t have it both ways.

The obvious answer is that the Harris campaign was not flawlessly run. In fact, it was deeply flawed and seriously mismanaged, and because the election result was so close, any one of its errors could have been more than responsible for the margin in the decisive states. Consider just a few examples:

• Harris kept all the top staffers who ran the Biden campaign into the ground. This includes campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez and chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon, who both hid and lied about Biden’s mental decline until it was no longer feasible. If nothing else, the Kamala Harris campaign was the specter of an elder abuse campaign.

• She failed to talk in sufficient depth about the issues voters cared about. In early August, political scientists David Broockman and Josh Kalla authored a guest post for Matt Yglesias’s blog sharing original polling data that suggested Harris needs to focus more on defining her own positions on the key issues rather than attacking Donald Trump. Voters already have an opinion about Trump, they reasoned, because they’ve been hearing about him for nine years — but they’d like to see Harris lay out what she plans to do in office before they decide whether to vote for her. At every stage in the campaign, Harris failed to do this. In the debate, she focused on baiting Trump rather than presenting herself to the country. Her campaign’s issues page, as Nate Silver pointed out, was a vacuous joke. She never articulated a health care plan or supported the public option like Clinton and Biden did. She said she supported raising the minimum wage — a widely popular position — but never specified how high she wanted to raise it until two weeks before the election. It genuinely seems like the Harris campaign thought they were going to win on coconut trees and brat memes alone.

• When she did talk about the issues, she prioritized things that didn’t resonate with voters. The primary theme of the Harris campaign, especially in the closing stretch of the election, was that Trump is an unstable wannabe dictator who’s an unprecedented threat to American democracy. Whether that’s true is irrelevant; it’s not the sort of thing that voters care about. Super PAC survey data from October found that ads calling Trump a “fascist” — which the Harris campaign spent tens of millions of dollars airing in the last few weeks — tested in the 40th percentile for effectiveness, moving just one-third as many votes as ads about expanding Medicare coverage.

• She made Liz Cheney her top campaign surrogate and spent valuable resources courting Republican endorsements. She did this even though her own staff begged her not to make a “coalition with the devil” and warned that doing so would risk support from already skeptical progressives. Despite spending weeks campaigning with Cheney (in the Rust Belt, no less), Harris received a smaller share of the vote from self-identified conservatives than either Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.

• She refused to do anything to earn the votes of Arabs and Muslims who opposed the administration’s blank check to Israel. She categorically denied the Uncommitted Movement’s request to have a Palestinian-American state senator speak at the DNC. She had Bill Clinton go to Michigan and tell Muslims that their family members deserved to be killed because King David lived in the Holy Land before the Prophet Muhammad was born. In her first television interview after receiving the Democratic nomination, she said there’s no daylight between herself and Biden on Israel, even though 61% of Americans and 77% of Democrats supported an arms embargo. On Election Day, just 20% of Muslim voters — and 14% of Muslims in Michigan — cast a ballot for Harris, compared to 69% for Biden in 2020. Fewer Muslims supported Harris than supported either Jill Stein (53%) or Donald Trump (21%).

• She burned through money and got next to nothing for it. Despite raising over $1 billion — nearly three times as much as the Trump campaign — Harris ended up $20 million in debt. Highlights from the campaign budget include $20 million for joint appearances with celebrities and “six figures” to build a one-time set for an appearance on the podcast Call Her Daddy.

3. The new Republican majority.

Every four years after the election, the same dimwitted people — who should have learned better after every other election — ask whether the results signal the end of the losing party’s electoral prospects. And then, some number of years later — often two (1994, 2010, 2018), sometimes four (2024) or six (2006) — the losing party wins again and the cycle resets. This is always stupid, but there are several reasons that it’s even more stupid this year.

First, the Republicans didn’t even have a particularly large victory. Trump won by about 240,000 votes in three states. His popular vote margin is set to be the smallest since 2000. His favorability rating is 8 points underwater. The single biggest reason he won is that Joe Biden — possibly the worst candidate Democrats could have run this year — was arrogant enough to think he could win a second term, and he didn’t get pushed off the ticket until the last minute, when the only option left was the second-worst candidate, Kamala Harris.

Second, polling data consistently shows the Republican policy agenda is widely unpopular. Trump had to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 this summer because it had an approval rating of only 9% among self-identified “MAGA Republicans” and 4% among the public at large. Key provisions of the Trump policy platform also boast high levels of disapproval, including replacing thousands of federal bureaucrats with appointees loyal to the president (68%) and cutting funds for renewable energy under the Inflation Reduction Act (52%). Mass deportation and tariffs poll well until you actually explain to voters what they entail.

Third, we already know how Trump governs. It’s extremely unpopular. He’s odiously corrupt, and he makes people exhausted. And even though he’s not ideologically committed to anything besides xenophobia, his staffers and allies in Congress are largely committed to conservative orthodoxy and do radically unpopular things like try to repeal health care coverage for pre-existing conditions and cut Medicaid. In the 2018 midterms, this dynamic led to Democrats picking up 41 seats in the House and posting a nationwide popular vote margin of 8.6 percentage points.

Fourth, as Nate Silver pointed out yesterday, there’s a bevy of facts peculiar to today’s political system and its coalitions that ought to make us think Trump and the Republicans are going to be extremely unpopular over the next four years:

Most incumbents are unpopular these days, especially in their second terms. The incumbent party has now lost three presidential elections in a row.

According to the national exit poll, Trump was elected with a tepid 48 percent favorability rating. However, he actually won 9 percent of voters who had an unfavorable view of him. These people may have seen Trump as a superior alternative to Harris but will be less tolerant now that he has no more elections to run in. In the same poll, 44 percent of voters have a very unfavorable view of Trump, so the ceiling on his popularity is likely to be fairly capped.

Trump’s most likely successor, vice president-elect JD Vance, is also unpopular.

Trump’s plan to enact tariffs may significantly increase inflation, which we know voters are highly sensitive to.

Democrats have the more passionate voter base that more reliably turns out in midterms and special elections.

When he’s inaugurated on January 20, Trump will be just as old — actually a few months older — than Joe Biden was at the start of his term.

And he’s inheriting all of the problems that Biden faced, like the unstable situation in the Middle East.

Trump will likely emerge with only a very narrow majority in the House, one where his agenda will often be held hostage to the Freedom Caucus. Depending on how the last few races are called, special elections or absences could potentially even put control of the chamber on the line before 2026.

Trump might not be interested in gutting the welfare state, but some Republicans in Congress will try to — and Democrats can target them in 2026.

And thermostatic shifts in public opinion will begin to favor Democrats again. I don’t expect wokeness to make a comeback, but things like anti-immigrant sentiment may decrease, especially if Trump tries to carry out mass deportations.

Accounting for all of these facts, it boggles the mind to think some people believe Republicans could hold on to support from a majority of the country for anything more than a few years — much less that the Democrats are in a “deep, dark state” and have nowhere to go after 2024. Sure, they’re unlikely to win the Senate back in two years — the map is not in their favor — but they ought to be odds-on favorites to win the House. And the most likely Democratic presidential candidates for 2028 are moderates with far better political instincts than Harris who lack Harris’s supposed “woke” baggage.

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All three of the narratives about the 2024 election are false. This was a bad year for Democrats, but not particularly bad, and their failure to pull out a victory points more to the deep flaws of their candidate and the headwinds they faced than anything fundamentally wrong with the party and its coalition. I don’t expect to convince the vast majority of people who are dead-set on thinking 2024 was a landslide — too many people have too much at stake emotionally and professionally to be convinced. But for the rare people who might have an open mind, I leave you with only this: Get in, loser. We’re going to have some more politics as usual.

1. “She just lost? Wow. I didn’t know that, I just… You’re telling me now for the first time. She led an amazing campaign. What else can you say? She was an amazing woman, whether you agreed or not, she was an amazing woman who led an amazing campaign. I’m actually sad to hear that. I am sad to hear that.”