I’m not sure if I buy your argument against the first narrative. I know Harris tried to repudiate the “woke radical” narrative but I’m not sure how effective it was. People still remembered her positions from 2020 and Republicans constantly ran attack ads bringing up those positions (e.g. supporting prisoners transitioning with federal money was the top performing attack ad). Also, I recall surveys indicating that most voters viewed Harris as being less moderate than Trump. At the end of the day, despite her best efforts, I don’t think she was able to shed the “woke liberal” label among low information voters.
I agree insofar as that was Harris’s baggage, but the point of that section was that the party itself isn’t broken. It’s not apparent to me that other Democrats would be vulnerable to the same attacks.
I think Democratic messaging has been broken for a long time. They waited too long to pivot on immigration, and spent little time touting Biden’s economic achievements. And I saw no effort from the Harris campaign to court the “Rogan voter”. Going on podcasts and interviews where the audience was already going to vote for you (Colbert, Call Her Daddy, SNL), made it seem like Harris had given up on convincing low information voters at all. Meanwhile, Trump did make an effort to appear on every podcast / stream that caters to that demographic.
The way they're obviously vulnerable is for issues they avoid talking about.
Compare with abortion, conservatives don't like that either, but Harris was able to articulate a punchy message that appeals to a broad swathe of the electorate.
Dems need to decide which are the 'woke' things they can make a good case for, and be willing to defend without evasion on Rogan and Fox. And if they can't do that, then they should drop them.
With respect to Rogan, the most obvious problem is the trans/sports issue. Rogan is passionate on this issue and Harris would need to be able to have a conversation about that.
There's a range of issues where they would clearly like to moderate, but actually articulating the moderate position clearly and unambiguously, and willingness to explain how the other position is wrong, is too costly because they'll get jumped on by their own side.
Democrats always pretend to be far to the right of where they actually are for the three months prior to an election, and this author demands that we be stupid enough to fall for it. The “fringe radicals whose influence is exaggerated by the Right” are not fringe, nor is their influence exaggerated. It’s the other way around - the “right-wing extremist” is a left-wing media fabrication.
I'm glad you corrected the record on this election being a blowout. I don't know how that narrative got started when it takes 2 seconds of looking at the numbers to see that the election was extremely close. It seems that the word "blowout" is becoming increasingly synonymous with "any win whatsoever" with how watered down it's become.
Nevertheless, I don't exactly agree that just because the election was close, it's automatically wrong to say that there was nothing Harris could've done to win it. Sure, she didn't run a *flawless* campaign, but she would've needed to do something that moved the needle by 2% to win, and it's actually very difficult to do that just by campaigning in the current environment. The needle is mostly tipped by factors that the candidates can't control, or that it's already too late for them to change (e.g., There was nothing the Harris campaign could've done this year to change the fact that she moved too far to the left in 2019). I think Democrats would've won if Biden had never decided to run for reelection, and the Party had nominated a popular midwestern governor (Whitmer or Shapiro) instead. Dems would have won the House majority and Casey's Senate race too. But given that Biden made the disastrous decision to run again, and that the nominee ended up being Harris after the last minute switcheroo, I'm not sure there's anything she could've done to fix that awful situation. Even if she had run a perfect campaign, she might have just lost by a fraction of a percent instead of by 2%.
Harris lost because of demographics and the Federal Reserve. I am certain of this, and will be explaining it all in my Magnum Opus:
The Democrats are Done. Why kamala harris Lost & Why They Will Never Win Again.
Those reasons are of course, the only two things I talk about on Substack. It is simply a coincidence (or perhaps evidence of my high human capital intellect) that they are also the two reasons that Harris’ campaign failed.
Strongly disagree that this wasn’t a blowout. Trump won literally every state considered relevantly contentious. No one thought that Florida was going blue or that New Hampshire was going red. Of all the states considered relevant for the election, Trump won them.
American democracy isn’t based on popular vote or even margin at the state level. The winner of the states takes all the votes, and Trump won all the states he didn’t have a 99.9999% chance to win. In my mind that’s a blowout.
Also, Muslims are a very small portion of the electorate, including in Michigan. Surveys have shown that inflation and wokeness were top issues and swing voters don’t care about Palestine.
In this context, the point of arguing whether or not the election was a landslide is to gauge how close Harris was to having won the election. The proper metric for that is how many votes she would have had to flip to win the states that could have put her over the top. The way you define the term, if Trump had won every swing state by 1 vote that would be a landslide. That's ridiculous.
If the Dodgers had beaten the Yankees in every World Series game by an out at home plate every 9th inning when down only one point, it would still be considered a sweep. But yes, I see your point about the flip and thought of it a few minutes ago. But it wasn’t decided by one vote and I felt confident enough that Trump would win that I was able to go to bed early (I didn’t actually go to bed early, but I was able to).
I had some other good point to make but I forgot what it was :(
It would be considered a sweep because that's the definition of a sweep, and I think everyone would agree that Trump swept the swing states. I don't think many people would call the baseball scenario you describe a blowout series win for the Dodgers.
> I think many of the people who are saying it was a blowout are thinking of blowout in the way that I’m using it so it’s not that absurd to think it was a blowout
People are thinking of it that way because the topline result makes it appear that way and they aren't apprised of the relevant statistics, not because they are right.
I think many of the people who are saying it was a blowout are thinking of blowout in the way that I’m using it, so it’s not that absurd to think it was a blowout. I don’t think they are all making the same point that she had a perfect campaign and there was nothing she could do because of a vast vote difference.
Trump didn't win all the states that he wasn't guaranteed to lose. In an actual blowout, he would have won New Hampshire, Minnesota, NE-2, Virginia, New Mexico, and Maine. If it had been, say, Haley vs. Biden, that's exactly what would've happened.
Even if you falsely pretend that the 7 core swing states were the only states who anyone could've won, that still doesn't make the election a blowout. It wasn't a remarkable result at all - it was literally the most common outcome of election models - so it's not like he did way better than expected. And comparing results to expectations says nothing about those results in an absolute sense anyway. It's possible to sweep the swing states and *lose* the election if the other candidate has enough safe states to make up a majority on their own (This has happened plenty of times in the past), so obviously sweeping the swing states does not automatically equal a blowout.
And as for your argument that it's a blowout because the popular vote and state-level margins don't matter to the final results: First of all, so what? Whether an election is a blowout has nothing to do with the final result - the final result is just "X wins," not "X wins in a blowout". To say that an election was a blowout means that the loser didn't even come close to winning, and the way you determine how close the loser came to winning is by looking at the margin in the tipping-point state. If the margin in the tipping point state is close, which it was, then the election was not a blowout. That specifically accounts for the Electoral College, so, "But we use the Electoral College, not the popular vote," isn't a counterargument.
Secondly, even if you just measure blowout-ness by the electoral vote margin, the election wasn't a blowout! The EV margin was just a hair larger than 2016 and 2020, and smaller than 2012. So there's no standard by which it could be considered a blowout.
Doing much better than expected isn't a "blowout". If you look at the results compared to other elections, rather than projections for this one, they are not unusual.
In a different comment, you said something like "it's a blowout because he won all 7 swing states that could have gone either way."
Even if we use that unusual definition of blowout, does that mean that Trump's performance was much better than expected? Not really. I think you're thinking of them as individual contests, but they're all connected. Because polling errors were likely to go the same direction in each state, if Trump won one swing state, it was likely he'd win them all.
In fact, that was the single most likely outcome for the 7 swing state races. The second most common was Harris sweeping all 7. And you could do some math to see that, if Trump won one swing state, he had about a 25% chance to win them all. Not an entirely unexpected scenario.
By your definition, a blowout (in either direction) was predicted about a third of the time. Many people would therefore not find that definition useful. Therefore, this article used definitions of "blowout" based off of things like number of votes. By those measures, the 2024 election was not a blowout.
This does nothing to rebut Robert G.'s point, and in fact, it actually proves his point. Whether a result is a blowout has nothing to do with whether it exceeds expectations or not - if it did, it would be impossible to ever expect a blowout.
Mercer could do much better than expected this weekend, and they would still lose, so obviously, "They did much better than expected" =/= "They won in a blowout," which is what you're equating when you say the election must have been a blowout because Trump won all the states that he wasn't expected to definitely lose in.
I never claimed that a blowout is based *merely* on whether Trump exceeds expectations or not. I claimed that the blowout is whether he wins all the swing states. Sure, what a swing state is happens to be based on expectations. But that’s not my point. My point is that Trump won all the swing states that could’ve gone either way, and there were 7 of them. That’s a resounding defeat in my mind.
If there are seven really close plays in the Alabama v. Mercer game that seem like they could genuinely go either way, and Mercer gets the upper hand in all of them (e.g., Alabama *almost* stops Mercer from making a touchdown, but they make it anyway), would you call the game a blowout for Mercer even though they lost?
Whether something is a blowout has nothing to do with whether someone manages to get the upper hand in the few really close bits. It's quite the opposite - something is a blowout when it isn't close at all.
As another example closer to the point, imagine an election where Alice is set to win 43 states + D.C., and no one really doubts the outcome in any of those states. However, the remaining seven states are all expected to be close - no one is sure who will win them. If Bob wins all seven of those states, would you call the election a blowout in Bob's favor because, "he won all the swing states that could’ve gone either way, and there were 7 of them"? Would you say that Alice had suffered a resounding defeat? If you would, I think you need to revise your standard for what a "blowout" is.
Also, you contradicted yourself in this comment. "I never claimed that a blowout is based *merely* on whether Trump exceeds expectations or not," directly contradicts your stated standard for determining whether an election is a blowout: "I claimed that the blowout is whether he wins all the swing states. Sure, what a swing state is happens to be based on expectations." If you agree that which states are swing states is based purely on expectations, and you define a blowout purely in terms of which swing states a candidate wins, then you are in fact defining "blowout" in a way that's purely based on expectations.
The only people at this point saying it was a landslide are those saying so to boost their own point of political view. 50.2 - 48.2 is not a landslide in any nonpartisan book. And despite the early takes, when it looked much worse, most people have realized that. Just not the ones with axes to grind or swords to hone.
But I still don't buy that Harris didn't run an exemplary if not perfect campaign. And maybe the election despite how close it is nationally could *not* have been won in the swing states. It was "only" 240,000 voters, but given the closed room informational ecosystem, it may have never been possible to reach those 240,000. Blunt way of putting it, there are a LOT of stupid people who don't mind staying that way. If they're only seeing excerpts of Kamala's rallies on Fox News, how is that messaging going to get through?
I like the thrust of this piece. I agree that Trump's victory was not a blowout. Harris could have done other things.
But I am not sure about: "There was no Democratic race to the left during the first Trump administration."
I don't know. Joe Biden's administration and the Democratic Congress passed some remarkably "anti-neoliberal" economic laws (CHIPS act, IRA, ARP, all the talk of BBB which failed) partly because that Biden's administration took on many people from the anti-neoliberal camp (Sanders and Warren staffers). Biden appointed Lina Khan to the FTC and Khan and her faction have been quite open about the fact that they were going to expand the scope of antitrust. Biden failed to take action on the border surge until much later (because it would not be popular with the advocacy groups in the coalition). Biden went to the union picket line.
I happen to like at least some of these things. But the fact remains that the Biden administration was way to the left of the Obama administration (it's right there in their platform). It's not clear to me how much your regular low-propensity voters pay attention to these things specifically but we shouldn't delude ourselves that the Democrats of 2020-2024 were just like the Democrats of 2010 and the only thing that happened was 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" (and even here, the Democratic primary candidates of 2020 were genuinely open to those ideas back than; they started walking it back once they realized they were unpopular).
Both Sam Harris and Bernie Sanders can both be simultaneously correct. Americans love free stuff, and they hate woke stuff. Kamala's line that she was approved of by "Goldman Sachs and the Wharton School of finance" combined with "trans surgery for undocumented minors in prison" didn't go over well.
The core three points here are correct, especially the first (this was not a landslide or anything close to it). I'm not so sure you're correct to dismiss Bentham's narrative about wokeism and the median voter; clearly this wasn't the only reason for Harris' loss, or even the biggest one, but I think it was a relevant one.
This article reads as if you’re coping for the centre rather than as an honest assessment of the Kamala campaign and the election. Because sure, all things being equal, Trump just barely won. But all things weren’t equal. You don’t even acknowledge the multi-institutional and international aggression against Trump when analyzing his victory at all.
Second, you don’t acknowledge that regardless of whether or not Kamala campaigned on woke issues, everyone knows she’s woke! She spent the last four years championing woke issues and dancing with drag queens.
It’s like you exist in this suspended reality where you ignore all subtext/history and take everything at face value.
If “everyone knows” Kamala is woke (whatever the hell that means) I hardly see how that does anything but support my central claim that the problem is with her specifically and not the Democratic Party.
Resident in France, I got most of my information via newswires like Reuters & AP. The tone of that coverage was very 'woke'. This makes me wonder if pro-Harris media could have been more hindrance than help, as she tried to distance herself from true believers.
Not a landslide, but a disturbing shift. Dems need to fess up to their deference to the far left, how they failed to put the woke minority in its place. The perception, which is more critical than the reality you describe, is that the party is deaf to the actual concerns of the working class, that it demands a lock step allegiance to the True Progressive Spirit, an arrogance that is deeply at odds with respect for American individualism. Put those far left arrogant wackos in their place, start talking common sense and perhaps the electorate will start feeling the love again.
This is a better, more balanced take than I have seen anywhere else. The real wildcard is the supreme court, if they fuck around and make Trump supreme leader for life or some bullshit there doesn't seem to be anyone willing to stop it. Congress is broken and the republicans will do whatever he says, leaving a compromised court the only barrier to dictatorship.. I do not understand why so many fail to see how dangerous this is.
Oh, plenty do. They're just not taking action. Dems now have no Federal presence to speak of, and the rank and file appear to be in paralysis from that vacuum. Robert Reich and Heather Cox recommend buying bumper stickers, I hear.
trump didnt win in a landslide, he won in a catastrophic avalanche. its easy to put up raw numbers and say "it was close", but that is embarrassingly blind to the actual facts that he made unthinkable inroads, with double-digit point shifts, across not just all demographics, but the demographics ALL democrats believed harris would dominate. NO ONE predicted anything like this. give me even ONE pre-election forecast that suggested anything like what happened. you cannot.
Well, I came here specifically to praise Glenn's predictions, especially the four points in section 3. Until the aftershocks die down there's gonna be money on the table for the betting-inclined. But maybe you meant "age well" in some other way?
I agree it was not a landslide. But movement of blacks and Latinos to the Republican side has to be concerning for Democrats. Barring a substantial policy change, we are looking at a President Vance in January, 2029.
"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%)."
I think this is the main problem with multiculturalism. While melting pot has historical been a strenght point for US it can also turn into a weakness, since not all migrants, at least not all with non-continental american roots can integrate their mind into to focus on domestic issues first like others.
As a so called Gribble who used to work in high finance among Ivy leaguers and the like, I was never closed off to Kamala being the best choice. But she never struck me as an intellectual in the least, just the box checking candidate that the party of the elites had full control of. And yeah I have a disdain for establishment-captured politicians. The “Steady hands”.
I could go on and on but suppose my point is that I’d be cautious in considering Gribbles as synonymous with low information voters.
I’m not sure if I buy your argument against the first narrative. I know Harris tried to repudiate the “woke radical” narrative but I’m not sure how effective it was. People still remembered her positions from 2020 and Republicans constantly ran attack ads bringing up those positions (e.g. supporting prisoners transitioning with federal money was the top performing attack ad). Also, I recall surveys indicating that most voters viewed Harris as being less moderate than Trump. At the end of the day, despite her best efforts, I don’t think she was able to shed the “woke liberal” label among low information voters.
I agree insofar as that was Harris’s baggage, but the point of that section was that the party itself isn’t broken. It’s not apparent to me that other Democrats would be vulnerable to the same attacks.
I think Democratic messaging has been broken for a long time. They waited too long to pivot on immigration, and spent little time touting Biden’s economic achievements. And I saw no effort from the Harris campaign to court the “Rogan voter”. Going on podcasts and interviews where the audience was already going to vote for you (Colbert, Call Her Daddy, SNL), made it seem like Harris had given up on convincing low information voters at all. Meanwhile, Trump did make an effort to appear on every podcast / stream that caters to that demographic.
The way they're obviously vulnerable is for issues they avoid talking about.
Compare with abortion, conservatives don't like that either, but Harris was able to articulate a punchy message that appeals to a broad swathe of the electorate.
Dems need to decide which are the 'woke' things they can make a good case for, and be willing to defend without evasion on Rogan and Fox. And if they can't do that, then they should drop them.
With respect to Rogan, the most obvious problem is the trans/sports issue. Rogan is passionate on this issue and Harris would need to be able to have a conversation about that.
There's a range of issues where they would clearly like to moderate, but actually articulating the moderate position clearly and unambiguously, and willingness to explain how the other position is wrong, is too costly because they'll get jumped on by their own side.
https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/us/polls-say-trump-more-moderate-candidate-than-harris-in-the-u-s-presidential-elections-democrats-voice-frustrations/amp_articleshow/113269584.cms source for the surveys saying trump was more moderate
Democrats always pretend to be far to the right of where they actually are for the three months prior to an election, and this author demands that we be stupid enough to fall for it. The “fringe radicals whose influence is exaggerated by the Right” are not fringe, nor is their influence exaggerated. It’s the other way around - the “right-wing extremist” is a left-wing media fabrication.
I'm glad you corrected the record on this election being a blowout. I don't know how that narrative got started when it takes 2 seconds of looking at the numbers to see that the election was extremely close. It seems that the word "blowout" is becoming increasingly synonymous with "any win whatsoever" with how watered down it's become.
Nevertheless, I don't exactly agree that just because the election was close, it's automatically wrong to say that there was nothing Harris could've done to win it. Sure, she didn't run a *flawless* campaign, but she would've needed to do something that moved the needle by 2% to win, and it's actually very difficult to do that just by campaigning in the current environment. The needle is mostly tipped by factors that the candidates can't control, or that it's already too late for them to change (e.g., There was nothing the Harris campaign could've done this year to change the fact that she moved too far to the left in 2019). I think Democrats would've won if Biden had never decided to run for reelection, and the Party had nominated a popular midwestern governor (Whitmer or Shapiro) instead. Dems would have won the House majority and Casey's Senate race too. But given that Biden made the disastrous decision to run again, and that the nominee ended up being Harris after the last minute switcheroo, I'm not sure there's anything she could've done to fix that awful situation. Even if she had run a perfect campaign, she might have just lost by a fraction of a percent instead of by 2%.
Harris lost because of demographics and the Federal Reserve. I am certain of this, and will be explaining it all in my Magnum Opus:
The Democrats are Done. Why kamala harris Lost & Why They Will Never Win Again.
Those reasons are of course, the only two things I talk about on Substack. It is simply a coincidence (or perhaps evidence of my high human capital intellect) that they are also the two reasons that Harris’ campaign failed.
Please clap. 👏
Strongly disagree that this wasn’t a blowout. Trump won literally every state considered relevantly contentious. No one thought that Florida was going blue or that New Hampshire was going red. Of all the states considered relevant for the election, Trump won them.
American democracy isn’t based on popular vote or even margin at the state level. The winner of the states takes all the votes, and Trump won all the states he didn’t have a 99.9999% chance to win. In my mind that’s a blowout.
Also, Muslims are a very small portion of the electorate, including in Michigan. Surveys have shown that inflation and wokeness were top issues and swing voters don’t care about Palestine.
In this context, the point of arguing whether or not the election was a landslide is to gauge how close Harris was to having won the election. The proper metric for that is how many votes she would have had to flip to win the states that could have put her over the top. The way you define the term, if Trump had won every swing state by 1 vote that would be a landslide. That's ridiculous.
If the Dodgers had beaten the Yankees in every World Series game by an out at home plate every 9th inning when down only one point, it would still be considered a sweep. But yes, I see your point about the flip and thought of it a few minutes ago. But it wasn’t decided by one vote and I felt confident enough that Trump would win that I was able to go to bed early (I didn’t actually go to bed early, but I was able to).
I had some other good point to make but I forgot what it was :(
It would be considered a sweep because that's the definition of a sweep, and I think everyone would agree that Trump swept the swing states. I don't think many people would call the baseball scenario you describe a blowout series win for the Dodgers.
> I think many of the people who are saying it was a blowout are thinking of blowout in the way that I’m using it so it’s not that absurd to think it was a blowout
People are thinking of it that way because the topline result makes it appear that way and they aren't apprised of the relevant statistics, not because they are right.
I remember what my last point was.
I think many of the people who are saying it was a blowout are thinking of blowout in the way that I’m using it, so it’s not that absurd to think it was a blowout. I don’t think they are all making the same point that she had a perfect campaign and there was nothing she could do because of a vast vote difference.
He also won all the states he did have a 99.9999% chance to win
Your wisdom is larger than Hilbert’s Hotel, Matthew
Trump didn't win all the states that he wasn't guaranteed to lose. In an actual blowout, he would have won New Hampshire, Minnesota, NE-2, Virginia, New Mexico, and Maine. If it had been, say, Haley vs. Biden, that's exactly what would've happened.
Even if you falsely pretend that the 7 core swing states were the only states who anyone could've won, that still doesn't make the election a blowout. It wasn't a remarkable result at all - it was literally the most common outcome of election models - so it's not like he did way better than expected. And comparing results to expectations says nothing about those results in an absolute sense anyway. It's possible to sweep the swing states and *lose* the election if the other candidate has enough safe states to make up a majority on their own (This has happened plenty of times in the past), so obviously sweeping the swing states does not automatically equal a blowout.
And as for your argument that it's a blowout because the popular vote and state-level margins don't matter to the final results: First of all, so what? Whether an election is a blowout has nothing to do with the final result - the final result is just "X wins," not "X wins in a blowout". To say that an election was a blowout means that the loser didn't even come close to winning, and the way you determine how close the loser came to winning is by looking at the margin in the tipping-point state. If the margin in the tipping point state is close, which it was, then the election was not a blowout. That specifically accounts for the Electoral College, so, "But we use the Electoral College, not the popular vote," isn't a counterargument.
Secondly, even if you just measure blowout-ness by the electoral vote margin, the election wasn't a blowout! The EV margin was just a hair larger than 2016 and 2020, and smaller than 2012. So there's no standard by which it could be considered a blowout.
Doing much better than expected isn't a "blowout". If you look at the results compared to other elections, rather than projections for this one, they are not unusual.
Alabama is expected to blowout Mercer in football this weekend. An expected blow out is still a blowout!
Let's say that Mercer barely wins. Would you call that a blowout?
No, but respectfully this has nothing to do with what I’m saying
In a different comment, you said something like "it's a blowout because he won all 7 swing states that could have gone either way."
Even if we use that unusual definition of blowout, does that mean that Trump's performance was much better than expected? Not really. I think you're thinking of them as individual contests, but they're all connected. Because polling errors were likely to go the same direction in each state, if Trump won one swing state, it was likely he'd win them all.
In fact, that was the single most likely outcome for the 7 swing state races. The second most common was Harris sweeping all 7. And you could do some math to see that, if Trump won one swing state, he had about a 25% chance to win them all. Not an entirely unexpected scenario.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-model-exactly-predicted-the-most
By your definition, a blowout (in either direction) was predicted about a third of the time. Many people would therefore not find that definition useful. Therefore, this article used definitions of "blowout" based off of things like number of votes. By those measures, the 2024 election was not a blowout.
This does nothing to rebut Robert G.'s point, and in fact, it actually proves his point. Whether a result is a blowout has nothing to do with whether it exceeds expectations or not - if it did, it would be impossible to ever expect a blowout.
Mercer could do much better than expected this weekend, and they would still lose, so obviously, "They did much better than expected" =/= "They won in a blowout," which is what you're equating when you say the election must have been a blowout because Trump won all the states that he wasn't expected to definitely lose in.
You may have different conceptual intuitions about what a blowout is, and for that we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I never claimed that a blowout is based *merely* on whether Trump exceeds expectations or not. I claimed that the blowout is whether he wins all the swing states. Sure, what a swing state is happens to be based on expectations. But that’s not my point. My point is that Trump won all the swing states that could’ve gone either way, and there were 7 of them. That’s a resounding defeat in my mind.
If there are seven really close plays in the Alabama v. Mercer game that seem like they could genuinely go either way, and Mercer gets the upper hand in all of them (e.g., Alabama *almost* stops Mercer from making a touchdown, but they make it anyway), would you call the game a blowout for Mercer even though they lost?
Whether something is a blowout has nothing to do with whether someone manages to get the upper hand in the few really close bits. It's quite the opposite - something is a blowout when it isn't close at all.
As another example closer to the point, imagine an election where Alice is set to win 43 states + D.C., and no one really doubts the outcome in any of those states. However, the remaining seven states are all expected to be close - no one is sure who will win them. If Bob wins all seven of those states, would you call the election a blowout in Bob's favor because, "he won all the swing states that could’ve gone either way, and there were 7 of them"? Would you say that Alice had suffered a resounding defeat? If you would, I think you need to revise your standard for what a "blowout" is.
Also, you contradicted yourself in this comment. "I never claimed that a blowout is based *merely* on whether Trump exceeds expectations or not," directly contradicts your stated standard for determining whether an election is a blowout: "I claimed that the blowout is whether he wins all the swing states. Sure, what a swing state is happens to be based on expectations." If you agree that which states are swing states is based purely on expectations, and you define a blowout purely in terms of which swing states a candidate wins, then you are in fact defining "blowout" in a way that's purely based on expectations.
The only people at this point saying it was a landslide are those saying so to boost their own point of political view. 50.2 - 48.2 is not a landslide in any nonpartisan book. And despite the early takes, when it looked much worse, most people have realized that. Just not the ones with axes to grind or swords to hone.
But I still don't buy that Harris didn't run an exemplary if not perfect campaign. And maybe the election despite how close it is nationally could *not* have been won in the swing states. It was "only" 240,000 voters, but given the closed room informational ecosystem, it may have never been possible to reach those 240,000. Blunt way of putting it, there are a LOT of stupid people who don't mind staying that way. If they're only seeing excerpts of Kamala's rallies on Fox News, how is that messaging going to get through?
I like the thrust of this piece. I agree that Trump's victory was not a blowout. Harris could have done other things.
But I am not sure about: "There was no Democratic race to the left during the first Trump administration."
I don't know. Joe Biden's administration and the Democratic Congress passed some remarkably "anti-neoliberal" economic laws (CHIPS act, IRA, ARP, all the talk of BBB which failed) partly because that Biden's administration took on many people from the anti-neoliberal camp (Sanders and Warren staffers). Biden appointed Lina Khan to the FTC and Khan and her faction have been quite open about the fact that they were going to expand the scope of antitrust. Biden failed to take action on the border surge until much later (because it would not be popular with the advocacy groups in the coalition). Biden went to the union picket line.
I happen to like at least some of these things. But the fact remains that the Biden administration was way to the left of the Obama administration (it's right there in their platform). It's not clear to me how much your regular low-propensity voters pay attention to these things specifically but we shouldn't delude ourselves that the Democrats of 2020-2024 were just like the Democrats of 2010 and the only thing that happened was 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" (and even here, the Democratic primary candidates of 2020 were genuinely open to those ideas back than; they started walking it back once they realized they were unpopular).
Both Sam Harris and Bernie Sanders can both be simultaneously correct. Americans love free stuff, and they hate woke stuff. Kamala's line that she was approved of by "Goldman Sachs and the Wharton School of finance" combined with "trans surgery for undocumented minors in prison" didn't go over well.
The core three points here are correct, especially the first (this was not a landslide or anything close to it). I'm not so sure you're correct to dismiss Bentham's narrative about wokeism and the median voter; clearly this wasn't the only reason for Harris' loss, or even the biggest one, but I think it was a relevant one.
This article reads as if you’re coping for the centre rather than as an honest assessment of the Kamala campaign and the election. Because sure, all things being equal, Trump just barely won. But all things weren’t equal. You don’t even acknowledge the multi-institutional and international aggression against Trump when analyzing his victory at all.
Second, you don’t acknowledge that regardless of whether or not Kamala campaigned on woke issues, everyone knows she’s woke! She spent the last four years championing woke issues and dancing with drag queens.
It’s like you exist in this suspended reality where you ignore all subtext/history and take everything at face value.
If “everyone knows” Kamala is woke (whatever the hell that means) I hardly see how that does anything but support my central claim that the problem is with her specifically and not the Democratic Party.
My critique is about your analysis, not your conclusions.
Resident in France, I got most of my information via newswires like Reuters & AP. The tone of that coverage was very 'woke'. This makes me wonder if pro-Harris media could have been more hindrance than help, as she tried to distance herself from true believers.
Not a landslide, but a disturbing shift. Dems need to fess up to their deference to the far left, how they failed to put the woke minority in its place. The perception, which is more critical than the reality you describe, is that the party is deaf to the actual concerns of the working class, that it demands a lock step allegiance to the True Progressive Spirit, an arrogance that is deeply at odds with respect for American individualism. Put those far left arrogant wackos in their place, start talking common sense and perhaps the electorate will start feeling the love again.
This is a better, more balanced take than I have seen anywhere else. The real wildcard is the supreme court, if they fuck around and make Trump supreme leader for life or some bullshit there doesn't seem to be anyone willing to stop it. Congress is broken and the republicans will do whatever he says, leaving a compromised court the only barrier to dictatorship.. I do not understand why so many fail to see how dangerous this is.
Oh, plenty do. They're just not taking action. Dems now have no Federal presence to speak of, and the rank and file appear to be in paralysis from that vacuum. Robert Reich and Heather Cox recommend buying bumper stickers, I hear.
Credit to Pritzker and Newsom though.
trump didnt win in a landslide, he won in a catastrophic avalanche. its easy to put up raw numbers and say "it was close", but that is embarrassingly blind to the actual facts that he made unthinkable inroads, with double-digit point shifts, across not just all demographics, but the demographics ALL democrats believed harris would dominate. NO ONE predicted anything like this. give me even ONE pre-election forecast that suggested anything like what happened. you cannot.
I predict this will not age well.
Well, I came here specifically to praise Glenn's predictions, especially the four points in section 3. Until the aftershocks die down there's gonna be money on the table for the betting-inclined. But maybe you meant "age well" in some other way?
I agree it was not a landslide. But movement of blacks and Latinos to the Republican side has to be concerning for Democrats. Barring a substantial policy change, we are looking at a President Vance in January, 2029.
"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%)."
I think this is the main problem with multiculturalism. While melting pot has historical been a strenght point for US it can also turn into a weakness, since not all migrants, at least not all with non-continental american roots can integrate their mind into to focus on domestic issues first like others.
As a so called Gribble who used to work in high finance among Ivy leaguers and the like, I was never closed off to Kamala being the best choice. But she never struck me as an intellectual in the least, just the box checking candidate that the party of the elites had full control of. And yeah I have a disdain for establishment-captured politicians. The “Steady hands”.
I could go on and on but suppose my point is that I’d be cautious in considering Gribbles as synonymous with low information voters.