Election Post-Mortem Silliness
It's Liz Cheney's fault!
Via The Independent: Democratic strategists say their warnings about having Harris campaign with Liz Cheney were ignored.
Democratic strategists are now saying they warned key Harris backers and top executives at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney and making their closing argument about how many former Republicans were supporting Harris was a bad strategy.
“People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil,” a source told Rolling Stone, referencing Dick Cheney, Liz’s father, who many Democrats despise from his time in the White House.
This kind of stuff amuses and annoys me for any number of reasons.
First, it strikes me as highly, highly unlikely this mattered on a mass level. Moreover, it is entirely possible it attracted some voters while it repelled others.
Second, so many people (especially pundits) love to argue that politicians need to be more “bipartisan” and to “appeal to the median voter.” It is all so lazy and silly to me.
Third, guess what? Most people were not paying attention to Liz Cheney (or to a lot of things Trump surrogates were saying and doing) in the waning days of the campaign.
I suppose the main thing I don’t like about this kind of reporting/”analysis” is that it presupposes that an electoral outcome is simply about how calibrated a campaign is. As if saying this word to that audience on one day versus another or that a specific endorsement/campaign event all mixed together is what determines the outcome.
I still think that if you are going to look for specific reasons, it has more to do with resentment over inflation and the election as part of a striking global trend. If that is the case, I am not sure what Harris, or any member of the Democratic Party, could have done to win. It certainly doesn’t boil down to Cheneys.
And let me note: I can understand why there were objections to the embrace of the Cheneys. But there i a pretty good argument for trying to create a cross-partisan, pro-democracy argument. Of course, on a broader scale, the situation of Liz Cheney underscores the core problem of our binary politics. She is rejected by her old party as being a traitor for going over to the other side, while she is not fully trying to be a Democrat, either. Again, it is a shame we don’t have a multi-party system, where she could go and then alliances between parties would have different resonances than the traitor/untrustworthy semi-defector dynamic we currently have.
You just can’t build a coalition by bringing out unlikeable people and by appealing to the unlikable Romney-like Republicans who had no problem with the Iraq war. The entire Iraq war went unpunished, and people hate that, except for the class of Democrats who supported the war and have been reviled and mocked ever since. They have basically made coalition-building all about the necessity of keeping their dumb existences in power.
It’s Murc’s Law. This must somehow be the Democrats’ fault, and specifically Harris’s. I think Alexandra Petri, the humor columnist at WAPO, has the best post-mortem today. It’s because Harris-Walz didn’t send out enough emails and texts.
Any talk of global conditions, the ignorance of the electorate, campaign money, or even of policy, doesn’t fit the de rigueur horse race framing.
Why on earth does Barry Goldwater have a statue!?!?!?
@Modulo Myself: I had this argument with my brother right after the election. He leaned heavily on the “they are ghouls and why would you do that/who is this appealing to?” I have sympathy for the argument that long-term it’s a bad strategy. But short-term you’re trying to capture a few thousand voters without alienating more than that number.
Name 1 person that you know who didn’t vote for Harris because she stood on stage with Cheney. I know a lot of very progressive people, and not one of them changed their vote because of it. Many of them complained! None of them changed from “fine, it’s Harris” to “not gonna vote.” (Some of them were already on “not gonna vote”, which is sometimes a problem, but all of them live on the West Coast, so…didn’t matter.)
This is one of those places where I very much appreciate the AOC approach: given the realistic choice between “very likely worse” and “maybe a little better”, you don’t enable the former because you’re holding out for the fantasy of a third option that doesn’t exist.
I don’t think the Cheney gambit was helpful. I don’t think it pulled in many (any?) voters, and she could have spent that time trying to drag in more unions or whatever. But in the end it’s like 2 days of campaigning during a short season. If you think Harris could have captured 100,000 voters in 3 different states during those two days with some other as-yet-specified strategy, you’re delusional.
She could have threatened to deport all immigrants, pledged to build a wall on the southern border and make Mexico pay for it and
taxslap tariffs on all imports from China and abolish the EPA and the Department of Education and hang Mike Pence.This is what American voters want. amiright?
It’s amazing how every single pundit out there has figured out that the reason Kamala lost was exactly their own pet issue…
“Second, so many people (especially pundits) love to argue that politicians need to be more “bipartisan” and to “appeal to the median voter.” It is all so lazy and silly to me.
Scary. 😉 I couldn’t agree more. I don’t buy into this slavish devotion to bipartisanship. Yes, its lazy and silly. Vapid. If you have strongly held convictions, state them. Its not all kumbaya. You may not be aware of this, but I’ve been known to state my views bluntly.
But in the end you have the battle of words, people vote, or you know how they will vote, and you bargain, or decide to stalemate. That’s our system. We seem to have muddled through since the late 1700’s.
Are you sure Liz Cheney hasn’t been campaigning for everyone worldwide? We’re all assuming it’s because of Covid recovery policies, but someone should check where Liz Cheney has been.
@Jack:
Well, there was that civil war…
More anonymous Democratic strategists. How many are there? Is there a Society of Democratic Strategists? Do they have a professional association with a credentialing process? Or is it a secret society like the Illuminati or Rosicrucians?
Oh, spare me.
I believe one has to analyze the long-term arc rather than the short-term arc.
– Our country was organized by white men who permitted slavery as an economic driver. Brutal capitalism to benefit the wealthy class is as baked into our national identity as the ideal of representational democracy. It has consistently been easier for the Republicans to enact supply-side benefits for the wealthy (for the promise of jobs) than relatively modest government programs to support a thriving middle class.
– We spent a vast amount of national blood and treasure on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that could have been used to support our physical, economic, and educational infrastructure.
– Our educational system does not teach economics in K-12. Many who live paycheck-to-paycheck have no understanding of Keynesian economics and monetary policy, although they have lived through two major economic upheavals: The Great Recession of 2008 and COVID-induced recession. Their view of economics is their bank balance or food subsidy debit card.
– Illegal immigration caused even non-racist Americans to haul up the welcome mat, probably more from a social/cultural standpoint than an economic standpoint. And Trump blocked the enactment of bipartisan legislation that would have made significant progress in securing our borders. I doubt most Americans realize this.
– COVID pandemic and recovery caused shortages and inflation, plus cultural division and support of pseudoscience fueled by Trump.
– The good economy Trump inherited from Obama dissipated by the end of his term. And they do not understand or appreciate the tremendous success of Biden in shoring up the situation.
– Paywalls prevent access to quality journalism and the right-wing media has perfected their outreach, outrage, and outright lies.
– The result is that most Americans have now tuned out the Democrats. They are more afraid of not surviving economically than living under a corrupt cabal that does not respect long-held democratic norms. They do not want to live through another 6 years like the last.
(As an aside Walz, during his VP candidate debate, gave the most coherent one-sentence explanation of why individual mandates were needed to create broad-spectrum, low cost risk pools that enable lower health insurance costs for all over a person’s lifetime ever given by a Democrat and it whiffed by most. )
The bottom line is, however, that Biden did not hand over the reins when he should have and Democrats did not have a candidate that was vetted and proven by the fires of the primary electoral process.
@ptfe:
It seems like a lot of Biden 2020 voters didn’t show up to vote for Harris. Why? Overall, I don’t think it’s any one thing. But her campaign did not deliver the turnout.
Here are the results of my voting district.
2020
Biden: 1,155
Trump: 39
2024
Harris: 810
Trump: 30
They’re spread out like this everywhere, it feels like. There was no fraud in 2020 in my district. There was no fraud anywhere. They just lost a lot of votes. It would be one thing if the campaign turned the tide in the swing states, where turnout seemed to be better. And it would be another thing if they had seen the hit coming—a possible EC victory and a PV loss. But this was a surprise, and you shouldn’t be surprised when your turnout goes into free fall.
@wr: It’s the same phenomenon and Speaker Johnson being called by God to be the Moses for America leading the nation into the Promised Land.
@Jack: You’re right on that. I’ve hardly ever experienced you stating your views at all.
Sometimes people over think this stuff.
Turnout.
By the time they wrap up the count, Trump will have received over 74 million votes, the same as in 2020. While Harris will have received about 70 million votes, about 10 million less than the 80 million Biden received in 2020.
To me it seems clear that the ‘Save Democracy’ element of Harris’ campaign did not resonate with anyone but Harris voters. Trump voters considered it drama queen stuff (nevermind the January 6th storming of the Capitol that nearly succeeded in stealing the 202 election).
For what’s it’s worth, likely not much, but I’ll attribute Tuesday’s fiasco to three things, the rest are just hot air and recriminations.
1. The worldwide rejection of incumbency.
2. That Dems have surrendered in the messaging wars and have no idea how to address the typical voter where they are. Damn few politicians have the talent that Bill Clinton displayed and Joe Biden once could do as well.
3. Biden reneging on the implied promise to be a one-term president and serve as a gateway to the next generation. His administrations smugness that they could gaslight the voters regarding mental acuity.
I think it all hinges on Elon Musk’s daughter coming out as trans. It sent him down a long spiral of hate and shifted him from TechBro Libertarian to full on MAGA, and using his money and platform to try to sway the election. And he dumped a shitload of money into electing Trump.
There’s only one thing that can fix this for 2028: one of his “daughters” needs to come out as trans, to maintain conservation of masculinity in the Musk family tree.
The election was close enough that various unpredictable, initially unrelated events can have provided enough of a push to sway things. And it means that pretty much everyone’s pet issue is going to be semi-plausibly big enough that it could conceivably cover the gap.
Except abortion. (White) Women just didn’t turn out with vengeance on their minds.
Republicans also made major inroads with Latinos. And the Loony Left (from antivaxxers to accelerationists).
@Jack:
Some people’s strongly held convictions are that we shouldn’t leave half the country behind.
This is why centrist-Dems lament the lack of bipartisanship, and it’s why Democrats never try to block funding for natural disasters in red states. (And why Hurricane Sandy still stings)
And it’s why the folks who festoon their cars and lives with Trump memorabilia, and create their Vanifestos, are so reviled. They are an affront to the strongly held belief that we are one people molded out of many peoples.
Amusingly, this is a belief that is far younger than America as a nation, that comes in part by taking the Founding Fathers literally rather than seriously, and not doing any critical thinking about them, and that’s the result of a right-wing campaign to make the Revolutionary War Patriots larger than life heroes.
Of course when we read that “all men are created equal” we take it as a noble sentiment rather than a political lie by a man told by a man who raped his slaves and sold his half-black children to other slave owners so he wouldn’t have to look at them.
Or how we say “plantation” rather than “forced labor camp.”
@Modulo Myself:
That’s definitely the trend overall, but here in my majority-Republican PA township, the number of votes this year was nearly unchanged–only about a dozen more than in 2020, which itself had more than a 10% increase in votes from 2016 due to roughly equal shares of increased registration and increased turnout in 2020.
This year, out of more than a thousand votes, Trump had one less vote and Harris had about a dozen more than Biden got in 2020.
@al Ameda:
There are still millions of votes to count in California and elsewhere, so Harris could end up with more than 75 million and Trump with more than 78 million votes. That would still be 6 million fewer votes for Harris than what Biden got, and a gain of 4 million votes for Trump over 2020. Perhaps some Biden-turned-Trump voters as well as turnout (poor or good) for both candidates.