On Messaging and Other Variables
Hint: another variables may be the key.
I was going to comment on James Joyner’s post, DLC 2.0?, but it was getting long, and I realized I had even more to say.
There is a long-standing debate in the comment sections of OTB, and in the wider world over what ails the Democrats, especially in terms of “messenging” and whether certain words or phrases are the real reason that they lose elections.
First, to listen to all this talk would make one think that Democrats are perennial losers who can barely eke out a win here and there. But this is hardly the case.
Apparently, I can’t stress the following fact enough: from 1992 to 2024, Republicans have won the popular vote only twice (2004 and 2024). And yes, they have won the presidency four times in that span, owing to winning the Electoral College and not the popular vote in 2000 and 2016.
To be clear, I fully understand the president is not elected by popular vote, but do note that almost always the popular vote winner also wins the Electoral Vote. Further, it also provides a pretty good empirical metric of overall popularity. While it may well be true that some strategic recalibration could help in certain states, it is also true that the magic words in question may not exist.
At the barest of minimums, the notion that the Democratic Party is some hopeless wreck that needs to engage in endless hang-wringing strikes me as not supportable by the facts and the general nature of American politics, regardless of whether I like or dislike specific messages or positions from the party. I will hasten to add that there is no current central message from “The Party” because there is no central messenger.
I will again stress that American parties are shaped by presidential nominees, not national party chairs, nor “The Party” as some clear entity. Indeed, the Democratic Party is currently in the part of the cycle of American politics wherein it is at its weakest, i.e., the two years after having lost the presidency. We are likely to move into the next phase wherein they win some off-term elections (e.g., the Virginia governor’s race) and likely re-take the House in 2026. Then the race for the Democratic nominee will start in earnest. The party will then take on greater coherence sometime in 2028. This is just how it works.
Consultants think that consultations and reports drive the party because, well, that’s how they make their money. Ditto pundits and the chattering class in general. But as James noted in his post, the GOP consultants told their clients after 2012 to be nicer to immigrants, and yet 2016 rolled around, and because of the nomination of Trump, the party went hard right on immigration.
American parties are driven by presidential candidates. Full stop. Even more so, they are driven by presidents. Else, there is no central organizing principle because there is no central principal.
Here’s the popular vote breakdown for each presidential election from 1980 to 2024 (source). Winners are colored by current party-color designations (I am always struck that Reagan-era Reps would have hated being red), and the bolded and italicized entries are electoral vote/popular vote inversions.
Did Reagan dominate Carter in 1980 because he was The Great Communicator, or was it more because we were in the middle of stagflation?
Did Clinton end up beating the man who was, for a while, the most popular president in the history of popularity polls (at the time) because he triangulated to the center, or was it more because the country went into recession from 1990 into 1991?
Did Obama win in 2008 because he was an incredibly articulate, not vulgar, sometimes even professorial (!) orator? Or was it maybe in large part because of the economic mess that had started under the Bush administration?
Did Trump win in 2024 because he is an “authentic” loudmouth, or was it more because of long-term anger over inflation?
I am not actually proffering a mono-causal answer, but people are tying themselves in knots over word choices and “messaging.” I am quite confident in saying that economics is a far more important variable than messaging and rhetoric as a general matter and is definitely more important than the kinds of things people get in a knot about, such as overly academic language or whether Trump is perceived as a normal guy or not.
While I am not saying the candidates and campaign don’t matter, I am saying that they matter less (perhaps far less) than the typical conversation over messaging and left/center/right acts like they do.
One thing I don’t see evidence for is that 2024 was lost over trans rights, and certainly not that Latinx was the straw that broke Harris’s back. It surely wasn’t because of terms like intersectionality.
Do I think these things bother some voters? Sure. But I also would need to see stronger evidence than I have that there were more voters motivated by such things than were motivated by frustrations over inflation.
I would say one concluding thing about candidate quality. I think the reason 2024 was as close as it was was because Trump was a poor-quality candidate. I know a lot of OTB readers, and Democrats writ large, ask the question this way: “How could we have lost to Trump?” I get that. But the real issue is “How did the Republicans only win such a thin margin given inflation and Biden’s low popularity?” And the answer is: Donald Trump was their candidate. I cannot prove a counter-factual, but I think a more “normal” GOP candidate would easily have won the majority of the popular vote with something that looked more like an inversion of 2020.
Trump was/is completely comfortable selling Unrealistic economic outcomes. Democrats aren’t.
Democratic messaging needs to focus on undermining the Republicans’ reputation for being good on The Economy. This reputation is inexplicable in my view if you consider economic performance since the 1990s, yet every POTUS election there’s some baked in GOP is good for business BS baked in that the Democrats candidate has to overcome.
Maybe the Democrats need to learn what Trump has taught us. Promise the Moon and set up an Us vs Them (the ultra-rich vs everybody else) to blame when the Moon isn’t the outcome.
This.
It’s like the Green Lantern Theory of Politics.
I vaguely recall in a movie about Nixon, starring Anthony Hopkins for some reason, near the end, when calamity is showering the administration with tons of bricks, one aide tells another “All he had to do was say “I covered it up. I’m sorry,” and all would have been well.” Or words to that effect.
Whether this happened or not is immaterial. It does show a widespread belief in magic words being the key. Say the incantation and all will be well. It’s just a matter of finding the right spell, yes? When it’s far more complicated than that.
I’ve also wondered about the role of memory. under Biden, real wages grew significantly for the first time in years, even with the high inflation*. Under the felon, hundreds of thousands of people died due largely to the poor management of the trump pandemic. But what people remembered was that prices were lower under the rapist, and that seems to have carried far more weight.
Finally, a note on the popular vote: it may not be that more people voted for the felon (fewer did than in 2020), as that enthusiasm for Biden and then Harris was lacking to get the vote out for the Democratic party.
It’s a tough question. To reiterate points others have made before and certainly in better ways than I can…. There’s no doubt that the economics are essential, but it’s also important how people feel about the economy. You can talk about the macroeconomics being good but if basics are more expensive, people will be more swayed by that. So you have to figure out how to hammer the R’s for the prices and heck, promise you will bring them down. Is that any more outrageous than most other political promises? One doesn’t have to go all the way into the rhetoric of Trump et al about crushing the world. Also Democrats are also oddly shy about acknowledging their triumphs and super hesitant about making accusations that are not mainly valid (as opposed to maybe based on a microkernel of truth, or even just interpretation) as Rs are. Simple examples: Not putting Bidens name on stimulus checks. I hardly ever saw signs of infrastructure projects thanking Biden and/or Democrats. What successes there were in rural broadband setups.
There’s innumerable examples of missteps that the D’s made in this campaign that almost seem like political malpractice. Dems pulling back on the ‘Weird’ label, and palling around more with Liz Cheney than the base. Deciding against having an Arab American speaker at the convention. Ignoring the ‘Trump is for you, Harris is for they/them’ campaign. Waltz being inexplicably polite at the debate. I don’t think a lot of these are ‘Hindsight is 20/20’ things, they were pretty clear from the outset.
Jumbled thoughts, I know. And probably missing many other examples I will remember later..
@Scott F.:
This is Karl Rove’s thesis. Attack your opponent’s strength. I tend to subscribe to this idea. First tried and worked with George W. Bush and his governor races.
@Scott F.:
I’m skeptical of how effective this really has been. Take for example the McDonald’s stunt. Did that really sway any swing voters toward him, or did it just tend to look ridiculous to anyone outside the hardcore MAGA base, and most people–including the typically low-info swing voters–weren’t even paying attention?
To be sure, there are many gullible voters out there who fall for Trump’s Nigerian Prince-tier con games, though I suspect a lot of that is baked in already–i.e. people that gullible were already on his side. In both 2016 and 2024, undecided voters seemed to break for him at the last minute, which suggests to me they weren’t sold on him and simply viewed him as the lesser of the two evils. (This is seen in exit polls as well–in both races, voters with a negative opinion of both candidates overwhelmingly backed Trump in the end.) It’s quite possible his antics turn off more voters than they bring in. His having won doesn’t prove it was the best result a Republican candidate could have achieved in that environment.
Dems don’t have a messaging problem as much as they have a messaging reach problem. They win the people that read the standard papers and watch the Sunday shows and 60 minutes. Their message doesn’t not extend beyond those platforms— which is where the fight for the post-Gen X generations will be waged.
Could their message be better? Certainly. Influencing the average person revolves around telling them story they want to hear. Most importantly—collectives stories follow a rotation, so what worked before and doesn’t work now—will work again in a generation or so. The key is to locate a story that stopped working a generation ago—and remix it for the present day. The Dem Story of a Federal Government that improves society has lost its power. The doesn’t mean that the Federal Gov. should not improve society—it means its not part of the Story you use to win elections. The story of Dem majorities passing X policy and society being better has also lost its power—stop selling it. Dems should keep passing policies to make society better—but it’s not part of the Story. The Story people want is the Robber Barron era story of the little guy being pushed around by powerful, unseen forces, and who isn’t going to take it anymore. Trump cast himself and his allies in the role of the underdog against the powerful, unseen “Swamp” who he casted as Democrats and the Federal Bureaucracy. The Dem counter narrative was a story of Dems and the Bureaucracy as guardians of civil society, prosperity, and a soft global empire. All true—but not the story for “our times”—its the film equivalent of a musical.
Dems are finally telling the story people want to hear and gaining traction because they are actually living it. They ARE being bullied and kicked around—and they aren’t going to take it lying down. Once the old guard of Dem diplomat politicians are out of the way—the showdown will begin.
Finally, the next centralized force of DNC politics is going to have to bring the factions to heel. Majority rules and Minority veto both have its limits. The worst thing for the Star of current Dem story, in this case, the Fed Gov, is for it to be inept. Yet, the protagonist of the Dem story can nothing large-scale at the speed of relevance. Biden passed an infrastructure Bill—whoopde damn doo. Little or nothing happened—because, in the Dem universe—a few people get to tell a lot of people “No”. That’s obviously a good and/or bad thing depending on the scenario—but as a manner of standard operation—it’s inept. Obama also passed an infrastructure bill—little or nothing happened. They’ve been trying to increase housing supply for years in blue states—nothing happens. California can’t build hi-speed rail even though they want too. EV charging infrastructure—nothing. This is why people are open to a strongman—because in the status quo—nothing happens, or quite frankly, can happen under the current system. Too many people get a veto.
@Scott:
The maddening thing is that, as @Scott F.: notes, they aren’t really good for the economy. And Scott understates it by saying they’ve been bad for the economy since the ’90s. Every Republican prez has had a recession in his first term going back to 1900. And depending on 2nd quarter numbers, Trump, in his second first term, may be having one right now. “Good for business” is a euphemism for good for favored individual businesses and tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations.
As I’ve said many times, there’s no mystery to ’24. Dr. Taylor notes inflation. On top of that, Biden’s age issues became obvious and he withdrew leaving Harris a few months to campaign. The surprise is that she did as well as she did.
The real question is why it’s been so close for so long. The GOPs have nothing to offer the 99% except prejudice and feels, so why are they essentially tied with the party that occasionally actually does stuff to help the 99%? Contra Dr. Taylor, I believe the answer to why GOPs are doing so well really is messaging, Republican messaging. With no steak to sell, they have mastered sizzle. Backed by piles and piles of dark money.
The election was close enough that I don’t think one can simply pin the blame on inflation. While that was a big factor, there were also other factors that could have been decisive given how close it actually was.
It’s just very difficult to win when your approval is under 40% and ~80% of the country (including a majority of Democrats) thinks you’re too old for the job. Switching to Harris was too little, too late, especially when she refused to break in any way with any of Biden’s unpopular policies. She ran as essentially a status quo choice, despite it being pretty clear that the public did not like the status quo.
In short, I think the election was winnable for the Democrats, and while it’s easy and perhaps comforting to blame outside forces and messaging, the problems are deeper than that IMO.
As far as messaging goes, however, I think the Democrats, overall, did a poor job. Part of this stems from defending unpopular policies and being on the wrong side of 80-20 issues. There was so much gaslighting on Biden’s age that no one bought into. On the economy, the messaging was basically lecturing people that the economy was actually good and people who thought, because of their own circumstances, that it wasn’t were ignorant or stupid. Conflating a reduction in the inflation rate with a lowering of prices. Largely more gaslighting.
By contrast, David Schor’s research shows that Harris’ most effective messages were not attempts to deny what the public believed to be true, but charting a different economic course with policies that addressed the issues people felt they were experiencing that were different or a refocus from Biden’s.
Democrats also bet on being anti-Trump as the core message, and the problem with that is it wasn’t convincing or effective. The marginal voter didn’t care about it that much compared to other concerns, and those who did care about stopping the threat from Trump were on board from the start. For them, the messaging was preaching to the choir. Trump neutralized much of the abortion issue (also strong for Democrats) by moderating and telling his pro-life supporters that no, a nationwide ban wouldn’t be on the agenda and that it’s a state issue now.
I think a lot of this, especially the abortion example, plays out due to different dynamics in the two brands. With the GoP, Trump is the boss, and he has the ability to tell factions in the GoP coalition to shut up and color. That’s what he did with the pro-life, ban abortion faction. Democrats, on the other hand, and Biden and Harris in particular, don’t have that level of political authority in the party, or were/are too afraid to try to use it. Democratic politicians, except some outliers, seem really afraid of the coalition’s interest groups, and try to please all of them and end up pleasing no one while adhering to positions that are unpopular with the public in the interests of coalition management. And that’s why, IMO, the messaging focus was on fascism and being against Trump – it’s the one thing the whole coalition strongly agrees on but it seems few considered how effective that message would be outside the Democratic tent.
People hear what they want to hear, and process externalities through very personal lenses.
There are many many individual glances into this–the woman who didn’t like Trump, but voted for him because he promised free IVF and she was struggling to conceive, for example.
As long as we have a system that relies on getting a handful of largely disinterested voters in a small number of swing states to vote, everything that can affect that outcome matters.
Keep everything the same — same parties, candidates, messages, and all their various flaws and strengths — and merely replace US citizens with citizens from any of our developed peer nations, and Harris would have won a landslide, even with 50 days to run. Duh: Trump is unqualified and unfit for the presidency.
The difference between us and them is that Americans overall suffer more widespread and worsening moral, ethical, and intellectual deficiencies, compared to our peer nations with higher general quality of life.
This problem, upstream of American decline, is not likely to improve soon. Mostly because so many Americans are in denial about it. It also does not help that the next blue wave midterm or Democratic president will obscure the need for a reckoning.
Our failing social and spiritual health could be somewhat improved by a progressive tax code that empowers investment in domestic tranquility and the general welfare — housing, healthcare, paid leave, early childhood education, clean energy, etc. But it’s not clear Democrats will soon have the numbers to legislate accordingly, or that we have the guts/strength to muscle such changes through, even if we did. So mediocrity and decline it is, for now.
Regardless of how well a normal Republican might have done, no normal Republicans stood up to Trump when they had the best chance to take him down after January 6th. Meanwhile, the Democrats killed themselves with Biden’s age and the way his inner circle behaved (which includes, apparently, keeping bad poll numbers from the candidate).
But looking back is pointless now. Going in 2026 and 2028, very few Democrats are going to be down with some sort of conciliatory message about normal Republicans and the cultures that produced them, let alone Trump himself. It’s been four months. Imagine two years of this or four. There’s something very wrong with what created Trump voters, and almost every Democrat (and certainly the entire base) believes this in some form or another. The fact that zero Trump voters seem to even be familiar with the idea of candor doesn’t help matters. Whatever the particulars of the We Hear You message are to swing state dummies, the Democrats still have to some acknowledgement that says You Have Nothing To Say That Matters.
@Andy: I sometimes wonder if “trying to please all [of the coalitions]” isn’t a factor/problem inherent in being a “big tent” party. Hypothetically anyway, the election was a possible Democratic Party win because of Trump, but only to the extent that Democrats could circle the wagons and get all the guns pointed in one direction–a problem that, in legislative terms as well as national election interests, dates back to healthcare reform during Clinton’s administration (and probably before). That Harris turned out to be another “we’re up for electing a woman–just not this one” candidate was unfortunate, though not unsurprising for this little ignint cracker.
@DK:
I think this speaks to the circling the wagons problem that I alluded to above. It’s hard to all pull in one direction when not all the stakeholders agree which direction that should be. It may also be illustrative of the possibility that while it may have been wise for Democrats to triangulate the radical left out of the decision-making corridors when I was your age (probably a little younger than you), it has become a problem for the party in that the perceived need to tack to the center dilutes both the message and the policy now. As always, YMMV.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I just don’t think that the loss was the problem of some big tent philosophy. I.e., that trans ad that ran millions of times was from a Harris way back in 2019 about trans care and prisoners. The more basic problem is that younger educated people are going to be involved at a back-end level in politics and policy. And overall it seems that younger educated people are going to be progressive.
Past that, the question is why are educated people more likely to be progressive. But the Democrats can’t pose that question because you have to be pathetic to believe answers like college is brainwashing you, but the other answers aren’t good for mass politics. So they’re left with a gaping hole in the center of a party devoted to probing why normal people are against immigration or trans people, but completely zoned out to thinking about why somebody who lives in Marin County doesn’t want to turn their area into some YIMBY-endorsed suburban hell.
They’re practicing politics at the level where the only forms of empathy are with bigots, and it’s the exact opposite of a big tent party.
@Andy:
I think that if we look at the table in the OP, or even just the final numbers for 2024 it is clear that at least it was possible the Democrats could have won.
It is worth noting that you were one of the ones who pointed out to me, as I marveled at how Biden could be behind Trump in the polls, that Biden was really quite unpopular. And so, even an unpopular Trump had a chance.
I am to the point, especially in light of what the lit tends to say about elections, that this one was a referendum on the sitting administration and therefore on the incumbent party. And while inflation was not the all of it, it was a huge amount of it (as were resentments linked to Covid and a general, global rise of reactionary nationalism).
As such, I think the Dems were doomed even if Biden had dropped out before the primaries.
@Jim X 32:
I cannot stress enough that the DNC has no ability to bring the factions to heel. The factions will eventually coalesce around the candidate, but even then, no one will be brought to heel, even if the elites play nice (see, e.g., the Bernie Bros even after all this time).
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Yes. It need not be so. If a Dem candidate is gonna be centrist, fine, but be a muscular centrist. If they’re gonna be liberal, they should be unapologetic about it.
I remember watching a Bush v Kerry debate with my parents. Bush kept telling the audience, “He’s too liberal.” Kerry’s response: “Look, enough with the labels.” Then a teenage conservative, I remember thinking how lame Kerry sounded. Why not just thank Bush for the compliment and explain why liberalism is awesome and you’re proud to be liberal?
It’s the same lame energy as Target running away from DEI or Elissa Slotkin and Rahm Emanuel self-flagellating Dems as “weak and woke.” Joining Republicans in using woke as a pejorative is the very weakness they decry. Walz gave the correct answer: yeah I’m woke, that’s good, and here’s why. That’s leadership. We need Dem leaders who want to shape public opinion, not just run around spooked in sackcloth, in response to how Fox News hosts define the world.
When Trump quadruples down on his unpopular election denial or issues a wildly unpopular blanket pardon of Jan. 6 terrorists, he’s still signaling to his base guts and strength, and a willingness to fight for his people no matter what the polling or the Washington Post editorial board says in response.
Democrats, trying to upset as few possible, tend to get stuck in a doom loop of half measures and muddled politics that leaves them exposed on all sides. Biden would’ve gotten more political mileage out of debt forgiveness had he done what Bernie and Warren urged him to do — issue a blanket cancellation via executive order and dare the courts to reverse it. (And I am not a Bernie fan.)
Or, conversely, by just saying “Tough luck, kids, we’re not canceling student debt.”
All the one foot in, one foot out just makes Democrats look like they’re content to weakly manage the decline. It seems clear voters are craving boldness and strength on America’s problems, in no mood to credit Dems for incremental progress.
Yes, some issues are gray and must be finessed. But not every issue.
@Andy: @Steven L. Taylor: Put another way that I think is important. If the sitting president is so substantially underwater popularity-wise that it makes re-election far less likely, then I don’t think that the stink of that unpopularity can be washed away by a new candidate from the same party.
I cannot, in fact, think of a good example where that worked.
I can think of no example for at least a century (and maybe not ever) where a sitting president was replaced in their first term and the party still went on to win. I think this is likely because if your party is sufficiently unpopular that your sitting president cannot win reelection, then it seems highly unlikely that a replacement could fix that.
Perhaps I am forgetting some obvious example?
With elections as close as they are, pretty much everything, including the dreaded messaging, is a deciding factor.
Messaging is too broad a category, in that it can mean the verbiage, the meaning, or the channel.
I think a large problem is that Harris had self-proclaimed-cool-aunt* vibes. She did not specifically refer to herself as a “cool aunt”, to the best of my knowledge, but she has all the mannerisms of someone who would, including being nowhere near as cool as she thought she was.
Hanging out with Cheney didn’t help. In fact the longer the campaign went on, the more insincere she felt. You could practically see the hands of consultants giving her directions on how to act human.
It’s stupid, but with elections as close as they are, I really do think they come down to amorphous vibes. (Autocorrect wanted that to be amorous vibes, which would be slightly different)
I am reminded of the 2004 campaign season, where the question “who would you rather have a beer with?” was repeated endlessly and the American people chose the guy who didn’t drink because they so desperately didn’t want to have a beer with Kerry.
The verbiage of messaging is a collection of cultural shibboleths that often seem to “other” the Democratic candidate. If phrases like “people experiencing homelessness” or “intersectionality” don’t strike you as odd, you’re probably an outlier. Not quite a Spiders Georg** level outlier, but an outlier.
On the channel aspect of messaging, not bending over backwards to do the Rogan interview was just plain dumb. The opportunity to talk to a massive audience of dull-witted people who are a key American voting block? Take the time. It has a far greater opportunity to change votes than holding three rallies for supporters. There is no way she could keep on message for the three hours or whatever that the long meandering conversation would have taken, but getting off message and showing that she is basically normal-ish is what she needed.
*: Is there sexism there? Probably, but the self-described cool aunt is way less likely to be a predator than a self-described cool uncle.
**: The “average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid is actually just a statistical error. The average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted. (this is a classic Tumblr meme)
@Modulo Myself: That it’s the exact opposite of a big tent party is exactly what I’m trying to get at when I talk about circling all the wagons and shooting in the same direction. Perceiving the need to tack to the center is how you get to empathizing with the bigots.
ETA: And I don’t see the problem as a big tent philosophy problem as much as a big tent reality problem. The Democrats have a big tent whether they want it or not.
@DK:
Quoted for emphasis. (And good luck with selling that “It need not be so” thing. ETA: I’m rooting for you on that, even if it may not seem so.)
@Steven L. Taylor: ‘Tis true, but doesn’t have to be. It’s ironic that the guardians of institutions are themselves dependent on charismatic personality and not an institution.
The players and mega donors in the party could decide a Machine with performers produces more consistent results than cyclical improv contests, change the rules, and rebuild the machine. Alas, that approach is also a threat to the influence of said players and donors so status quo it is.
The bottom line is a smaller more unified group will beat a larger, disaggregated group more times than nought. Dems have larger numbers but unfocused interests, with some factions totally willing to punish the rest of the group for not being sufficiently interested in their issues.
I have turned around several Balkanized organizations like this—mainly by understanding the addition in subtraction. There are a handful of factions that are boat anchors on the Coalition and are just as ideological as MAGA—compromising none of their goals for the advancement of the entire group. Their marginalization would enable tighter focus of the Coalition AND would attract a different element into the mix.
@DK:
I think I’m sympathetic with where you are coming from, but could you help me understand better? How do you marry up…
…with this…
This strikes me as a chicken & egg situation. How does an opinion shaping leader get elected by a morally, ethically, and intellectually deficient electorate?
@Jim X 32: Oh, it could work diferently. You know I am all about democratic reform, including the parties.
But I find that until people truly understand what reality is, rather than what they think it is, we aren’t getting any reform. That was at least part of the point of my post on what the real lessons of the Biden situation were.
@Steven L. Taylor:
There are, to my knowledge, no other examples in US history that have similar circumstances to those of 2024. We’ve had Presidents promise to only run for one term and keep that promise. Hayes, one of those, was replaced by a same-party candidate, but Hayes promised to be a one-term President before he even took office.
Of the other five I’m aware of who chose not to run again, they were all replaced by someone of a different party – Polk, Buchanan, Coolidge, Truman, and Johnson. The two most recent bowed out in large part due to unpopularity.
You mentioned in the OP that if a more traditional/rational/sane Republican had run instead of Trump:
I agree with that counter-factual. The reason I think Trump was beatable in 2024 is that he very likely underperformed a more generic GoP candidate.
When Harris took over, she jumped to a small, but substantial polling lead until about mid-October when things moved back to neck-and-neck. One can interpret this in many different ways, but it seems to me that Harris’s decision not to break with Biden on anything prevented her from any hope of distancing herself from the administration’s unpopularity.
@Jim X 32:
Out of curiosity, who are the boat anchor groups you speak of?
I believe Trump won because of a few things:
(1) Kamala Harris was perceived as the incumbent and therefore part of an Administration that did nothing about immigration.
(2) Democrats were defined by Republicans as being concerned only with cultural issues that were out of the mainstream (pronouns, LGTBQ, CRT, DEI, etc …
(3) Finally, perhaps on the margin but definitely a factor – Kamala Harris was a woman of color. It still matters.
I don’t think Harris ran a bad campaign, especially given the cards she was dealt. The Democratic Party has been ossified for years, unwilling to court change, make change, and get things done.
I don’t know who recently said it – Democrats are afraid to exercise popwer – but I get it, I agree.
@Beth: Any faction that is only part of the coalition to showcase its issues as the main narrative of the broader Party message—even if their story doesn’t have a place in the larger narrative and restricts the Coalition from making a broader appeal—for votes
Currently, there is no boat anchor faction because the Party has no story. Who has the main plot? In the Dem universe, all of them do. Black Folks, Environmentalists, LGTBQ, Socialists, Abortion, Institutionalist, etc—it’s a cacophony of interests thrown under an umbrella of civil/human rights and fighting injustice—a story that was, but is now past its time. How do you tell a compelling story to the simplest of Americans in 2 minutes that hits all the grievances of these groups without pissing one of them off. And perhaps more importantly, how do you craft a national message that people can identify with (the primary factor in determining if they like a story) if the lower common denominator voter cannot identify with the grievances of these groups. To be frank, most of the Democrat coalition is only there because there is no home for them in the other Major party. Not really a good factor Brand expansion strategy when the only reason your buyers drink your Cola is because they hate the other Cola.
Messaging serves multiple purposes. The whole anti-“woke” campaign, of which the anti-trans vileness is a subset, may not have moved many votes from D to R, but it kept the MAGA base fired up and enthusiastic, thus encouraging turnout. It also succeeded in crowding out other news stories, depriving Democrats of oxygen in the media. Indeed Trump has been a master right from the start in finding inventive ways to dominate the news cycle.
These things have intangible effects. A party which is also a movement, full of righteous indignation over abortion and same sex marriage and men in women’s sports and all the rest will be highly motivated and energised – more so than one which sticks to mundane “kitchen table” issues. The exceptions will be election cycles when kitchen table issues are the most important things on people’s minds, for example the pandemic in 2020, which drove record turnouts for both candidates.
@Gustopher:
A particularly excellent comment.
@Andy:
But this is a key problem for a candidate in Harris’s situation. They need to siphon off just enough of the incumbency energy and some Be Different. That is almost impossible. She was the veep, so breaking with Biden, even if she tried as hard as she could to do so, would both a) seem disingenuous and b) alienate voters in the party who supported Biden.
And, again, just having the same party label means whatever bad feelings X% of the population has against the sitting president tar you as well.
A key point I am making is that there is no magic circumstance in which an unpopular incumbent can be replaced by a member of their own party and somehow be new and shiny enough to avoid the reasons why the incumbent didn’t run.
@Gustopher:
I understand the point, but it is still kind of wrong in my view. I don’t think any issue or any message could have been the “deciding” factor. I don’t think that there is any evidence that the trans issue cost Harris the race, and certainly not that “LatinX” or “intersectionality” did.
By that logic it could have been the weather.
I am going ot kind of agree on vibes, but the vibes in question were:
“I feel like Joe Biden caused inflation.”
“I feel like Trump had a better economy.”
“I am still mad about Covid and the Dems were the ones who shut things down.”
“I am not entirely comfortable with a lady president.”
“I am really not comfortable with a black lady president.”
“Trump will be protect us from rapist coming across the border.”
I agree with that. I still think she would have lost.
I mean, seriously, if we are going to try to reduce this down to key variables, her gender and race, coupled with inflation, are enough to explain that gap. And I still think that inflation itself is enough.
Maybe better put: I find gender plus race plus inflation to be a better hypothesis than the messaging claims.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Agreed.
And, to your point, add in the unpopularity of the incumbent (and Andy’s point about not being able to separate from the incumbent). I also think we need to draw attention to the broader context of incumbent parties losing across many parts of the Western world. And the most notable exceptions (France and Canada) both involved unique internal and external factors.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I think everyone realizes it was a difficult position. But everyone also knew that the Biden administration was the least popular in modern polling history, with the exception of Trump’s first administration, which was equally unpopular.
Harris deciding not to break with Biden on anything was a choice – one that guaranteed the negatives of Biden’s bad numbers would have full effect (and also the global anti-incumbency vibes). To me, it seems pretty strange to double down on that unpopularity instead of taking a risk, ruffling a few feathers, and forging a different path. Maybe that would have failed too, but I think that course had a bigger potential upside than continuing to cling to Biden’s coattails and hoping.
Anyway, the more fundamental problem is that the Democratic brand is unpopular, and even after all the outrageous things Trump has done so far, it continues to be unpopular. Democrats, to the extent possible, given the weakness of parties and the collective action problem, really need to address this. Continuing to rely on negative partisanship and the thermostatic shifts of an always displeased electorate, which has punished incumbents for the last decade, is not a path to political success.
@Andy:
There is no doubt that this, Harris’s decision to not partially break with Biden, was definitely a negative.
There is a not-so-distant historical antecedent to this – the 1968 election – where incumbent Vice President Humphrey declined to separate himself from LBJ’s Vietnam policies, and this delayed the Democratic Party from coming together to support Humphrey. Not sure if this was a decisive factor, but it surely hurt Democrats, as Nixon won a narrow victory.
Steven,
You may be interested in Nate Silver’s recent piece on voting patterns over the last couple of elections:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/turnout-didnt-cost-kamala-harris
@al Ameda:
Counterfactuals are always difficult.
My general sense is that when the fundamentals are against you, then that is the time to do something different as opposed to doubling down.
Hey, I was born in 1968! For me, that is pretty distant!
@Andy: I just don’t know how you make a major break from Biden as his VP. It would have been pilloried as inauthentic, which would have played into existing critiques.
@Andy: Same!
@Andy: I will give it a look. Thx.
@Andy:
I’m with you on this.
You (your avatar) look young.
I was a high school senior at the time of the 1968 election.
1968 was the most incendiary year in my lifetime: the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, a literally riotous Democratic Convention in Chicago, race riots, and the Vietnam War at peak American involvement … just to name a few ‘occurences.’