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November 7, 2024 - 8:15pm
Kamala Harris’s defeat this week presents a fork in the road for Democrats, who must now choose whether to embrace economic populism and moderate on social issues, or double down on their neoliberal strategy.
The Democratic elite, including Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton, seemed inclined to stay on the current course in the immediate aftermath of the election. The Obama and Clinton statements praised the Harris campaign and made no acknowledgement of the party’s failure to win over working-class Americans. The Obamas called Harris and running mate Tim Walz “extraordinary public servants who ran a remarkable campaign”, and suggested they lost due to factors outside their control — namely, the Covid-19 pandemic and inflation. “Those conditions have created headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world, and last night showed that America is not immune,” their statement read.
Harris suggested the party should double down in her concession speech. “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign — the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness, and the dignity of all people,” she said, along with references to abortion and democracy, two issues the campaign hammered which ultimately failed to persuade voters.
Those responses suggest a commitment to the current state of affairs on the Left, where Democrats have chosen to focus on social justice issues rather than economics. Democratic strategist David Axelrod, for instance, praised the Harris campaign and blamed racism and sexism for her loss — issues the candidate herself previously denied played a role in the election.
White women in particular have become a favourite target for blame from this camp of Democrats, much like in 2016. North Carolina state Sen. Sydney Batch called for white women to “dig deep and figure out why they, to this day, given all Donald Trump’s sexism, all of his racism, is still the person they voted for over Harris”, calling this demographic’s support for the former president “dumbfounding.” Joy Reid of MSNBC also blamed white women for Harris’ loss, and complained that this group missed their second opportunity to “change the way that they interact with the patriarchy” by voting for a woman president.
The argument is reminiscent of the response to the Democratic defeat in 2016. Then, Hillary Clinton blamed sexism for the result, while mainstream media outlets widely cast Trump’s supporters as both racist and sexist.
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Subscribe“Democrats in general need …listening to the American people” – The most brilliant idea I’ve ever heard!
Let’s watch them try (pretend) to do it and fall on their face, again.
The problem for the political left everywhere is not just that they don’t listen to the people, its that instead they listen to activists who tell them what the people should be thinking and saying.
Then when members of a group whose support they assume says something which does not fit with what they expect, they don’t have a clue how to react except to start flinging insults at the very people whose support they somehow still feel entitled to. “Idiots”, “bigots”, “Oreos” etc etc.
That’s like asking a tone-deaf person to listen to Mozart.
The problem is, that probably means they have to stop listening to their donor class and, in fact, go against the oligarchs.
Can’t argue with the Obama and Clinton Statements. Harris and Walz were Extraordinary, and their campaign was definitely Remarkable. Perhaps the way I interpret those words within the context of the statements differs slightly though.
Reminds me of when Greg Lemond was asked about Lance Armstrong’s victory in the Tour de France and said it was “unbelievable”.
At the time everyone simply took it as meaning “what a fantastic performance”. But Lemond was well aware of the possible second meaning that “it is not credible.”
The DNC no less than the RNC is a party of oligarchs, presiding over widespread poverty, homelessness, opioid addiction and deaths of despair. — all in the richest nation ever. Where was all the economy rhetoric during the rest of Biden (before they needed razor-edge margins all of a sudden)?
It seems extraordinary. When a party is so unpopular that the electorate chose someone like Trump ahead of them surely the thought must cross their minds that they’ve been doing something wrong?
I have the impression that the Tories in the UK know they have to face up to a tough re-evaluation of their policies and it’s possible they’ll offer us something better in a few year. I don’t see that the left is capable of that
Sorry, but you are being too lenient with both sides here. This is not about the Democrats ‘doing something wrong’. The one thing that might have made a difference would have been for Biden not to run and to have an open primary. But it is even less about the US just voting for Trump because he was not Harris (the way the Brits voted Labour because they were not the Tories). The People of the United States of America voted for Trump because they like Trump. They want to be governed by someone like Trump, and they want to live in the kind of society that Trump will build. They are not children; they know what they are doing. They may end up disappointed when they find that kicking the elites does not make their lives much better (as the Brexiteers found on this side of the ocean). But they have made an informed choice. The US is a Trumpist country. No point in pretending otherwise.
Well this might have helped, certainly.
But the early analysis coming out of the Trump camp and pollsters is that the real cut-through moment came when he ran the ad featuring Harris in a previous campaign promising state funded trans surgery for prisoners. This cut through especially with urban Latinos.
A lot of Dems on social media are now bemoaning how “bigoted” voters must be to elect someone like Trump because of an issue which only really affects a “tiny number of people”. But this just shows again how out of touch they are with many of the people they presume to speak for.
Most people take a live and let live attitude on trans issues, but they object to being bullied into affirming what they consider a lie: that people can change sex. And they know that what starts in California will eventually find its way to them and it will, for example, be their daughters forced to play on sports teams against males who think they are females.
The big trick of this far left social justice movement is to masquerade as a reasonable claim to uncontentious virtues like “kindness” and “inclusion”. When the veil drops and people see that the reality is stuff like cutting healthy body parts off kids and their taxes paying for prisoners to have surgery to affirm their delusions, they aren’t so keen.
So if I were to make a list of things the Dems did wrong, its would certainly include overestimating their traditional voters’ appetite for wokery.
“The US is a Trumpist country” is a meaningless statement.
The US is a country with two main political parties, and a large chunk of it will generally vote Republican unless there is a very good reason to do otherwise, and Kamala Harris was not that reason.
Most Americans – especially those on the right – want to build their own society and not have politicians do it for them.
I would guess that a lot of Americans don’t particularly like Trump, but will chose him when the alternative is a candidate and party who wants to abolish the police, empty the jails and give free sex change operations to illegal immigrants. That is how I feel, so I have to guess that some Americans feel the same.
A lot of people would say that Donald J Trump was a very good reason not to vote Republican this time. But you think differently, as does a majority of your countrymen. That says something about you. You know the man, you know how he will behave, you know what he will do and what changes he will make. And you are happy with all those things. Why try to deny it?
Rather arrogant to pass judgement on 72 million voters with your tone of moral superiority. Which is a fair part of him being elected. People get tired of being told to do what I say or you are deplorable garbage and a fascist.. Trump is not the best by far but the choice of woke nonsense and economic throttling by excessive regulation are worse…you are welcome to the European lifestyle of slow economic decline and the nanny state of the EU..
At last year’s “Battle of Ideas” London weekend there was a debate about American politics. An American voter from the floor stood up and said that he didn’t like Trump because of his attitude to women (who does?) but he intended to vote for him because Washington was overbearing and corrupt and Trump aimed to “drain the swamp”. I guess there’s a lot of Americans who think like that. Exactly the same goes for France which I know better, rural people where I lived vote for Le Pen because they dislike Paris and Brussels bossing them around.
The same could have been said about Boris in 2019. I do hope the Republicans don’t make the same mistake as the Conservatives did a few years later.
But if the US flipped Harris-ist, the point would be exactly the same: American voters vote oligarchic, and happily so.
I’m not sure that you are right on this. On the news there was a Latino American voter who said, “I don’t like the man but I pretty well agree with his economic policies”. It was maybe the vote of people like that that swung the election so wildly — and it’s a perfectly rational attitude. Trump’s foreign policy was on the whole enlightened when he was in office: he brokered the Abrahamic Accords which as someone said, if it had been done by Obama he would have been offered the Nobel peace prize for the second time.
It may well be that some people disliked Trump and even most of his policies, but chose him for some specific point they cared about. I do not think that really makes a difference though. One way or the other, they looked at Trump and thought “Sure, this is OK. I am fine with having this man as President“. And that choice defines them.
I am not talking about people being ‘racist’ or ‘misogynist’ here. For one thing I do not think those explanations are true, and for another: If it is OK to vote for Harris because she is black, or a woman (as the Democrats say), it is OK to vote against her for the same reason.
Nor does it make sense to talk about ignorance or misinformation or lies here. The information about what kind of man Trump is is all out there. Whether you like it or choose to disregard it, that is a choice you make. Besides the point is not that lots of people think it is true that refugees in Springfield are eating the local cats: The point is that they do not care whether it is true or not.
It is not about his private life either. There has been some pretty slimy individuals as US presidents, from LBJ to Nixon, and if people think someone will make a good President there is nothing wrong with voting for him.
It is not even about the policies: It is quite hard to figure out which of Trumps many pronouncements will actually end up being enacted (I doubt if he knows himself). And, anyway, people will disagree about any possible policy – and have every right to do so.
What makes Trump unique is his personality and what that tells us about how he is going to govern. He is reckless and erratic, acting from gut instinct and a belief in his own infallibility. He is authoritarian, refusing to be restrained by laws or the constitution, refusing to accept the election result and trying to overturn it, surrounding himself with yes-men to make sure there are no obstacles to his will. He refuses to look at reality or accept uncomfortable facts, from the size of his inauguration crowd to the likely consequences of his own actions, and prefers to follow his wishful thinking and try to manifest it into reality. He is petty and vindictive, with a major policy driver being the need to punish those who have dared standing up to him or making him look small. Most of all he is insecure, driven by his needy ego, so that he will do whatever makes him look and feel big and strong, without caring about the real-world consequences. With a man like that his decisions are disconnected from the facts on the ground: he may do something good or useful one year (like the Abraham accords, to the extent that they were actally his work), but it is a roll of the dice if he will make major disaster next time. As they say of stocks: “Past performance is not a guide to future results”.
If you vote for a man like that, you make your choice. You may not yourself be vindictive, authoritarian, reckless, and in denial of uncomfortable truth, but that is the kind of man you have chosen for your government and your head of state. That makes you a Trumpist. The US is majority Trumpist now. We can hope that at some point in the future there will be a different kind of government, that can try to undo some of the damage the Trump will do. But whoever wants to bring that about should be aware that they will be shovelling shit uphill. The American people wants a man like Trump. It will take a lot of work to manipulate them into chosing the opposite.
The core problem: We (DNC) are the Good. Therefore the only reason for our repudiation is: the Bad (racism, sexism). Oops, democracy, too: a (slight) majority of Americans are morally Bad.
The reason why the Left is incapable of re-evaluation of their policies is loss of face. Labour has enthusiastically promoted multiculturalism and unlimited immigration for at least thirty years now, so to change their tune is to admit they got it seriously wrong over a period of thirty years. Many humans will do literally anything rather than lose face publicly, and that includes sacrificing millions of lives if necessary. Both Stalin and Mao were aware that their agricultural policies were ‘not working’ but they doubled down on the policies rather than admit they had maybe got it wrong. The result was the massacre of millions of ‘kulaks’ in Russia and possibly the greatest famine of all time in China when apparently 20 million died. Whether people on the left are more prone to this sort of obstinacy I don’t know, but it could well be that it is true. So don’t expect any changes from them. As Jonathan Andrews suggests, the Tories just might change their tune — but don’t hold your breath. ,
Gosh, lots of feedback.
I doubt I could respond wisely (even if wasn’t on my third pint).
When we had the brexit vote I voted to leave for a number of reasons but the straw was that it seemed to me that the British Government (God save the King) at least pretended to care about what the population thought. The EU didn’t give a monkeys.
The Republicans and Trump at least pretended to care about the views of “ordinary Americans’, the Democrats were openly contemptuous.
Now, the point is who has humility? Can the Dems self repair? I fear not. I fear the Left in the west has become so sure of its own virtue that it will blame the people rather than rethink.
I have no argument with the Left; they should present their ideas as they see fit. I regard the failure as being on the Right (at least in Blighty) who have been afraid and too stupid to articulate a powerful and convincing argument of a small state. We have had no choice.
I’m glad Harris lost but I wish she’d lost to someone else.
This was a bizarre election. The Democrats almost skated by with Joe Biden as the nominee, but luckily for them he soiled himself (figuratively, I think) on national television. That gave them a chance to dump a losing nominee and replace him with someone who had a fighting chance. She fought, but lost anyway.
This race was not fought on policy grounds. Neither campaign put out policy, but ran on personality instead. Donald Trump offered his usual “truthful hyperbole” and meandering stand-up comedy. Kamala Harris offered “joy” and a mouthful of teeth shown at every opportunity.
So why should the postmortem focus on policy? This was a popularity contest, and popularity has little to do with policy. It’s like deciding who to vote for in a beauty contest by how the contestants answered the question, “if you won, how would you promote world peace?”
I think this is basically correct.
There were “issues” that were simply fig leaves to cover the fact that it was a popularity contest. No “serious” American wants to say that they voted for A over B because they *liked* A better and that they found B repellent, so these fig leaf issues let them claim that they voted for Trump because of immigration or the economy (BTW, within my lifetime of >75 years, this was NOT an economy that itself will lose an election for you), or for Harris because of abortion or social fairness.
Because there’s a lot of blame-assigning now–Biden should have gotten out sooner, the economy was the cause–I think that many Demo spokespersons really do not get that people *preferred* Trump, the person, over Harris, the person. Trump was genuine, Harris was not.
There was a TV spot that ironically told me how far off the Demo strategy was. Harris faced the camera and said “If my opponent is elected, he’ll wake up every morning and look at his list of enemies and that’ll occupy his time.”
Right there, at that spot, I suspect that very many Americans thought “Yes. And they have it coming, too. Good for him.”
I couldn’t get myself to vote for either candidate, but I can understand that the demos have run two female candidates who each lost a popularity contest with Donald Trump, as improbable as that sounds.
Well said. I talked to four people in my extended family over the past month or two who dislike Democratic policies on social issues (like abortion on demand at any time in pregnancy and men going in women’s bathrooms or playing in women’s sports leagues) and so would not vote for Kamala Harris.
But like you, they would not vote for Donald Trump either, even though none of them said they disliked any policy position he took in his first term or proposed for his second. They like what he does but they hate him, mainly for what he says in his rallies and his tweets.
For them, logic and reason have nothing to do with it; it’s just visceral, coming from the gut. For them, words speak louder than actions. Very strange.
Well, if you really think it is a good policy to put RFK Jr in charge lf health policy or the oil industry in charge of climate policy you maybe ought to vote for the Don. But it is understandable that your relatives still did not do so. It is not about either his policies or his achievements.
You are doing it yourself. You are not judging him for what he has achieved, but because you like his style. No new wars during his presidency? Sure – and no earthquakes either. Sure proves how great a leader he is. You admitted yourself that he achieved nothing in North Korea, beyond giving the Kim a propaganda victory and letting them build their bombs in peace. But you praise him to the skies anyway, because he is a big dog dealmaker, and you like big dog dealmakers. If there are any achievements in his track record that show why he would be great at foreign policy or at ‘managing’ the energy transition I sure cannot see them, but you let your enthusiasm for him carry you away anyway.
His actions show how he is likely to govern: erratic, petty, vindictive, uninformed, and riding his hunches without caring too much about the facts, or likely consequences. For logic and reason you cannot beat the judgment of The Economist: That it might not be a disaster, but that the downside risk of putting Trump in power is way too high for that gamble to be worth it.
You are Zanny Minton Beddoes and I claim my £5. It’s been an awful long time since the Economist has been right about anything.
My guess is that this is a long-standing (and very useful) evolutionary safety trait. If a man suddenly turns up at your village saying threatening things, then it’s best to be wary first – until they can prove otherwise. I also suspect that this is a slowly diminishing trait.
Only someone who has never experienced real insecurity could believe that working people don’t vote on policy and outcomes. That’s why the Democrats thought they could win by getting all these shallow and narcissistic slebs to endorse their hopeless candidate.
Luxury politics are really only for people who can afford them.
People who live with insecurity vote for whoever they think will provide them with safety and stability. That isn’t the Democrats anymore – and won’t be again for a long time.
“Okay, we lost BIGLY. Our candidate was a liberal from CA, who NO ONE voted for in ANY primary; instead she was foisted upon us by ‘those who know things’ in the DNC. You know, Obama, Clinton, Pelosi, hey even Biden, when he was awake…And then WTF? We Lost?? Huh?? Wait, we had everything going for us — TV, cable, newspapers, colleges, umm.. tik tok? Taylor f*****g Swift? Oprah?? How is it even POSSIBLE???”
Yeah. How is it even possible. The party of the workers, of the middle class — supposedly.
And now, check out all the ‘news’ outlets — NYT, NPR, MSNBC, M-O-U-S-E…
“The American voters are just racist, misogynist, hate-filled, assholes!”
That’s the takeaway for most of the Democratic machine.
Can they learn? I hope so. I do. We need balance. Not a dysfunctional, 2-tiered chaos-spinning privilege engine…
I had the impression that Dr. Jill, using Twitter right after Joe submitted his letter of resignation, foisted Harris on the DNC, as retribution.
Can they learn? I hope so. I do. We need balance. Not a dysfunctional, 2-tiered chaos-spinning privilege engine….
Are you listening Starmer?
This wonkish analysis is irrelevant. All normal voters could plainly see the legal attacks on Mr Trump were unjust, their grocery bills were higher, that illegal immigration was increasing, and that US weapons were killing hundreds of thousands. The people did not want four more years of that.
In many regards the same key theme overrode all else in the US as did earlier in the summer in UK – ‘it’s what you did to my standard of living stupid’. Trump has massive character deficits. Critics of Starmer would argue different but significant deficits. But in neither case was it the key point for the electorates.
The key backstory in the US is real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago. Youngsters have a worse standard of living than their parents. And it remains v unclear if AI and robotics will make a bad situation even worse for the working class in the US. The US also continues to be the richest per capita nation in the World but the only wealthy Nation not to guarantee healthcare to all. The Trumpists may have won but they won implying promises to fix these things. It will be remarkable if a Party led by a Billionaire and in hock to the extreme wealthy does anything but obfuscate and seek to distract away from addressing these fundamentals. The Democrats in turn, whilst they have sections that ‘get it’ has also allowed itself to become too much the pawn of the multi-millionaire.
And the Democrats are not ‘in hock to the extremely wealthy’?
Explain to us why a party that genuinely had the interests of its voters at heart would deliberately import tens of millions of illegal immigrants, put the interests of criminals above those of working people whilst sanctioning the mass sterilisation of their children and do everything in their power to promote racial and religious conflict in poor communities.
The truth is that they did these things because that’s what their donors demand in return for the billions of dollars they’ve invested in their campaign. At long last Americans are waking up to the corruption of their ruling class.
And that’s a good thing.
I’m not sure about any “waking up” inasmuch as both parties are comparably oligarchic.
Yes Democrats too tied to big money.
Now watch and see if Trump really that bothered about the left behinds etc. It’s just one group of Billionaire Oligarchs swopped for another, using a different set of dog whistles.
Trump will stop the flooding of the country with millions of illegals for the simple reason that he doesn’t get money from Soros. He will stop the mass sterilisation of children and kick men out of women’s sports and toilets. He will stop the defunding of police and the non-prosecution of violent criminals (also paid for by Soros). He will put an end to the appeasement of Iran and at least try to end the forever war in Ukraine.
Even if he does nothing else but play golf he will have justified his win.
I look forward to the British electorate following suit when they realise how poor Starmer and Reeves have made them.
I’ve been reading the reaction over at the Guardian with interest, both the published articles and reader comments, wondering if the penny will drop this time. No chance. It’s more of the same denialism that we see from the political left after every defeat. But with bells on.
Their reaction boils down to: we would have won if only we had the right voters instead of the stupid, racist bigots we’re stuck with.
Brecht said something similar in the 50s.
Yes, Brecht wrote a short poem saying that if the East German government thought what it did about its own citizens, maybe “it should just abolish the people”.
It’s Britain’s misfortune that this great political reckoning is running one election cycle too late. My fear is that we lack a visionary to head it up, in the coming years.
Sooner or later the capture of the Democrats by extreme wokism was going to impact their usually reliable urban working class vote enough to tip the balance. This is that moment.
Poorer people in cities, including many non-white minorities and legal immigrants, are the ones who have to live with the consequences of “social justice” policies like the effective decriminalisation of shoplifting and drug tolerance zones. Its not the shops which the Obamas and the Newsomes use to buy groceries which are closing because of uncontrolled theft or putting up prices in order to cover costs of additional security.
To me the Dems’ problem is obvious, it’s not the policies and all that identitarian, DEI woke stuff. It’s the ‘People’. For any number of reasons, and God knows there were many, the voters were wrong.
The solution equally obvious; change the people!
Democrats needed to win back the working class.
You mean the ‘deplorables’, ‘garbage’, racists, misogynists, fascists? Why would they want to appeal to those people??
“WHY DIDN’T YOU VOTE FOR US YOU STUPID, RACIST WHITE CNUTS? WHY?!!!”
I looked at the picture of the ‘old guard’ at the head of the article… these people achieved success in their careers by doing the same political things day after day – the political machine was their machine. They are unlikely to (be able) to change.
Maybe the Democrats could go back to holding primaries and then respecting the outcome. That way they would choose a candidate that was popular with the electorate. The last time they did it – in 2008 – they chose someone who won two Presidential elections.
In 2012, there were no proper primaries as understandably no one wanted to campaign against a popular incumbent. In 2016, Hilary promised to pay the Party’s debts in return for the nomination, so the actual winner Sanders was cheated. In 2020, Covid was used as an excuse to anoint Biden, who in any case agreed to let Obama run the White House in exchange for his endorsement. In 2024, Biden remained the candidate until it was too late to hold primaries and challenge the anointment of an unpopular candidate.
Trump offered better governance objectives and provided a pathway to achieve it.
That’s why Americans voted for him.
Democrat states should secede from the union and bring in Democrat citizens from the rump US and let any Republican leave if they wish.
Yes, but will they? The Democrats, whose figurehead is Obama, who will feature in the bottom ten of US Presidents, are in real trouble. The only thing that will save them will be economic disaster (e.g., the national debt) for which Trump will be blamed, and he will deserve some of it.
Trump was handed a booming economy by Obama and ran it into the ground. Biden has spent 4 years successfully repairing the damage that Trump did and now Trump will benefit from it again before he screws it up with his lunatic policies. Unfortunately the voters only see who was in charge when they were hurting economically and the cycle will continue.
Otherwise, Democrats need to find out why women would vote for a rapist who will curtail their health rights and “take care of them whether they like it or not”, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.
They need to figure out why Latinos would vote for a fascist who will round up their families and put them in concentration camps before deporting them.
They need to figure out why the working class will vote against their own interests time after time.
I know the answers so lord knows why the Democrat leadership don’t…
According to exit polls most women voted for Harris. but interestingly her support among women dropped from Biden in 2020.
I suspect that when the analysis is fully done we will find it comes down to something like this:
Whether people like it or not the fight for abortion rights is now happening state by state. There is no realistic federal route to a constitutional right to an abortion. This Supreme Court is not going to overturn Dobbs vs Jackson so a Constitutional Amendment would be needed and that’s not going to happen either.
So whether Trump or Harris won is not going to make any difference to abortion rights.
There is however a federal route to stopping the creeping infiltration of women’s privacy, fairness etc by men coming from the social justice left. For example, a Trump Dept of Education can and will reverse the Biden-era amendment to Title IX that stipulates males who identify as females must be treated as females for purposes of sports, funding etc.
My guess and belief is that this line of thinking persuaded a significant enough number of women to hold their noses and vote for Trump.
This one is actually very easy. This isn’t going to happen. Even today Trump has been explicit that he welcomes legal immigration to the US. His issue is with illegal immigration and border security.
Barely a few short years ago a policy of trying to prevent people entering countries illegally and then deporting them if they do was considered entirely mainstream and unremarkable. Many Latino US citizens (and other Latinos legally living in the US) recognise this as a perfectly reasonable position.
Good stuff. But there’s little point in responding to CS. His politics, like those of most young, middle class leftists, are driven by fashion, not logic. He gets them off the same shelf as his t-shirts.
I would suggest the actual datum is, Most women who are answering the question in an exit poll indicated they voted Democrat.
The bit about Latinos is wrong. Latinos who came into America legally and have lived there all their lives and worked often resent people jumping the queue and many first generation immigrants consider themselves Americans first politically even though they may still be South American culturally (speaking Spanish, eating different food &c.)
They need to figure out why calling people fascists doesn’t make them want to vote for you.
They need to figure out that what is in the interests of rich middle class public sector bureaucrats, academics and journalists is not in the interests of people who have to work for a living.
They need to figure out that selecting a radical leftist California machine politician, who has never won and open election and came dead last in their own party primaries, as VP to an octogenarian stop-gap candidate is a really terrible idea.
I can’t imagine you’ve ever met someone from the working class.