I’m seeing an outpouring of grief and bitter recriminations from Democrats on the outcome of the election. I hope we see more reflection on what led to this eventuality.
1. It wasn’t money
The Harris campaign raised plenty of money. It spent about $3.5 billion.
2. Why are Democratic presidential campaign so expensive?
I have no idea. I could offer some conjectures but that’s what they would be.
3. Why did the Democrats delay replacing Biden as their standardbearer in this election so long?
Joe Biden did not just suddenly become an old man for the debate he had with Donald Trump. It was clear that had been the case for some time. Why did his staff and the Democratic leadership deny it for so long?
4. Why did the party fall in behind Kamala Harris as Biden’s successor so quickly?
Joe Biden’s approval rating was low before the debate. Kamala Harris was, possibly, the least accomplished of all of the 2020 primary candidates for the Democratic nomination. She was among the most progressive candidates running. She was not incredibly popular and her retail political ability was, at least, questionable. The undemocratic way in which Vice President Harris became the presidential candidate undercut the Democrats’ complaints about how authoritarian Trump was.
5. What’s going on here?
I’ve checked these figures and they’re correct. What happened to the 20 million people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020? Did they evaporate? Did they sit this election out?
6. Why did the Harris campaign overestimate the power of abortion as an issue?
It certainly wasn’t enough to carry them across the finish line.
#2 – It costs a lot of money to buy votes. (It’s a joke. I couldn’t resist.)
#1 – See #2, and they did not buy enough votes. (It’s a joke, also. I couldn’t resist. This is too easy.)
#3 – President was “an old man” from day 1. He was/is a senile, racist, pedophile. (They should have called me.)
#4 – Unless they could have assured a transgender woman of color would be the candidate, there was no way to not nominate VP Harris. Only a misogynist and/or racist would deny that she was the most qualified person to become President.
#5 – Probably, it was anti-Trump voters who became dissatisfied with President Biden but are still anti-Trump. (This is part of the reason why Trump believes he won 2020. It lead to statistical anomalies that were assumed to be fraud.)
#6 – The Democrat elites believe that they are smarter than anybody who disagrees with them.
Except for #1 & #2, this is not that difficult to understand, but with more degrees and certificates, common sense becomes harder to discern.
My sense is that they thought Harris’ better favorability than Trump would get her across the finishing line, and they just needed to run whatever the equivalent of a prevent defense is in politics by not doing anything to risk public opinion that she was the nicer person. When that didn’t work she called Trump a fascist to motivate the base. She didn’t persuade anybody to vote for her, it’s all based on not being Trump.
#4- It was the only pragmatic choice. It erased any legal questions about having access to campaign funds. There really wasn’t time to have a primary. The claim it was authoritarian is bizarre.
#3- Good question. Its actually pretty common that people have a slow decline then a tipping point where the rapidly progress. That would be my guess. Trump looks to be in slow decline phase so we probably get to repeat this.
#5- Largely inflation but also immigration. The Biden admin gambled on full employment and good economic growth. They got both of those but also got a short period of inflation. A lot of rank and file Democrats were not happy with the surge of illegals.
Let’s hope Trump carries out his mass deportations. Let’s start in the red states.
Steve
Harris/Walz were the worst candidates ever nominated by a major party in our entire history. Neither was qualified to hold any public office. Neither could articulate a policy on any issue. They were suspected of being progressives, but you would not know it from any statement they made. Both are demonstrably stupid, and have no accomplishments of any substance. Walz let Minneapolis burn for four nights before intervening. His wife said she opened windows to enjoy the smell.
The Democrat Party today is the party of the super-rich, the upper class/elites and the freaks. Transgenderism, immigration/open borders, inflation and DEI all worked against them. Transgenderism alone defeated Sherrod Brown in Ohio.
In a complete inversion of roles,Trump has made the Republican Party the party of the working and middle classes. He made significant gains among minorities and women.
The Republicans also won control of the Senate, now with 52 seats, and possibly as many ad 55. It is highly probable they will retain control of the House.
This is the biggest Democrat loss since 1984.
You may despise Trump, but he is the most transformative politician this country has had in many generations.
Now if he can control his infatuation with Zionism.
I don’t know how to make this more clear.
Any population anywhere in the world, anytime in history, will have a natural limit to the number of immigrant strangers they will be comfortable absorbing.
You force this beyond the limits and two things happen.
The immigrants are so numerous that they feel no need to assimilate and,
The native population feels threatened.
Any time and any place this is true.
Why are Democrats’s campaigns so expensive?
Because they have the money, they are today the party of the rich.
Wealth is no longer from industry, but from information technology and entertainment. They spend money because they have a lot of it.
steve:
You prefer oligarchical? It certainly wasn’t democratic.
And it wasn’t pragmatic due to exigent circumstances since the Democratic leadership had created the exigent circumstances.
Democratic would have been having The Talk with Joe Biden in February and allowing Democratic primary voters to choose. Instead they delayed until the last possible minute and put their preferred candidate up. Now their preferred candidate has lost.
Tasty did a lot of the legwork.
I would just say that on #1, money doesn’t replace a silly campaign based almost exclusively on “Trump is Hitler” and “Trump is Hitler.”
#3 is very important, because it precluded a reasonable process to identify a sensible, and not vacuous, candidate.
on #4, Tasty is right. Identity politics. Its very self destructive.
#5 Hard to duplicate boxes and boxes of BS ballots. That avenue was cut off this time. “Rare things happen all the time” as the explanation for a just silly number of votes for Biden, who couldn’t draw a crowd of more than 50 was just ludicrous.
#6 There are many single issue voters, but not enough.
I guess in your fantasy world things work better. In reality, this is the first time this has happened. AS I noted, having seen this happen many times in 50 years in medicine, it’s not unusual for people to reach a tipping point fairly acutely. I dont know that’s what happened but neither do you. I also think that in reality Dem leaders would have preferred a functional Biden over Harris as their candidate so I am having a hard time seeing some plot here.
As you have complained at times, our executive position, POTUS, has way too much power. We dont have a good way to get rid of someone who should go. For all we know they had The Talk and Biden said no. Suppose he did agree. How long do you really think it would take to arrange debates and have primary votes? Just based on his age Biden should have announced a couple of years ago that he was not running. That would have avoided the mess. Since he didnt this was the least bad option.
Steve
I have been warning about that for 20 years. What concerns me is the prospect of an overreaction. That’s what happened a century ago, the last time we had as high a proportion of immigrants as we do now. Worse, most of our latest immigrants are culturally quite similar.
What I wanted was small increases in the number of legal immigrants and strict enforcement on illegal immigration. Instead, the Biden Administration opened the floodgates. What were they thinking?
They had many alternatives. They could have gone public with it. They could have removed Biden via the 25th Amendment. State Democratic parties could have blocked him from the ballot.
Haven’t you ever been in charge of or run anything? It would take at best weeks, more likely months to go through any of those options. If you have the talk and Biden disagrees then he contests and it likely has to go to the SCOTUS at some point. There would be at least 3 weeks before Congress voted and you need 2/3 to agree. If the cabinet was saying Biden was incompetent to hold office do you really think they would have voted him out rather than face him in an election? What would be the legal basis to keep him off state ballots and again what is the chance it goes through the courts quickly?
Steve
As to #6, whose voice is loudest in an echo chamber?
Trump and conspiratorial minded Republicans have a theory for #5…..
My theory is COVID restrictions, the Floyd protests lead to the climax in social mood of about 4 years of increasing hysteria; and that both motivated usually apathetic citizens to vote along with creating a massive infrastructure to reach those citizens. Given its impossible to sustain that level of hysteria, those citizens went back to being apathetic and hard to reach.
#6, I don’t know if Harris overestimated the issue, but rather the adage about lawyers and pounding the table. What policy did Biden/Harris that polled or was objectively better — not the economy, not foreign policy, not on COVID response, not crime.
Looking forward, Democrats maybe secretly happy that they lost. They can transform to #resistance, likely taking part or all of Congress in 2026, impeach Trump, and be favorites to retake the White House in 2028. Trump is entering office into difficult circumstances economically and in foreign affairs, with a small dysfunctional House majority; unless he’s learned and does things different the 2nd time around, he won’t be able to accomplish much. It isn’t clearly evident Trump has taken lessons to heart.
Floodgates,
What WERE they thinking? Votes?
Is it an extension of wokism to extend sympathy to everyone except your neighbors and constituents?
Cheap labor?
I have to believe that the ruling class is so isolated that they don’t even care. They can’t see the view from the ground.
Their isolated lives and views have blinded them to the obvious, and it cost them.
But that was inevitable, if not this time around then in four years.
5. They aren’t done counting yet. I’m particular, late-arriving mail-in ballots are still trickling in, and a lot of states are slow at processing mail-in and drop-off ballots received near election day.
There are about 8 million not-yet-counted ballots just in California, and something like 4.5-5MM of them are likely to be for Harris.
CuriousOnlooker should not be so coy. As to number 5, it is blatantly obvious that those “missing 20 million “Democrat votes never existed. The 2020 presidential election was flat out stolen, and the “missing 20 million” is the scale of the fraud.
This year, Trump, almost fanatically Zionist, was the obvious Israeli choice. Harris were/are suspect as possibly being pro-Palestinian. So the Jewish lobby would not cooperate in another fraud.
I think one of the factors here is that (until recently, with Elon’s acquisition of Twitter/X) conservative outpourings of grief and bitter recriminations were done out of the public limelight.
They were still there, they were just harder to spot. So I think the symmetry of grief holds across the aisle.
You theoretically could be correct on #5, curious. But that vote total is off the charts and implies wild enthusiasm, for a candidate who couldn’t attract a crowd of more than a couple dozen at an event. And then we have actual film footage of (the same) people repeatedly showing up at drop boxes with ballots. Polling places with windows covered but film of boxes appearing from underneath tables………late at night.
I was once told that a woman who repeatedly showed up at a drop box outside a library just liked to go to the library a lot, and helped out her neighbors by delivering ballots. I resisted the temptation to tell then “say hello to the tooth fairy next time you see her.”
Based on the latest estimates, it won’t be 20 million missing voters, more like a shortfall of about 3-5 million (with Trump gaining a couple million) — that’s how Trump wins the popular vote.
The items #1-#6 really are secondary considerations for why Harris lost. Practically it can be explained by 4 factors.
#1. Biden’s job approval rating. Stuck at 40% for 2 years, well below the level of any President that has won re-election. Being forced out by his own party is a reflection voters wanted change. If Biden’s approval rating was 60%, whatever Biden’s mental acuity, he getting ready for a second term.
#2. Inflation. The worse inflation in 50 years. The most costly phrase Biden uttered was “inflation is transitory”. It was a slow constant bleed in credibility on Biden on all “kitchen table” issues.
#3. Immigration. That exponential like surge in illegal immigration for the 3 years preceding election year.
#4. COVID response. This is the key one, Biden was elected on a narrow but clear mandate, improve on the perceived lacking in Trump’s handling of the pandemic and bring normality back. Instead, Biden had more people die of COVID in 2021 then Trump had in 2020, despite having a vaccine. And with more divisive things then Trump ever tried, like vaccine mandates.
That spoke to some level of incompetency in administration. Compounding was after the first month, Biden was focused on practically everything else other then resolving the pandemic (ARP, BBB) — a misreading of his mandate.
Looking back, I would say 2021 was where the key decisions / events that drove this election.
CuriousOnlooker:
To your list I would add that Vice President Harris not just failed to differentiate her views from Biden’s she outright refused to do so. That is what it means when you are asked “What would you change?” and your answer is “Nothing comes to mind”.
I noted Harris’s remarks at the time, that they hurt her.
I’m not sure if her response was a lack of prep or a reflection of the dangers of an alternative answer.
This was a question where there wasn’t an answer that was a net positive for her.
If she lists changes, it would only remind voters they want change, and then why go for the “diet coke” when they can go for the “real thing” (as in vote for Trump). Also, note that Biden positions himself (as you noted) in the middle of the Democratic party; to move from his position on some policy would invariably ruffle some fraction of Democratic party; and Harris could ill-afford that in the heat of a general election.
At first I thought it was a successful effort to abort ballot fraud, but now I’m convinced David Ziffer has the correct diagnosis: COVID.
https://substack.com/@daveziffer/note/c-76267607?r=1f0f6t&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action