Stop Overthinking the Election
A likely futile attempt to clear the decks
I’ve refrained from doing morning-after analysis of the election of Donald Trump, because I’ve seen a ton of that from other people and find very little of value in most of it. And I don’t have a great deal of confidence that anything I have to say about it will be all that valuable, either.
That said, it’s kind of looming over everything, in a way that makes it difficult to write about anything else. Not impossible, obviously, as I’ve posted a bunch of stuff in November, but it takes either a significant effort to re-focus or external motivation, both of which have been lacking this week. So I get stuck in a loop of thinking about election stuff and end up frustrated and not writing anything, which isn’t good, either. So I’m going to cave and actually type out some stuff in hopes that it will clear my head; feel free to skip off to another blog if you like, and here, have a photo of this awesome owl mural from my recent photo hike in downtown Troy as a parting gift:
Given that context, you should largely read the title of this as an instruction to myself, though it also kind of works as a general statement. The thing that’s most frustrating about the bulk of the election analysis is that it’s mostly overanalyzing what is, in the end, a pretty simple story. Voters really fucking hate inflation, as can be seen from the incumbent party taking a shellacking in basically every election everywhere since peak Covid, and Donald Trump’s personal loathesomeness was almost enough for Kamala Harris to eke out a win in spite of that.
I really don’t think there’s a lot more to it than that. Most of the energy in post-election arguments has been around what can be roughly shorthanded as culture war stuff— abortion, LGBTQ+ issues, immigration, even right-wing authoritarianism— but I don’t think that was a deciding factor, and certainly not in Trump’s favor. To the extent that that stuff mattered, it mostly worked against Trump— had the Republicans been able to run the reanimated corpse of John McCain he would’ve put up Reagan numbers, but the prospect of a second Trump term was unappealing enough to enough voters to make it a squeaker.
“Yes, but Trump ran a bunch of anti-trans ads in the closing months,” is the obvious rejoinder, but I think that misreads the sneaky appeal of those ads (which I saw too many times while watching playoff baseball), especially for people who aren’t locked in on politics all the time. The “Kamala is for They/Them” ad actually plays in the context of the economic argument— the message that resonates is “The Democrats are more worried about this weird transgender shit than working to fix the economy.” And the devious part is that reacting to those ads as primarily anti-trans hate speech plays into the economic argument— when the immediate response is to complain about the anti-trans aspect, it makes it seem like the Democrats really do care more about that than the economy.
The best argument the Democrats have on all of the culture-war topics is the one that Tim Walz debuted with, namely “Why are you being weird about this?” All of the issues— gender reassignment for inmates, trans women in sports, etc— involve such tiny numbers of people that they shouldn’t even be on the radar for a national campaign. To the extent that you’re talking about these edge cases at all it’s a distraction from what the voters who will ultimately decide the election actually care about, namely “Everything costs too damn much now.”1
Of course, the hell of it is that the Harris campaign wasn’t entirely wrong to go for the culture-war bait, because they just didn’t have much to work with on the economic front. I saw a lot of commentary both before and after the election of the form “Harris should’ve done more to distance herself from the Biden record,” but I don’t think that was really a viable option because Biden didn’t do anything wrong. In terms of substantive policy actions, what Biden did was the right stuff to do, which you can see from all the objective measures— low unemployment, growth in wages and GDP, the fact that the US economy is in much better shape than most of Europe. They could’ve done better on the messaging side, maybe— Biden could’ve made a big public show of concern about inflation, or done something flashy that at least appeared aimed at lowering prices— but I’m not sure they had great options there, either. Harris really didn’t have much room to repudiate Biden administration policies because they were the right choices given what they knew at the time.2
On economic issues, the only real argument they had available was “Look, we came in in the midst of a world-historic crisis on multiple fronts, and that really sucked. We did as much as we could to make it stop sucking as quickly as we could, but there was no way to avoid the suck completely. We’ve got things back on track now, and it’s going to get better.” Which is all absolutely true, but not exactly inspiring, especially given the “Voters don’t know shit” problem.
So their only real play was variations on “Donald Trump is awful.” Which, again, very nearly worked, because he is, in fact, thoroughly awful, as are most of the carnival freaks he’s elevated within the GOP coalition. He didn’t win because of the uglier aspects of his rhetoric and that of his supporters, he won in spite of it. Given the economic situation, a normal Republican from the 2000’s who wasn’t as crass and tacky as Trump would’ve won with 425 electoral votes.
That also means that a lot of the post-election advice for the Democrats seems to me to be deeply misguided. Admittedly, this is generically true of electoral advice after a loss, the bulk of which tends to be of the form “You need to adopt all the policy positions I’ve been banging on about for years.” This year’s crop of nonsense has been particularly fruitful, though, with lots of calls to get even more left-wing in the face of ample evidence that voters hated all of the left-wing stuff Biden tried. There are also a lot of claims that Harris should’ve had to face a primary, but those are generally some linear combination of “The Democrats should’ve generated more #content for me to pundit about,” and “We should’ve had a chance to pressure her into taking even more weirdo left-wing stances,” both of which seem actively counter-productive to me.
In the end, there are only two bits of election post-mortem content that I find at all persuasive as advice for going forward. The lesser of these is that the Democrats really need to find a way to seem more fun. I can’t find the piece that I read that put this most succinctly— it may have been a podcast— but I think there’s something to the argument that sometime during the Obama years the Democrats became the party with a scold-y affect. Through the 80’s and 90’s and most of the G. W. Bush years the Republicans were the anti-fun party: putting the Religious Right front and center to take bold stands against sex, drugs, and rock and/or roll. In recent years, it feels like the vibes have reversed, and it’s in dealing with the Left that you’re most likely to walk into a buzz saw of scolding. Not just language-sensitivity stuff, most of which genuinely is basic politeness, but shaming over largely irrelevant issues: “How can you tell jokes when climate change is going to destroy civilization by 2050?!?!?” and that sort of thing. It’s grim and unpleasant, and pushes people away.
The other, more significant point I think was put well by Josh Barro: “Democrats Will Not Win By Changing the Subject.” As I noted above, I don’t think Harris had all that much choice about running on a change-the-subject platform, but in the next round of elections the Democratic candidates won’t have the same inescapable burden. They will, however, have to have a good answer for “Why should we trust you to run the country?” in a variety of contexts, and right now the available answers are pretty bad, in no small part because a lot of deep-blue places are really badly run. That’s not something it’s going to be easy to paper over, and people need to get to work on fixing it. I don’t necessarily agree with the prescriptions of a lot of the pundits who write about this stuff, mostly because I don’t think that having to live in a place that isn’t NYC, SF, or LA is a human rights violation, but a lot of very loud people seem committed to pretending that nothing is wrong with the status quo, and I don’t think that’s remotely tenable.
So there you go. I guess the TL;DR version of this is just “It’s still the economy, stupid,” but again, the whole point here is to stop overthinking.
So I guess that was mildly cathartic; whether it works to clear the decks and let me think and write about something else remains to be seen. If you’d like to see it, here’s a button:
And I’ll start out with the comments open, but reserve the right to shut them down with zero notice if things look to be getting nasty, so consider yourself warned:
To clarify slightly: the bigoted aspects of Trump’s campaign are in fact highly energizing for some of his followers. My feeling, though, is that the number of people who are actively rooting for him to stick it to trans people and immigrants is small compared to the number of people who just don’t care enough about those issues to see them as a reason to vote against what they perceive (probably incorrectly) as their economic interest. They’re mad that Staple Good X costs twice as much as it did in 2019, and everything else is secondary.
My sense is that the Biden team was more worried about unemployment than inflation in 2021, and that guided their choices. But I also get the impression that most economists would’ve gone that way, as well, and that they have been somewhat surprised by just how negative the reaction to inflation has been.
This seems an excellently direct, simple, and sane post-election take. I quite agree. I can only add that we desperately need to improve the education system and our attitudes towards it.
Great post! I don’t really buy the idea that the Democrats need a major course correction when it comes to policy. I do worry about the trend of educational polarization—the Democrats need to make it clear that they’re the party who offers a better future for Americans without college degrees. The policy is already there—they just need better messaging.