Among certain segments of the indigo blob, there’s a pall hanging over the election. No matter what happens today, we may be in the dying days of American democracy as we’ve known it.
At least in 2016 and 2020, Democrats entered the election nervous about the possibility of a Trump win but assured that the polls suggested that, at the very least, he was more likely than not to lose – that surely the American people would ultimately see what a charlatan he was, how antithetical to democracy he was, and reject him. Even when that optimism turned out to be ill-founded in 2016, it seemed to be because the Clinton campaign bought into that optimism too much and became more concerned with running up the score in deep blue states than making sure they’d actually win in the places where it mattered in the electoral college. Joe Biden’s win in 2020 allowed for that optimism to seem vindicated, that America had survived four years of Trump and could now start to heal, to move on from the threat Trump represented to everything America stood for.
There’s little such grounds for optimism in 2024. Where before polls seemed to show a clear Democratic advantage, now they seem to show a toss-up – and given how much the polls underestimated support for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, if that repeats itself in 2024 it could result in Trump getting a near-mandate, maybe even winning the popular vote. Where models break down the percentage chances of each candidate winning, they’d given Trump a slight edge until after I started writing this post – Nate Silver had him with as high as a 55% chance of winning until Saturday morning, and right now both him and the site he founded have it as a razor-thin race with no advantage even detectable for either side (though the Economist has given Harris as much as a 56% chance of winning). Democrats had some reason for optimism for a Harris victory even before the recent momentum in her favor – motivated voters not captured in polls’ likely voter models, right-wing pollsters “flooding the zone” to make Trump look like a bigger favorite than he is, and nonpartisan pollsters trying too hard to pull the race into a dead heat, on top of Harris having the general vibes (specifically larger crowd sizes) in her favor. But even if Harris were to come out on top, Trump and his supporters would surely cry foul and claim that the “deep state” was manipulating the results in her favor, and we’d get a rerun of the events of January 6, maybe even worse.
Fueling Democratic anxiety more than anything else is the sense that it shouldn’t be this way, that none of Trump’s runs for the White House should have come within a thousand miles of success, that Trump’s terribleness and the superiority of the Democrats are so obvious that the fact that any of the three have been remotely close has tarnished their faith in America. They can point the finger at all sorts of reasons why that’s not the case – Russian interference, America being racist, mainstream media outlets “sanewashing” Trump, social media outlets (especially Elon Musk’s Twitter) putting their thumb on the scale for right-wing propaganda, billionaires pouring money into Trump’s coffers. But even with all of that, if America were a functioning democracy, if democracy were as clearly superior to all other systems and Americans valued it the way my generation was taught they were, and the Democratic Party was even halfway competent, Trump would be swept away in all three of his elections in an electoral landslide of the sort Democrats haven’t benefitted from since Johnson over Goldwater in 1964 – with Trump perhaps capturing Deep South and some other rural states, but Democrats winning every state not completely dominated by the “deplorables” making up his base. The choice that preserves American democracy is not the automatic choice of anyone with the slightest grounding in reality, and that’s something that Democrats have refused to fully wrestle with.
Two weeks ago I read a pair of columns in relatively quick succession purporting to explain why the election is so close simply in terms of the thought process of swing voters. One of them was Silver breaking down why the election was close specifically despite Harris’ edge in favorability ratings, ultimately coming to the conclusion that Trump was competitive not in spite of his unlikability, but because of it. Silver compares Trump to the sort of personal-injury lawyer who advertises what a fighter he is – someone who may be an asshole, but who’s your asshole, who’ll come out swinging with both fists with the goal of getting you what you deserve. They’re not after me, they’re after you – I’m just standing in the way. Silver found that, while Trump’s web site is all about how he’s going to fight for you and presents a series of concrete policy proposals, Harris’ is all about how great and inspirational she is, and when actually talking about issues, resorts to empty platitudes, the result of having to take a cautious path that avoids offending people on either side of her too much, not distancing herself too far from Biden but not staying too close to him either. Harris talks of a “new way forward”, but hasn’t really laid out what that way is or how it differs from Biden.
It’s long been a lament of the left that Trump could, proverbially, shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and not lose an ounce of support, while his Democratic opponents have to thread a very thin needle to not do anything that could spark outrage on the right that could tank their campaign. Some are particularly bitter that the relatively innocuous “scream” tanked Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004 yet Trump routinely gets away with far worse. Personally, I always thought the “scream” could have painted Dean as the sort of vibrant figure, full of real personality, that would have marked him as a breath of fresh air from the bog-standard politician if it hadn’t come off of a fourth-place finish in Iowa – and maybe it would have if it had happened now, in an age of much less trust in the media that successfully tarred Dean back then. Perhaps the things that ended campaigns in the past only did so because of the media saying that you should be outraged by them, and without the media’s influence the typical voter never would have cared that much.
If you’re the sort of person who believes Bernie Sanders would have won in 2016, Silver’s piece will have you eating well; more than anyone in the 2020 Democratic field, no one doubted what Sanders stood for or his willingness to come out swinging to fight for it. Someone with an overly-sanitized, focus-grouped, but ultimately meaningless message is not going to inspire people as much as someone who makes clear what they believe in and stands firmly for it. Democrats have not learned the key lesson of 2016: at least when it comes to the presidency, a candidate’s positions aren’t as important as their charisma. As I never tired of repeating in the Trump era, every presidential election from 1980 to 2016, with the possible exception of 1988, had a clear dichotomy between a more charismatic candidate and a less charismatic one, and the more charismatic candidate won every single time. That’s not to say that issues don’t matter at all – just not the ones Democrats would prefer people focus on.
The other column was from USA Today columnist Ingrid Jacques, and if you can look past the parroting of right-wing talking points, it makes the point that everything boils down to the economy. Jacques cites a Gallup poll noting that more than half of Americans say they’re worse off now than they were four years ago – levels not seen since James Carville made “it’s the economy, stupid” the mantra of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, implicitly surpassing the levels of economic frustration seen in 2008 and 2016. Democrats will cite all sorts of statistics suggesting that the economy is actually booming, even in ways that ordinary Americans should be feeling, and that most of the damage to the economy in the last four years came early in Biden’s term, representing the lingering effects of the pandemic and of Trump’s policies, but Americans are still feeling the effects of inflation and might not buy that Biden is actually making their lives better, or that Harris would. Moreover, Harris has struggled to make the point that she would be better for the economy, preferring to focus more on the threats to democracy, or abortion rights, or the general racism of the right.
That reflects the general attitude of liberals for whom those things are important enough to override any other ephemeral, material considerations. For liberals, and anyone else raised like I was, democracy is enough of an end in itself that someone who threatens it is automatically disqualifying. But for most people, democracy has always and only been supported because of the perception that it’s the system that will result in the best life. That’s the bargain the establishment has always made with the American people: support us and we’ll shepherd American society to the best outcomes. But the American people have been losing ground for decades, and 2016 showed that they were desperate for something, anything that could reverse that trend, “drain the swamp”, and fight back against the forces they perceived as holding them down. Democracy is not important enough as an end in itself to inspire people to vote to preserve it, because in their mind, democracy has failed them. The establishment has failed to live up to its end of the bargain.
For too much of the Democratic establishment, fighting Trump means fighting to preserve the system as it is and keeping Trump from taking a sledgehammer to it – while failing to appreciate the fact that Trump’s very popularity is a symptom of a system that has failed. Even more than failing to improve people’s perceptions of the economy, the great failing of the Biden administration was that it attempted to restore the status quo ante, rebuilding the institutions that Trump tried to destroy, rather than reforming the system to work for the American people again so that people won’t be desperate enough to support a Trump in large enough numbers to potentially win an election to begin with. And Harris has given no indication that she intends to change that, which is troubling because fixing the problem means starting to convince moderates of the need for serious reform, and even more so because she herself did not win the nomination as a result of any sort of democratic process (Biden dropping out was the right decision, but the fact it got to that point is still troubling). It’s hard to tell voters, “You had better vote for the candidate we’ve selected for you, or otherwise it’s the end of democracy!” It’s especially frustrating for the left who don’t like having to keep voting for whatever the establishment gives them because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate, without them ever doing anything to fix that situation – perhaps because on some level, the Democratic establishment, captured by the same moneyed interests backing the Republicans, like having Trump to hold over leftists’ heads to keep them from getting too uppity.
But the left (referring specifically to the cultural, not economic, left) isn’t blameless in this either. Not for nothing has the Trump campaign run a series of ads on the national level over the past month scaremongering over Harris supporting taxpayer-funded sex change operations for prisoners, ending with the admittedly clever line, “Kamala Harris is for they/them; Donald Trump is for you.” It strikes me as a sort of modern version of the Willie Horton ad – now Wilhelmina! – taking aim at the modern equivalent of 1980s racism. The ads are so thinly veiled in their hatred (just look at that caricature of a trans person near the end of the ad) that it’s hard to see it not doing more harm than good, especially since Republican fearmongering over trans bathroom bills largely backfired in the 2022 midterms, and polls suggest that even in swing states, most people broadly support trans rights. But for many, things like gender interventions for minors and allowing trans women into women’s jails and sports are a bridge too far, areas where even some relatively liberal commentators find some reason for skepticism and where Republicans perceive that Democrats won’t even defend their position.
For the trans community, these things are vital to allowing them to fully embrace their identity without being considered second-class citizens, and anyone not supporting them is furthering transphobia if not being transphobic themselves. But for people not following the ins and outs of the trans discourse, it just sounds like these people are coming in, dissolving common-sense elements of the gender distinction for no good reason, and calling you a bigot for disagreeing. And it further hurts the case of those trying to defend democracy when elements of the left are spending their time pushing policies that sound nonsensical to those not familiar with the reasoning behind them, policies that seem designed to help everyone except themselves. The left have fallen into the same trap as liberals more generally, failing to learn their own lesson from 2016 in the process. People are willing to extend the rights they enjoy to those that don’t enjoy them as much, but only if they feel they’re taken care of first. If they feel like their plight is being ignored to uplift other groups, the result should not be surprising.
I will be watching tonight’s election results hoping for a Harris victory, but it won’t feel like a victory – merely staving off defeat. And if the Democrats don’t do anything to reform the system, merely continuing to perpetuate the status quo, hoping that they can continue to preserve “democracy” by keeping it on a knife’s edge, they should not be surprised when it eventually fails and defeat eventually comes – potentially as much the result of the left losing faith as anything unaffiliated voters do – at which point any “victory” tonight would be decidedly Pyrrhic.
I plan to hold my own livestream of the election results tonight at twitch.tv/morganwick42 starting sometime at or after 4 PM PT and continuing likely until after midnight PT, though it could be challenging given the shortcomings of my new computer and the problems with my old one. I also plan to further interrogate the problems with the system over the next few weeks and months, regardless of the result.