Election 2024 Quick Takes

At some point in late November or early December, I'll be back with my comprehensive breakdown of election 2024, painful as it will be to motivate myself to write.  But in the time being, here are some takeaways I've cobbled together in the last 48 hours.....

2020 was 1976 and 2024 is 1980--Four years ago, Biden put together an unwieldy and incoherent winning coalition structurally comparable to what Jimmy Carter put together 44 years earlier. It didn't make sense for any kind of governing mandate and showed signs of coming apart amidst an insurgent populist movement from the right that was capturing the imagination of an aggrieved working class. After a period of inflation, rising crime, and poorly timed foreign policy entanglements, the incumbent party had a low approval rating and was challenged by the face of that conservative populist movement. The unhappy public behaved the way unhappy electorates always do and installed the challenger. While the Dobbs ruling and general demographic changes since 1980 likely prevented Harris from facing an electoral wipeout to the same degree that Carter did, the Democratic Party is left with a shrinking, geographically limited and operationally useless husk of a coalition in the aftermath of the realignment.

She Couldn't Overcome These Fundamentals--A full 72% of the country was unhappy. Harris would have really needed to pull a rabbit out of her hat to overcome that. Biden had a 40% approval rating and could probably have been beaten by a ham sandwich. Harris wasn't Biden which kept her in the game but it was gonna be hard as his Vice-President to build up enough distance from him.

Follow the Registrations--The number of people registering as Republicans has gone up in the last four years and the number of people registering as Democrats has gone down. That should have been a much more obvious warning sign that this wasn't gonna end well.

Running on Democracy Was a Loser--I get the Harris campaign's dilemma here. They had to lean into what they figured was their likeliest path to victory, appreciating that courting one group would be to the exclusion of another. Given that Harris's party was already in power and her challenger had a slate of moronic but easily digestible populist policies, it would have been really tough to run on a package of deliverables and compete with him. So she went back to the playbook that Biden abandoned early on of begging voters to care about January 6th as much as Beltway insiders do. Attempting to disqualify your challenger is typically not the closing message of a campaign confident that it's about to win, but it was probably the best weak hand she could play. For the last few days of the campaign, I began to doubt myself and wonder if it was working, but my instincts were right.

At Best, Abortion Was a Zero-Sum Game--Exit polls would seem to confirm that running on Dobbs largely flopped. It may have prevented further losses in such a bad electoral environment, but women still shifted three points toward Trump compared to four years ago. And I'm not surprised men responded the way that they did. The critical mass of abortion messaging in all of this year's Democratic advertising left little time for saying anything to men beyond scolding them for not prioritizing women's reproductive rights. The result was the 2014 Mark Udall Senate result at a national level.

Where Does Reproductive Rights Messaging Go From Here?--Hard to see how this issue goes away but its salience was vastly overestimated. An "undecided voter focus group" on cable news included a couple of women who were torn between their preference for Harris over abortion rights versus their preference for Trump over the economy, but leaned toward Harris. When it was explained to them that their state (can't remember which) already protected abortion rights and wouldn't be affected by Presidential policy, the women changed their minds and decided they leaned Trump after all. As long as it was only women from other states being denied control over their own bodies, they were okay with it! I took a mental note of this conversation and connected the dots to the gun issue. Until voters are affected personally by violence, it's a "you problem" and has limited salience at the polls. I suspect this partly explains Harris's horrific underperformance in so many blue states, and it makes me question how the Democrats can update their messaging on the reproductive rights issue moving forward.

The Border Mattered--If Trump won, I was prepared to come on here and rage on about three years of astonishingly incompetent border policy being the primary driver, but to be fair, the issue's salience wasn't as abundantly obvious as I expected. Still, there's plenty of connective tissue here to the biggest demographic story of the night....the double-digit shift to Trump among Hispanic voters. After Obama's 2012 re-election powered by record margins from Hispanic voters, the Democrats got it in their heads that they were single-issue immigration voters motivated entirely by maximizing the share of the population who "looks like them". It turned out the only constituencies for lax border policy were the tech sector, Ivy League college faculty members, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Working-class Hispanics wanted no part of it.....and had kind of hoped the Democrats would be able to talk to them about something else in the past 15 years. Since they didn't, the Hispanics moved on to the other guys.

For the Love of God, Can We Stop Saying This?!--After several years of insisting upon calling Hispanic people Latinx despite their repeated requests for us not to, elites on the left and in the Democratic Party seem to have finally gotten the message. Now I humbly ask if we can scrub another poisonous term from our vernacular....."someone who looks like me". It's so reductive....and so counter to the mandate voters are sending us through a megaphone.

Selzer Torpedoes Her Reputation--Many of us in Democratic electoral analysis circles failed to take our own advice and beclowned ourselves worshiping at the altar of Ann Selzer's Des Moines Register poll even though it should have been painfully obvious that it was fake news. I stood by my Trump +11 prediction for Iowa, but even that was insufficient for the extent of the Hawkeye State's redness as the state went Trump +13. But I was guilty of some ninth inning daydreaming of my own about "what the Selzer poll means". In the end, it amounted to little more than fantasizing about what we'd do if we won the lottery just before we found out we weren't holding the winning ticket. Hopefully we won't be seduced so easily next time. As for Iowa, looking at its widening Republican margins compared to Minnesota and Wisconsin, it's clear that it is part of the Upper Midwest in geography only. Culturally and politically, it's poised to behave like the southern Midwest and Plains states.

Running Against a Magician--Donald Trump convinced half of his coalition to vote for him because they believed he was serious about the economic policies espoused in his campaign. He convinced the other half of his coalition to vote for him because they didn't believe he was serious about the economic policies espoused in his campaign. That's one helluva magic trick and I don't know how mere mortals can run against it.

How The Hell Do We Reach People in the 2020s?--In our fragmented media landscape, outreach to voters disconnected from the fast-shrinking legacy media bubble has become a herculean challenge. For most young people in particular, all information is filtered through the podcast bros and Big Tech's algorithms. We don't stand a chance unless we can figure out how to crack this information firewall.

The Future is Autocracy Revisited--Once again, Republicans break things and get rewarded for it. After bringing the state of our legislative branch to paralysis, the public got annoyed and the GOP presented them with the solution.....an authoritarian strongman who doesn't follow the rules yet cosplays with a copy of the Constitution in hand as he violates it. The public loves it so much they ask for a second helping. After Tuesday night, I don't see how challenging this dynamic within the confines of our constitutional system can ever again be expected to prevail in the court of public opinion. Either you get on the bandwagon and take advantage of your newly granted Presidential license for unlimited criminality to make the trains run on time or you get bulldozed by a challenger who does.  Either way, July 1, 2024, when the Supreme Court ruled the President is above prosecution, will go down as one of the most consequential and destructive days in American history, orders of magnitude worse than September 11, 2001.

The Future is Autocracy

As of this writing, the November 5 election is still a few days away.  And it's not looking great for the republic.  I'll stand by my original predictions, but if anything, I'm even more bearish about Harris's chances based on the tea leaves.  The biggest tea leaf of all is from the state of Nevada, the only state in the country that, because of unique geography, gives us meaningful data related to early voting.  Registered Republicans are outnumbering Democrats by nearly 5% there in early voting.  There's no precedent for this in a Presidential cycle and spells probable disaster for Harris.  And Nevada is one of the only swing states I predicted to go for Harris!  It's very hard to believe the Democrats' problems are gonna be contained entirely within Nevada state lines.

But let's say that Kamala Harris manages to land the inside straight and squeak out a narrow victory next week.  Trump has hinted at a "secret plan" hatched with the Speaker of the House to steal it from her.  All it would take is a Republican Governor or legislature from a state Harris won refusing to submit their slate of electors by the December 11 deadline.  Mike Johnson could insist the electoral votes be processed without delay even without every state having submitted them.  With fewer than 270 electoral votes for either candidate, the election would be punted to the House of Representatives and Trump would win.  

Trump couldn't do this in 2020 because Nancy Pelosi was Speaker, but there's no reason whatsoever to believe our republic's guardrails would hold and he wouldn't get away with it this time.  Does anybody really believe either Johnson or Trump's Supreme Court supermajority would hesitate to stave off a homegrown junta if that was their only path to power?  In effect, Harris probably needs a victory of at least 290 electoral votes to avoid having her victory stripped from her by the kind of maneuver one would expect in a place like Senegal.

Of course, the odds are that Trump won't even have to cheat to win.  His victory would constitute the quickest and easiest route to an autocratic future.  "If Trump was gonna behave like Hitler, why didn't we see it in his first term?" is the inevitable half-witted, context-free counterpoint lobbed at us by his groupies, hilariously attempting to airbrush from history his ruthless attempts to overturn an election he lost and to incite a mob to stampede the Capitol with the objective of murdering Trump's own Vice-President.  But I'll play along and give two very obvious answers to their ignorant inquiry.

First, Trump knew he had to face the public for re-election in his first term, which imposed some limitations on his instincts to proceed with a host of broadly unpopular measures.  Facing the voters will no longer be a moderating force on Trump in a second term. 

Second, and most important, Trump did not yet have license for unlimited criminality without consequence in his first term.  As of July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court granted him that license by decreeing that Presidents can never be prosecuted for any "official act" undertaken during their Presidential term.  Even if the country avoids a second Trump term, this court ruling fast-tracks us to the inevitability of authoritarianism down the road and I can predict with unwavering certitude that it will go down as the worst Supreme Court ruling in American history.

Beyond that, Trump is a sociopath....and mentally ill people aren't known for self-corrective behavior as they approach their sunset years or when they're bequeathed a position of power.  Trump's behavior on the campaign trail illuminates the extent of his sociopathy, specifically the cheap thrill that he clearly gets by pushing boundaries to see what he can get away with.  He knows that his groupies will twist themselves into pretzels defending his every overheated utterance, and he enjoys watching the spectacle.  This was abundantly clear nine years ago when Trump bragged he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and not lose any voters.  Recall that 30 years ago, O.J. Simpson had bragged for years that he could murder Nicole and get away it....and then he murdered Nicole and got away with it.  

This is what sociopaths do.  If Trump promises the country he's gonna behave like a dictator, believe him!  If Trump repeatedly speculates on how his groupies won't abandon him no matter what he does, expect that he has every intention of following through, watching said groupies continue to defend his rising tide of autocratic behavior while cosplaying with copies of the U.S. Constitution in their hand every step of the way.

Trump's malignant narcissism is an extreme case of the most dangerous possible person to lead a country, but it's also not unique.  Aspiring autocrats tend to be ambitious, which is why history books are so full of diabolical strongmen who seize control of governments and do terrible things.  Trump's rise proves that the United States is not immune to the allure of the worst kind of autocratic personality, but it wouldn't even require someone as cartoonish as Trump to spiral our democracy into something more sinister.  If Harris manages to win decisively and become the 47th President, we're still gonna be uniquely vulnerable to the wiles of a budding madman based on electoral realignment patterns.

At one level, I think it's a positive development that so many young people are choosing to bypass the racket that is contemporary higher education after watching it foist a lifetime of debt on the generation before them with dubious benefits.  At least in the short term, I think it's a net positive for Gen Zers to vote with their feet and force these colleges and universities to clean up their business models, but the political trend visible with young adults, especially young men, eschewing higher education is alarming.  It's reasonable to argue that college professors and administrators had too heavy of a hand in filling their heads with propaganda in the past, but even less reliable news sources have occupied that informational vacuum in our fragmented, digitized world.  We have a generation of young men whose idea of "news" are TikTok headlines and random bros with podcasts who think they have the world figured out from their parents' basements.  

Furthermore, colleges teach critical thinking skills, or at least they're supposed to.  It's no accident that the Trump realignment breaks down so precisely along education lines.  The more education one has, the more likely they are to understand the complexity of geopolitical matters....and the less likely they'll be to embrace simplistic solutions such as massive tariffs, border walls, and pulling out of NATO.  And the less education one has, the more likely they'll be to buy into a con man's assurance of his business prowess because he played a successful businessman on a TV show 20 years ago.  Watching man-on-the-street interviews of noncollege voters this cycle and seeing how many people accept autocracy as a small price to pay for hypothetically cheaper cartons of eggs has convinced me we have a problem bigger than Trump, and that our vulnerability is assured of deepening amidst a void of either higher education or a shared media environment.

The same generation of young people, especially men, appears to be singularly motivated by standing in strident opposition to absolutely anything they consider representative of "the elite".  Earlier this year, I was getting an oil change and listened as a cluster of 20-something mechanics casually muse "since we can't drink Bud Light anymore...." as though a boycott of the brand over its ad campaign featuring a transgender influencer was being undertaken as part of a collective tribal backlash that didn't even require any sort of critical reflection.  "Owning the libs" is no longer just a hobby, it's a lifestyle....maybe even a religion.  This makes them putty in the hands of any demagogic autocrat.

The Democrats' astonishingly narrow-minded conceit of the last 10 years that rising racial and ethnic diversity ensured a more favorable political and cultural environment for them are poised to get a crushing reality check, whether it happens next week or when Trump's heir apparent runs down the road.  Neither the color of one's skin nor the country of origin of one's ancestors insulates them from the deceptions of autocrats with the misinformation landscape and polarized culture we're stuck with now.  And while I probably shouldn't read so much into the results of the Nickelodeon Kids' Poll released last week, keep in mind that nearly 50% of today's schoolchildren are nonwhite, and Harris managed only a paltry 52-48 victory over Trump.  The logic of the Trump-supporting children:  he's funny, tough, and they understand his ideas.  Doesn't sound much different than the logic of the adults who support him, amirite?  And perhaps a good warning sign of the consequences of arrested development.

That leads me to the most pernicious assumption of autocracy apologists....the notion that America will persevere either way because, well because we're America!  It's a pretty safe bet that the electorates of other nations who turned over their keys to the hands of an omnipotent autocrat were confident everything would be okay for them too.  And it's a pretty safe bet that the lieutenants and underlings of previous budding autocrats never expected they could be easily compelled to ride their coattails in pursuit of power and prevent them from fighting for democratic principles they had long defended. We've already witnessed how nearly every member of the Republican Party has allowed themselves to be co-opted into Trump's toxic orbit with almost zero resistance.  Lust for power will have the same corrupting influence on the supposed good actors needed to stand in the way of any future autocrat just as we've seen for the last nine years with Trump.

Specifically, the willingness to hand over the country to an unapologetically malignant madman even amidst favorable fundamentals for the incumbent party heightens my alarm about how much more vulnerable we'd be if the country really was in a precarious situation.  So even if Kamala Harris stitches together a win with an unwieldy and incoherent 1976-style coalition next week, there's no doubt in my mind that our 1980 revolution awaits us, and it will be an autocratic one.  The only question is whether this election is our 1976 moment....or if the last election was.