Thoughts on a Democratic postmortem

I agree with all points. The democratic party is weirdly reluctant to take cues from what the republicans are doing effectively: talking about the economy, engaging people like Joe Rogan for interviews, and focusing on who they are instead of who they aren't.

This is a catastrophic loss. Harris was not set up for success, but she underperformed even so. So, hopefully it serves as a wake-up call.

I think the biggest takeaway is that Democrats still havent learned that trying to weaponize outrage against a troll only makes them stronger.

In 2016 they tried the whole "oh my god look how awful he is listen to his terrible soundbytes" thing and it didnt work out.

But even as soon as last week people were still going "oh my god did you hear what they said about Greece? This is so damaging, Trumps campaign is SUNK".

Hes been shitty for the last 10 years and people are still acting like that isnt a core part of his appeal.

Its like if people went to go watch Joker and didnt understand why everyone didnt turn on Arthur after he shot that tv host.

The last time Trump won, there were a lot of people really angry at the democratic party and how we didn't hear the voices of the little guys and democrats should be ashamed because they aren't the perfect people.

This is all bullshit, and I hate that kind of discourse.

The thing that wins an election is turnout. This is the lesson of every election and we somehow keep thinking "if only candidate was slightly different on one little personality quirk!" But no, we just need to be able to motivate people to go to the polls. Telling people that a monster will win if you don't isn't going to get them to vote.

I'm not going to say that Trump won because he has rizz, but what he is tremendously good at is pleasing people, and he does so by endlessly kissing up to them, pretending he's on their side, and creating scapegoats for people to be angry at to keep them on his side. His rallies were hours-long dance parties that he could show up over an hour late to and still get people invested. The media keeps focusing on gaffes like these, but they fail to capture the enrapturement that keeps the audiences there in spite of them.

If democrats want to win, they need to make people excited to vote for them. Right now they are a circus tent trying to entertain a huge amount of people who all want different things, and they do not have the luxury of having cult leaders with media empires willing to back them up to mesmerize people into thinking their way.

A large reason why people don't vote is because they don't feel their vote will get them what they want. A lot of people are upset at the people who didn't vote for Harris because of her stance on the war in Israel - including me - but they have a right to their opinions, just as everyone else on the planet is, and the system is set up so that the only way they can represent themselves in the election is to not vote, or to vote for a third-party candidate which essentially throws away the vote. So what we should do in order to gain victory is something that I and many others have been asking for forever but nobody tries to do because it's "impossible" - to increase democracy. Get rid of first-past-the-post voting and do something like ranked choice instead. Eliminate the electoral college so that unpopular voices don't get squelched out. Make representation in congress actually proportional to population instead of letting tiny states have a huge pull for no goddamned reason. Maybe even get rid of the senate altogether, for that matter. Get rid of corporate campaign contributions altogether, including strict laws about political advertising so that we can get rid of SuperPACs and have real conversations about real issues instead of "PERSON BAD" ads drilled into our brains all the time. If voters don't feel disenfranchised, they will vote.

I haven’t seen anyone mention the lack of a democratic primary. I think this was a major problem for the campaign and party. Honestly, Harris was not particularly popular as a vice president. When she assumed the role of nominee, people including myself got hyped/relieved Bidens doomed campaign was over and we all got on board and forgot about Harris’s popularity. Biden said he was going to be a one term president but he and the party didn’t do that. I think that will have a major impact on his legacy.

Just one small correction. We did not see significant shifts among black voters towards trump.

Honestly but I think a big issue is religion, pastor are straight up preaching for republican candidates. And this time it transcended race or ethnicity, with Muslim leaders and Jewish ones both supporting trump and not to mention all the Catholics and Christians who are super socially conservative.

How can the left compete with that ? If you truly believe in a god, why would you put the benefits of the country and other Americans over what your supposed creator mouth piece tells you?

I’m an atheist so maybe I’m just pissed seeing people say this trump win was gods plan and other religious bullshit.

Also let’s see who actually runs the country the next for years because I don’t see all those billionaires expending all that money to have the erratic trump throwing it all out of the window on a whim.

You did a nice analysis and I agree with most of it.

Mostly it's pretty simple. I don't think people's stated reasons for voting are usually true. They come up with reasons after they have already chosen for some emotional reason. America is much more racist and sexist than you would believe by looking at the pop culture. Republicans make ads that appeal to the visceral lizard brain fear of others and hatred for those who are different. It doesn't make any sense but it works.

People are also fickle. Somehow Obama won, possibly due to charisma. I think Bernie Sanders would have won in 2016 even though he's too "liberal".

A lot of people online assume that the democrats should go harder left/progressive. These people are in a bubble and are most likely wrong. It's much more important to have a charismatic candidate than one who has specific policies that are either left or right.

Hopefully republicans don't completely rig the system over the next few years so we can try again in 4.

3 Social policy can only go so far. Its salience can be quite limited compared to the economy. Negatives can be very negative, white positives may be “meh”.
9 Many folks view Democrats as being the “mom” or “Karen from HR” party. That is not the kind of reputation that wins elections.

I think these two are heavily connected.

I'm watching US politics from a distance, and from here it seems like there's a large gap in opinions of a strongly progressive portion of elites and the rest of the population, has been since Obama basically. The elites so far have been unwilling to compromise and the mainstream population goes through shifts where various groups of people move between reluctantly accepting it and pushing back (and a minority that is too small to win happily accepting it). This situation does not seem to be sustainable because the pushback is something that people like Trump can endlessly use for their benefit.

The other issue that you don't mention is that even when democrats decide to partially change their opinion on controversial progressive topics, like on immigration, they do so quietly and reluctantly. I think that part of the "clean house" point also has to be very explicitly saying "our predecessors used to do xxxx, we're here because we believe it was a wrong decision and we're not going to do it". There has to be something like an openly explicit move from "wokeness doesn't exist, it's just something that MAGAs and incels complain about" to "wokeness had its faults and we're moving away from it" even though the core of their policies obviously has to stay progressive, in order to solve the cited points 3. and 9. above.

To your nice writeup I would add one piece of advice. Successful retail politics is an art, not a science. It involves skill but also talent. Democratic leadership, you should work on building your bench, and also promote your winning politicians who can communicate effectively outside the bubble of automatic support. Challenge your preconceptions. Read the book Moneyball. Don't assume you know which issues will be winners ahead of time. Don't assume that you know why a winning politician wins.

They were way too cautious about breaking from Biden. Every time she dodged a question trying to find light between her and Biden it was a miss.

Great list.

I say this as someone so frustrated with the Democrats strategy that over a couple decades I went from being a political organizer in a rural district to registered unaffiliated. (Yes, I voted for Kamala, and Biden, and Hilary, etc. But I refuse to identify with such a poorly led party.)

I would echo @boxer_dogs_dance about the art of retail politics. Swing voters are "swing" for a reason, and that's usually related to the economy, crime, or border issues. People who are feeling stable don't usually flip flop between cycles. So if you want to win swing voters you need to make sure they hear themselves in you. Own the problems they face and tell them you will fight for them.

Secondly, you need to accept the opinion of the electorate as a fact of the political landscape. You don't win elections by trying to change what people care about. You win elections by letting them know you care about the same things. Too often the Dems come across as trying to move people and culture rather than honestly representing them. There is a balance between enacting unobtrusive civil protections for minorities and coming across as chiding the electorate.

Third, make the hard political choices. I wonder how many "I told you so's" have happened over the VP pick. When Trump first crossed 270 I bet the idea of having PA locked up with their popular governor as running mate seemed like a missed opportunity. Instead Walz was chosen for clicking with Kamala.

But the big picture is govern from the middle, and fight like hell to get back the blue collar support.

This is a nice analysis, but I wonder if the answer isn't simpler than this. When the economy is bad, Americans vote Democrat, and when the economy is good, Americans vote Republican (or more accurately, Democrats don't vote when the economy is good). It seems that a lot of people are pointing to the problems in the economy that lead to this result, but I think it's more that the economy is too good for people to vote Dem right now.

Right now the economy is good by most measures (of course with some exceptions, but we're definitely not in a recession), so Democrats didn't bother to vote. In 2020 there was a recession and COVID, so Democrats showed up. In 2016, the economy was recovering, so Democrats didn't vote, and Trump won. In 2008 there was a recession, so we got Obama. In 2000 the economy was good so we got Dubya. In 1991 there was a recession so we got Clinton.

So basically, people weren't feeling enough pain to bother voting this time. I know you proposed some ideas to help with this, but if your general strategy doesn't involve lying to people about a false boogeyman out there to get you, it's an uphill battle.

I think you hit the nail on the head of much of what went wrong. I would partially disagree with a few things:

• Foreign policy: I think it mattered more than you'd think. Not necessarily because there was a large constituency voting solely on that (though there was certainly a much larger portion of the electorate that cared quite a bit about Gaza beyond just Muslim Americans), but that it dramatically shifted the vibe among hyper-engaged Millennials and GenZ that you heavily depend on for canvassing, organizing, evangelizing, and keyboard-warrioring . Gaza made it difficult for most people who are highly engaged in politics to feel actively good about voting for Harris. I mean, the fact that there exists an intellectually-defensible, though arguably weak, argument as to how Trump would be marginally better is really bad. The electorate more broadly is also anxious about getting entangled with foreign conflicts, and it's empirically true that we had less conflict under Trump than Biden and that Ukraine was a strategic failure (whether Trump would've done better may be another question).

• Immigration: I would just add that the Latino vote was largely lost because of mass illegal immigration, not purely social issues. It was their communities that felt the brunt of the chaos and the Biden administration handled the border logistically poorly.

• Scolding: horrendous strategy from the Dems that definitely hurt them much more than it helped.

• JD Vance: Picking Vance was a base pick and a gamble, but it paid off handsomely I think. The base loves him and it made the non-full-out-crazies in the Trump camp feel like they were voting for something than against something. He was smart to be on a constant media blitz and to routinely go to adversarial settings; if you go into a room where everyone hates you, you only stand to gain.

• GOTV: The Trump campaign's get-out-the-vote I think was just much stronger. They kept hammering home that they should get 5 or 10 of their friends to go vote.

Appreciate the post but it’s way too early.

The only interesting data we have right now are exit polls which are unreliable, we should wait for the actual data to come out on who voted and who didn’t before drawing any conclusions.

Edit: For instance,

Some of this was due to depressed D turnout (Harris got 15 million fewer votes than Biden)

This is probably fake news. Wait for the final counts, we'll be a lot closer to 2020.

They viewed Trump as being likelier to fix things, with a big bold plan (tariffs, deportations, tax cuts).

No, they did not. Trump got two million fewer votes than 2020. He did not put up a winning campaign or a winning plan. Getting fewer votes than his previous losing campaign would be a clear political disaster to learn from, had the democrats turned up at the polls.

Democrats did not show up, just like they didn't the first time with Trump v Clinton, when it was widely considered "obvious" no one would be insane enough to actually pick Trump for president. Fifteen million "get that guy outta here" votes Biden had that Harris did not see, and those numbers did not go to Trump. They sat on their couches and watched. Again.

I think the main thing that Democrats have to grapple with and catch up with is the media environment. It doesn't work to just blanket people with ads anymore. People digest information in different ways now. There is an entire right wing media sphere, from podcasts to streamers to Musk's X to Fox News to Newsmax etc, that has completely captured huge swathes of the population. Until Democrats find a way to counter this none of those other things will matter. Policy does not matter if that policy is presented to people filtered through these outlets. Messaging does not matter. We are at the point where even the "facts on the ground" do not matter. If the internet is telling people that the country is in the shitter and overrun by criminals and immigrants, even if they do not experience it in the quotidian, they will believe it. Some of these issues are not new (e.g. Fox News), but the scale is absolutely different now.

I have been watching from afar (not an American), but your post sums it up well. The cost of living crisis was the no.1 issue, and voters were looking for change, whatever form that change took. Trump could afford to just turn up to rallies and dance because his message was clear: are you better off than 4 years ago? The Dems did not paint a picture of change, and instead relied too much on the fascism/weirdo strategy. That was a huge mistake. Also, celebrity endorsements mean fuck all if you can't clearly communicate actionable policies that sway voters. Harris should have concentrated on the cost of living and been clearer how she was going to fix it.

“ This Is a Collapse of the Democratic Party": Ralph Nader on Roots of Trump's Win Over Harris

https://youtu.be/gh_tQWyBcdg

My take on why Kamala lost:

1. The economy. I'm puzzled why Allan Lichtman said these two keys were true in his prediction. The cost of living has skyrocketed alongside inflation to the point where a Big Mac now costs $18. Much of this can be attributed to debt from the COVID-19 pandemic and from economic sanctions towards Russia. If your average wage slave can't even afford to live in most cities then they're not gonna give a fuck about some economist saying US GDP grew by 2% in the last year. Kamala offered no reforms to tackle this at all and just kept up the Biden status quo.

2. Anti-LGBTQ sentiment: Don't get me wrong. I'm a trans ally, but a lot of people I know (here in the UK) aren't. Very few would make supporting LGBTQIA rights a voting issue, and in specific circumstances i.e. the ability to self-identify without a medical diagnosis, or giving children access to medication or surgeries to transition. This has been reflected in opinion polling in Scotland and is one of several big reasons why public opinion for the Scottish National Party dropped off a cliff when they tried to push through a sweeping gender reform bill which Westminster actually shot down. And don't get me started on the frankly BS accusations being made by the far right.

3. Immigration. Many western countries are very hard to get into via legal means, and this notion (whether true or not) that we are rolling out the red carpet for people who enter illegally is something the Democrats failed to address, especially when focusing heavily on sanctuary cities. I'm seeing the same thing in the UK, and it's a big reason why we not only voted to leave the EU, but also why Reform UK are gaining massive traction here.

4. Far right propaganda and astroturfing. Sometimes I question whether the hordes of comments fawning over Trump truly came from a few Russian bot farms, or if this was a case of opinions being parroted enough that it became generally accepted among the populace.

5. Weak democratic safeguards. In any other developed democratic nation, Trump would have been behind bars and would have been wholly ineligible to run for office.

If you zoom out, I think the presidential election may have been doomed. There really hasn't been any democracies where the incumbent party didn't suffer massive losses, and typically lost power, post COVID.

UK, France, Germany, even in semi-authoritarian India, Modi kept control but suffered a massive blow. It's just a really bad time to be an incumbent.

That being said, there's something to be said about sheer magnitude of the loss. I definitely think that a better candidate and campaign from the democrats could have kept the presidential race closer, and flipped the house.

Definitely, I think democrats need to swing further to the right on immigration. People just do not like it. Moderates in Europe have already well learned this lesson. Economics? I mean, honestly, I don't know what you could do to shore that up.

Identity-politics wise, I don't think America is ready for a women for president. The next candidate needs to be white, a man, and not seen as a sleazy coastal elite (cough gavin newsom cough).

Possibly of interest: Reflections on the recent election (Andrew Gelman)

The forecasts did what they were designed to do: they aggregated economic and polling information, did not overreact to individual polls, and allowed for a potentially large nonsampling errors, leading to wide uncertainty intervals. The only systematic way to do much better with this information would be to include a prior belief in the direction, not just the possible magnitude, of the polling errors. In retrospect there are reasons to have done so; on the other hand, pollsters were aware of the bias from before and were trying to adjust for it, so there was a concern about overcorrection. To put it another way: the polls were in aggregate off in 2024 as they were in 2020 and 2016 (although not in 2018 and 2022); the errors in 2024 had affected the forecasts less, partly because forecasters built the scale of possible polling errors into their models, and partly because the polls, along with the historically-based models, were pointing toward something close to an electoral college tie, so the forecasts happened to produce something close to even odds.

I said my piece about it in the megathread, but I think there was a combination of lot of baggage on the Biden Campaign, a vibe correction after the pandemic, Trump being able to keep on message and running the best campaign of his career, and the Democrats once again letting their hubris run the show. There is an element of me that says the Democrats need to restructure yesterday and this sort of loss was overdue, it's just that now that every election is the most important of our lifetimes, we don't really have an opportunity to learn except through pain.

Rebuilding the party is going to be difficult just because the power structures are so ingrained and an institution is most directed to self preservation. Easier to be an ineffective national opposition party that gets to fundraise and float it's promises yet another term because they don't have all the levers of power yet.

Any fix I could see for the Democrats would have them cease to be Democrats, similar to how Trump made the Republican Party into his hype gang. I don't think a similar cult of personality will do it for the Dems, I'm not sure I want one whose capable of such a thing. But at the same time, the chokehold that the powers that be have over the party is strangling it, so maybe it has to be new blood.

I voted for Harris and am trying to make sense of what happened. Here is what I've taken away, so far:

1. It's the economy, stupid. I do think the Biden administration did a good job with the economic mess that they inherited. However, the rampant inflation put the Dems in the hole right from the start. When given a choice between abstract ideals like preserving democracy, reproductive freedom, and foreign policy or practical considerations like feeding your family and putting a roof over over your head. The practical wins every single time.

2. I am privileged and live in a bubble. While I don't like paying 3x the price for eggs from what I paid 2 years ago, I can absorb it much better than a lot of people. I also work with and have friends who are like-minded and similarly privileged people. This means that I was blind to just how much the economy was a factor. I consider myself a compassionate and empathic person, but my privilege makes it really easy to focus on the high level ideals and not the day-to-day realities. I got so caught up at the high level that I took for granted the struggles of people less fortunate than me.

3. The mainstream news outlets are in it for the money. Period. They definitely aren't in it for democracy or to have fair, unbiased opinions. As much as people in my circles like to deride Fox News for being too conservative, news outlets like CNN are just as bad. They both know their audiences. Both sides want your clicks and attention and will emphasize articles and use inflammatory rhetoric to get it. Not realizing this soon enough gave me a badly distorted view of the voting electorate.

4. The values of the country at large do not align with mine. The United States is not what I thought it was. It is not a bastion of democracy and justice - it is just a country, filled with people just trying to survive. There are no grand ideals to be found here. I thought we were making social progress, but the population is far more religious and conservative than I realized, and the trend is accelerating. This makes me feel alienated from the larger American society. That feeling of isolation makes me really cynical and hopeless about the future. Eventually, I will need to come to peace with never fitting in. I've always been able to fit in, more or less, so this will be new to me.

These might seem obvious to some, and I'm not sure if this will help anyone. However, writing it down helped to make sense of, what is to me, an extremely short-sighted and selfish outcome.

I appreciate you articulating an organizing a lot of the ongoing discussion in such a cohesive way. This line caught my eye:

7. (My weird, hot take-ish view) Go on an offensive cyber campaign. You’ve got Russian operatives shilling for Trump and the GOP. Hack them. Make it so they can’t just continuously pump out disinfo. Even a few million should be enough to establish a unit dedicated to fucking up Russian troll farms.

I've had a thought kicking around in my head regarding how pervasive online troll misinformation campaigns seem to do so well at sewing doubt in people's minds. Where is the counter disinformation? Where are the entities coordinating and dishing back counter confusion? To be clear, I'm not recommending domestic psy-ops. However it feels really weird we have pervasive misinformation in online circles that conveniently feed support for right wing politicians that appears to go unchecked. I see way too many people on Instagram (and social media generally) responding with facts, sources, and coherent information to people spouting off nonsense. It's just not a fair fight. So then where are the accounts (bots or human) dressing up lies that appear to be pro conservative but actually point them in the right direction in the same style as the right supporting misinformation? Are progressives just too honest? Surely there are nation states with a vested interest in a non-fascist America trying to muddy the water.

All that being said, offensively targeting nation states' cyber operatives intent on trying to election meddle is a very cathartic concept. The ongoing success of online disinformation (which it's hard to tell how much is domestic vs foreign) makes me think no one is doing this successfully, but it's nice to hope maybe someone is already out there trying.

Edit: Adding a proper top-level after initial post.

More than anything, I see it as the natural consequence of a failed-coup leader positioning himself in a "heads I win, tails you lose" narrative for election fraud. We already know with audio proof he wanted ballot boxes stuffed in 2020. He and his congressional cronies have had 4 years to lay this out.

Add in all the additional voter suppression tactics, a healthy dose of bigotry and sexism (sorry Dems apparently "young white dude" was the correct answer), and you've got a nasty recipient for a doomed election.

In some small, sick way; This might actually be better than the alternative. At least this way the violence might be postponed till January.
\edit

Latinos likely weren’t particularly turned off of Trump

That's because they don't realize they are the "illegals" Trump is talking about. Once their friends and family start having doorknockers demanding to see their papers and anyone who doesn't have their birth certificate in hand gets dragged off they might change their tune.

I really want to hang a sign, but my wife won't let me:

It won't be so shocking
When the SS starts knocking

I can barely eat a bowl of oatmeal today and you just did more work writing this post than I’ll do at my job.

I want to engage, I want to try to be positive, but Ive just got nothing left.