The Return of Trump

Just about everyone and their dog, cat and pet fish has a view on why Kamala Harris lost the US presidential election. The answer is pretty simple: she had fewer votes and fewer votes in the electoral college. I am not trying to be flippant. Like you, I'm sure I've read an endless stream of commentaries on the election and the Democrats across-the-board failure. And, also probably like you, watching the US election from afar, I've been surprised by friends -- well, more acquaintances -- who have said they were undecided or even voted for Trump.  And, I am sure like you, I personally feel that there is more than enough blame to go around. In an effort to say something perhaps slightly different let me make a few points.

First, I don't fault Harris. She did the level headed best that she could have done. She came to the campaign late, the normal leadership contest -- which would have allowed her to stake out policy positions and explain them in more detail -- was not there, and she inherited a political infrastructure that appears to have been little short of a mess. Outside of their core areas of support, the Democrats as a party did not seem to have an organization on the ground that would have allowed them to turn out their vote or broaden it. Harris had about 10 million fewer votes than Biden, while Trump remained constant (suggesting that there was, in fact, not a lot of movement to Trump outside of his core constituencies).  The difference, however, is not that the Biden campaign was better at mobilizing voters. They're weren't and the late Mike Davis actually wrote a really piece on this in Sidecar. Where Biden made inroads, he was able to piggy back on other political groups that organized on the ground but were not part of the Democratic Party apparatus. None of this was Harris' fault. In fact, I think she campaigned as long and as hard as possible. She was dealt a losing hand (for a range of reasons) and ... lost. 

The take away point here is this: in retrospect, what would have happened if there had been a Democratic leadership contest? Harris might have won and used the contest to create her own political space within the Democratic Party. Or, she might not have. I noticed CNN was already lamenting that there is no Democratic front runner for 2028. Allowing that it is way too early to make that determination, let me also say: (1) good and (2) that is lazy journalism on CNN's part. Looking around for a front runner allows easy reporting. The absence of a front runner pushes the party to where it needs to be: considering its voting base, thinking about the policies needed to build the future, counteracting incredibly weak and lazy journalistic presentations of Democrats, and organizing. If there had been a real leadership contest, we don't know who would have won. But, it might not have been Harris. In either case, all bets would have been off. The take away here is that political leaders who are past their best before date need to step aside and it should not have taken George Clooney to make this point. 

Second, and connected to this, is the actual nature of the Democrats campaign. I am not certain it convinced anyone of anything. IOW, those who supported Harris did so before the campaign. Those who supported Trump ... same thing. The voting shifts don't seem to have been from Harris to Trump (or, vice versa) but from Biden to not voting. The Harris campaign amounted to a series of celebrity endorsements.  I understand why they did this. It was a second best option in the absence of an effective on-the-ground organization, but it got tiring to listen to pop stars endorsing Harris. It really did and I wondered ... why should anyone take their cue from them anyway? The drop in vote suggests to me that a lot of people felt the same way. 

The Republicans, I hasten to add, did not necessarily do any better organizing but they could continue to piggyback on self-organized groups and on evangelical churches to motivate and -- in this case maintain -- their vote. 

For the Dems, the take away is this: they need to do three things: 

1. Rebuild their party apparatus where it is weak 
2. Make alliances with other existing groups with strong organizations on the ground (groups that are opposed to Republicanism but have similar ideological perspectives as Democrats)
3. Begin the process of going after the Republicans on their "home turf." 

I'll come back to that last point in a future blog. But, for now, let me say that I think it is important for Democrats to use the time that they have to take the political contest to the Republicans on their home turf. This is, in fact, what Trumpists did to the Democrats in the Blue Wall. This is not a TV commercial, snap your fingers and it is fixed, kind of thing. It will take time but the Dems have time right now. And, it will be the right politics. But, I'll explain that later. 

Third, if you have not read Carol Anderson's White Rage, you should. Anderson makes a number of key points to which more people should have been paying attention. In very brief these are as follows. (#1) The Republican approach to politics that we have seen under Trump is not new. In fact, it dates to well before Obama, even if Obama's electoral success gave further impetus to it. The easy contrast between a pre-Trump Republican Party and a Trump one does not really stand up. In fact, it was the changes through which the Republican Party passed independently of Trump that laid the ground work for him. An example is "voter fraud." I've listened in amazement to commentators who seem to honestly think that Trump made this up and that his supporters who continue to believe it are being tricked by him. As Anderson points out, the truth of the matter is that the idea of voter fraud went back to the Bush, Jr. days. The numbers Trump cited may have been his own but the idea of massive voter fraud was circulating within the Republican Party long before Trump arrived on the scene. Said differently, Republican supporters believed Trump because they already believed -- independently of him saying it -- that voter fraud had become part of American public life. The campaign against Trump's perspective needed to dislodge not Trump's words but a couple of decades worth of self-confirming discussion replete with its own data among Republicans.  It turns out, that was impossible to do.

(#2) Likewise, the use of vigilante politics (let's call it that) long pre-dates Trump as well. Again, Bush, Jr. could be implicated, but the roots are deeper than that. Republican politics has long empowered ordinary citizens to take the law into their own hands and feel that they are right in so doing. One could recall the disruption to recounting in Florida during the Bush/Gore election. Said differently, no one in the Republican Party batted an eye at the vigilante politics that accompanies Trump because it was already deeply embedded among the faithful. 

What does this mean? It means that getting high-profile Republicans to endorse Harris could do little good because the trajectory of Republican politics was already set. The discourses Trump and his followers mobilized were not new, but old and that oldness gave them strength. In the face of everything else, Harris was fighting history.