It was almost completely a battle of ideas. No one ended up caring about Trump being an asshole, January 6, or all the other stuff that Democrats hung their hats on. Swing voters went to Trump because they perceived him as better on crime and the economy and Harris had an extremely weak, even counter-productive approach to those issues. The fact that voters may have been misinformed about inflation and crime rates or that Trump’s proposals to deal with those things are stupid is an indication that the more than one billion dollars that the Harris campaign spent on its messaging was wasted. You control what you control.
The problem that Democrats can fix without making Trump or his core supporters change their behavior is the fact that they employ a thousand people who think just like this and get six-figure salaries for doing so - an army of utterly clueless campaign strategists who consistently lose elections, deliver excuses as to why it doesn’t “count” because it was so unfair, then collect their checks and do it again 2 and 4 years later.
Most Democrats are perfectly capable of conceiving of “socially conservative minorities.” What they can’t handle is the idea that there are millions voters of Hispanic descent who do think Trump is a racist and would prefer he be nicer to immigrants, but voted for him anyway because they care about their small business tax rate and safe streets more than that issue. “Just not placing primary value on identity politics” is more alien than being wrong about identity politics and doesn’t enter into their race-obsessed thinking.
If you can’t recognize the signs of someone who’s constantly popping Xanax from how she moves and talks, fine, it seems pretty obvious to me. It’s the same affect as millions of other middle-aged women in this country with the same prescription who you run into every day.
At least once she got the nomination someone told her to stop doing the “snake trying to swallow a rhinoceros whole” unhinged-jaw fake laugh thing that was her signature move previously. But it’s another sign of how much of her persona is offputting and manufactured.
Here’s how Democrats can get more in touch with the reality of voters:
1: No more self-awarding criteria-free titles like “ran a perfect campaign” or “won the debate” and then acting surprised when the Good Election Witch of the North doesn’t descend from the sky and magically make you president for getting a perfect score on the test you made up. Fire anyone who is getting paid as a consultant who thinks this way.
2: No one who went to a liberal arts college that costs more than $20,000 a semester or has any kind of graduate degree allowed to advise on messaging. Ivy League alums allowed only if they got a job outside of politics after graduating.
3: Stop treating everyone like an idiot if you don’t want them to vote like idiots. If you managed to emerge from COVID and the money-printing stimulus with 2% inflation in 2024, run on that. The idea that a single number or graph will make people’s heads explode can’t work if you are trying to be “the smart candidate” or make a case for yourself.
4: Actively tell the DSA wing to fuck off. Not only are their core issues complete poison to the electorate and usually objectively stupid, they are all snakes who will never support the candidate. The student debt thing was a fiasco from start to finish and the political reward for it was the people who claimed it was the #1 issue in 2021 spending all of 2024 campaigning against Biden/Harris. You can’t please these people, they hate the U.S. and the Democratic Party, and the more you get associated with them by letting your negotiation over their issues become the subject of the news cycle, the more votes you lose.
Yeah, someone like Fetterman might be the future (I can’t speak to his medical issues or whatever). A good question to ask would be, why is someone whose entire political platform is essentially “whatever the median Democratic voter believes” and able to win in Pennsylvania as a result (something neither Harris nor the other Democratic Senate nominee was able to do) so reviled by the left, and it’s not just because they are obsessed with a maximalist anti-Israel position that most people find offputting or irrelevant, it’s because they fucking hate it when Democrats win elections! As a practical matter, the people making decisions in the Democratic Party actually do have to choose between “the electable Democrat” and “the people whose identities revolve around destroying the electable Democrat” and the amazing thing is that a lot of them don’t think that question has an obvious answer.