Like everybody, I thought we were going to win in 2024. But everything we pinned our hopes on was based on wishful thinking. The NYT/Siena polls we loved to hate so much turned out to be right all along.
Women were supposed to turn out in droves to reject Orange Man. Didn’t happen. We were supposed to make Florida, Texas, Iowa, and other places competitive. Selzer, who was supposed to be this powerful polling guru who was rarely wrong, touted this poll showing us in the lead in Iowa. I believed it; I saw a lot more Harris signs in Iowa than last cycle. She was catastrophically wrong. Men were supposed to join women because they didn’t want to sign their partners’ death warrants. Didn’t happen. We were supposed to have this massive ground game that was supposed to swamp the lack of a ground game by Orange Man. We were supposed to turn our voters out in droves. Didn’t happen. We were supposed to run rings around Trump in fundraising. It was supposed to be a sign of our grassroots support. Didn’t happen. The Trump supporters were supposed to die off from COVID-19 and have no new converts. There was supposed to be no new pool of voters for Trump to tap into. Didn’t happen. The Puerto Ricans were supposed to come to our rescue after Donald Trump’s hateful NYC Madison Square Garden gathering. They were disproportionately located in battleground states. They were supposed to swamp the polls. Didn’t happen. Kamala Harris had all these Republicans in tow such as Liz Cheney to give Republicans permission to vote Blue for the first time ever because they were so appalled by Trump. Didn’t happen.
Maybe we should treat reputable polls that show negative results, not as rigging in Donald Trump’s favor, but as a warning sign that we are not getting through to voters. I read diary after diary about how people were receptive and telling our pollworkers that they would vote for Kamala Harris. But I have a theory of that. I talked with a candidate in real life who ran for local office and who had countless people promise to vote for him in the election. Except they turned around and voted for someone else and he got trounced. You have to be careful about relying on voters who promise they will vote for your candidate. What I’ve found is that many people tell you that, not because they like her, but because they don’t want to get drawn into an argument with you.
Looking back on Trump’s behavior in hindsight, he didn’t do what he did out of dementia. He acted all along like a guy who knew he had it won and that he didn’t have to do anything. So he could shell out money to Elon Musk to put together a makeshift voting operation in which many of the workers simply cheated.
So what went wrong? Here are my reasons why everything that could have went wrong did go wrong:
--Israel Right or Wrong. I encountered dozens of people who told me they would not vote for “Genocide Joe” because of his support for Israel’s sadistic bombing of Gaza. Nothing I said could persuade them; not abortion rights, the fact that Trump will be worse on this issue, the threat to our democracy, or mass deportation. A disproportionate number of such people live in Michigan.
--Neglecting Rural America. People here will find this hard to believe, but as recently as 1996, my part of the state, which is rural and 75% Trump, voted for Bill Clinton. But ever since then, the Democratic Party has alienated Rural America and has done nothing to reverse decades of population losses, buildings rotting to the ground, rich people buying and hoarding land, corporate hog farms growing, and schools getting closer and closer to having to shut down.
--NAFTA and other free trade agreements. Ever since it passed, factories have been closing right and left and jobs shipped to Mexico, India, and China. Obama’s attempt to continue that, through the TPP, reopened those wounds in 2016. For rural Americans, it’s not always about the money, but about the loss of community and identity.
--Inflation. The Democrats needed to have a plan to fight inflation. It’s not good enough to say that it’s now under control. I can rattle off a bunch of things that are much higher now than it was when Joe Biden took office. It costs me $7-10 to get something at a convenience store (which I have to do for my job), as opposed to $5 a few years ago. Bread used to cost $1.20; now, I have a hard time finding anything less than $2. Eggs are frequently north of $3; they used to cost $1 a dozen. A bag of chips used to cost $1-3; now, they cost around $4. Gas used to cost around $2.10 during the last two years of Obama and first four years of Trump, except during COVID, when it went lower sometimes. Under Biden, it has frequently cost over $3, although it’s around $2.80 right now. I could go on and on. But Democrats needed to file massive lawsuits against corporations for price gouging. Call it what it is. Name names. That didn’t happen.
What we need to do is to organize around peoples’ basic needs. I get that Biden grew the economy by 14 million jobs. But people are hurting. Prices are going up so much that wage growth is not enough in many cases. Trump made some of his biggest gains in places where rents were skyrocketing. If we go by Maslow, it doesn’t do any good to tell people that Trump is a clear and present danger to our democracy (love, esteem, self-actualization) when people are struggling to get by, barely making ends meet, and drowning in debt (physiological, safety).
When Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan cratered his popularity, it went underwater, never to return. It needed to be done, but the chaotic way it was managed showed Putin that we were weak and that he could go through with his planned invasion of Ukraine. We should have been having conversations about who would be running in 2024 back in 2022 and 2023, when there was still a chance to put someone else on the ballot. This was the kind of black swan event that tanked Carter’s presidency (Iranian hostage crisis) and Donald Trump’s first presidency (COVID-19).
We have to keep in mind that this election was not a mandate for Trump. He gained two million. Instead, this election was a repudiation of Democrats. We failed to turn out our voters, and we lost. Kamala Harris had 73 million votes (as of this afternoon) as opposed to Joe Biden’s 81 million.
We can’t keep doing things the same way we have always done, or we will get the exact same result, as George Bush II found out the hard way when his “Stay the Course” policy went nowhere in Iraq and cratered his popularity after the 2004 election. First of all, all that money that the party spent on $100,000 to $500,000 a year consultants and celebrities to appear with Kamala Harris should have been spent on local parties. People are a lot more likely to vote for your candidate when they hear from your friends and neighbors. The Democrats need to fund local parties whether it is in DC, the bluest part of the country, or in Alabama, one of the reddest parts of the country. Everything needs to be driven by the local parties. Ever since 2008 or so, local Democratic gatherings have become increasingly rare as the local committees no longer have the money to put stuff on.
Secondly of all, the party needs to build local infrastructure to report news. All this talk about a 50 state strategy has been nothing but a bunch of talk. Where Democrats do compete, they do better; for instance, their losses this cycle were not as bad in the battleground states as they were in the rest of the country. But we don’t even compete in many places. We assume that places like New Jersey, New York, and California will vote for us and then we wonder why we didn’t win the popular vote. We assume places like Alabama, Utah, and Idaho are lost to begin with, don’t even try to compete there, and wonder why so much hateful legislation comes out of such places. The States Newsroom project is good, but it is a fraction of what is needed. Donald Trump has dirt on numerous political figures, which explains why they hate Trump so much, then bow the knee at Mar-a-Lago like Kevin McCarthy did. Pro Publica and Investigate Midwest are good sources, but they are a fraction of what is needed.
Finally, we need to encourage people to vote for us with their wallets. First, we need to appeal to peoples’ physiological needs such as air, water, food, clothing, shelter, and reproduction. Hence the need for a Basic Income, bringing back the child tax credit, housing as a human right, and anything else that fits. Then, we need to appeal to peoples’ safety needs such as security, employment, resources, health, and property. That would mean stuff like Medicare for All, strong resources, creating jobs through a clean energy transformation, and things like that.
Donald Trump’s biggest strength was that he was able to appeal to peoples’ perceived need for security through his hateful rants against immigration. We need to form a counter narrative — yes, there are drug cartels that pump immigrants, money, and drugs into our communities. I read the arrest reports on the Justice Department and Homeland Security websites all the time. But we need to name names. The NRA owns the drug cartels, the rampant shootings in the cities, the murders, domestic violence, and people raping our women. Why? Because they support the lax gun laws that allow criminal enterprises to operate and which allow the gun manufacturers to sell guns to the drug cartels in Mexico and elsewhere that Donald Trump says he’s against.
Once we successfully appeal to peoples’ basic survival needs and that of their families, then people will be more willing to listen to us when we say, for instance, that Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to our democracy, that manmade climate change is burning up the planet, and that Democrats offer a way forward.
We need nothing less than a kindness revolution. Donald Trump came to power based on cruelty, lies, chaos, and destruction. For these next four years, every act of kindness that we perform will be an act of resistance to his tyranny.
