The Kamala Harris campaign in a little over a hundred days did a lot of things right. It took over a losing ticket and with our help, hard work and a ton of our money put together a credible stretch run that brought her to parity, at least in the polls.
But whether it was COVID resentment or a relatively unpopular president, America wanted to go a different way. They saw Harris, Liz Cheney Republicans, the entertainers, and the campaign as defenders of the institutions they didn’t trust (particularly the CDC/COVID and the Federal Reserve/inflation and interest rates). They wanted to blow those institutions up. And they have spoken loudly that they did not want to vote for Democrats, because they didn’t think Democrats would do that. No one could overcome that.
They were probably right, at least about us. We want good things but we dither over what to do about the Supreme Court. We argue about blue slips and the filibuster. Congress doesn’t work and the public just wants it to work.
Going into the week of the election, I felt like it wasn’t a tie. I thought all the swing states would move together. They did (as of now, with a few uncalled). But they didn’t move in the direction I was anticipating. I got that part very wrong.
I think the hardest to digest and process is the current popular vote. Trump leads 51-47 at the current time, before all the votes are counted. So it wasn’t this state or that district. It was everything, everywhere, all at once.
Chris Stirewalt/The Dispatch:
What Polls Can Never Tell Us
They reflect what people think. Elections reflect what people do.
In this life, there are typically two kinds of problems that are within our control: knowledge problems and problems of the heart.
If you don’t know why your dishwasher keeps flashing “F2” at you when you push start instead of offering the satisfying suck and whir that means it’s obliterating the manicotti morsels from your plates, you have a knowledge problem.
If you see the error message, turn off the machine and quietly walk away, leaving the food to fossilize on the dishes until your spouse or someone else comes along to repeat your discovery, then you, and your family by extension, have a heart kind of problem.
People of all times, particularly those blessed and cursed with strong opinions, have always been more willing to see knowledge problems than heart problems: “If only those poor souls knew the truth! If only we could teach them!” Give a man a clean plate and he stacks it away, teach a man to de-gunk the filter on a Whirlpool 5100, and he has clean plates for a lifetime.
But, of course, 100,000 years of human experience tells us the painful truth. Knowledge is not only insufficient to solve our problems, it often makes them worse. Yes, when we have incorrect knowledge, it is worse than pure ignorance. But, perhaps worst of all is partial knowledge.
Exit polls can be misleading but that number jumps out at you. Did we expect that big a change? I didn’t. Neither did Mike Madrid/The Great Transformation, whose career is built around following this:
Prediction
Three dynamics that may lead to a bigger win that aren't reflected in the polls.
I have been critical of Democrats’ inability to break through with Latinos despite four publicly announced early advertising blitzes. None of them worked. And as recently as a week ago it was clear Trump was steadily increasing his share of Latino voters even more. That was until Madison Square Garden.
It was then that everything changed.
It changed broadly and across voter groups. America was reminded why they fired Trump in the first place.
Kamala Harris is going to win the race tonight.
She’s going to win for three reasons that may have been missed or under appreciated by pollsters.
It didn’t change that much. We’ll have to change to catch up to it.
In the meantime, we’ve got two months of relative calm before a peaceful uncontested transfer of power. We believe in that, even if the country has lost faith.
Joyce Vance/Civil Discourse:
While we all continue to watch the votes come in and worry about the ultimate result, I want to make sure you were aware of a really disturbing development: the plethora of bomb threats at polling places that broke out today.
Why would anyone do that? There are two obvious reasons. First, prevent the people who are already in line from voting but create delays while a polling place is shut down and swept, which takes enough time to ensure that some folks will have to leave. Second, create fear, so that other people will decide it’s too unsafe to go to the polls. In other words, bomb threats at polling places are made by someone with an interest in disrupting an election and keeping people from voting.
But these weren’t just random threats, the work of a lone wolf. According to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, it was Russia that took that approach in Fulton County, Georgia, on election day, targeting polling places where people tend to vote heavily Democratic. The threats were deemed "non-credible" and Fulton County determined that its polling sites were secure. The DNC and the Democratic Party of Georgia went to court to keep the polls open for additional time to make up for what was lost, but it’s hard to accept that American elections are being threatened by Russia. That fact is deeply disturbing.
A little color from Philadelphia on X via Threadreader about the campaign’s effort and design:
I’m not pointing fingers. I think it was designed to do a thing. But even the best ground game can’t make up a five point deficit you didn’t know you had.
Josh Marshall/TPM:
Status Check Just After Midnight
If Harris loses, that is obviously a crushing result. There’s no way around that. It’s different from 2016 in that it’s not a shock. We all knew or should have known this was a very possible result. The polls and models were about as close to 50-50 as you can get. A number were literally 50-50. But there’s another dimension of the story, assuming Trump does win. And that’s this: everyone knows who Donald Trump is. He was already President once. We know what that was like. Paradoxically Kamala Harris and he both did a pretty good job reminding us who he was over the last month. So it’s not like 2016 when you could say people didn’t know what they were getting. We know who he is. If he wins, which now looks probable though not certain, that’s a very sobering reality.
I wrote yesterday that I thought Harris ran a near flawless campaign. I still think that. And that removes one excuse. If she had run a mess of a campaign that would be one thing. She didn’t. I think she ran about as good a campaign as possible. I’m sure some people will blame her. I don’t think that will be fair. But big picture it doesn’t matter. Trump is the exception. Nobody gets a second chance to run for President. So blame her or not, it doesn’t matter. She won’t be running again.
The reality we need to keep in mind is that incumbent parties have been losing in basically every industrial democracy since the pandemic. From one perspective it’s no surprise that the U.S. appears to be following that pattern. But Trump, with his degenerate, autocratic ways was the option.
The voters have spoken. They wanted what Trump is selling. God bless us all.
David Rothkopf/Need to Know:
Sad, Angry and Undaunted
We Must Turn Our Attention to the Work That Lies Ahead
In a democracy, you accept the will of the people. It’s a principle that not all of our fellow Americans acknowledge. But it is essential.
Sometimes doing so is hard, however. Hard when you believe the choice that voters have made will be bad for the country, will hurt many of our neighbors, will weaken us, will strengthen our enemies, and is, at its core, wrong.
But at this moment, with Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election clear, it is precisely because of those concerns about the future of the United States, that we must work to accept the new reality because it will be our duty within our system to continue to fight for what we believe, to ensure that those who have been empowered by the people do not abuse that power or forget for one moment that in our society all power derives from those people.
I think the roots of rejecting the institutions started growing years ago (again, see SCOTUS and the 2000 election) but COVID was the catalyst. Having to manage your kids with conflicting advice while those better off got to work from home, that sort of thing.
Pretending it all went away and we could live in Gore Vidal’s United States of Amnesia and the public wouldn’t blame incumbents for what’s going wrong maybe in the end wasn’t the right approach.
But we’re here for you to weigh in, too. See you in the comments.
