In the clarity of Thursday, we are being told why and how Democrats lost the 2024 election. There are many reasons, but the consensus opinion is that we were doomed from the start. What happened here happened in every democracy since the aftermath of COVID. Incumbent governments, right and left, east and west, either fell or suffered unanticipated setbacks. Reading the opinions on Wednesday more than suggests that the knowing pundits had written their obits on Monday. The following observation from Derek Thompson at The Atlantic is indicative:
She is the vice president of a profoundly unpopular president, whose approval was laid low by the same factors—such as inflation and anti-incumbency bias—that have waylaid ruling parties everywhere. An analysis by the political scientist John Sides predicted that a sitting president with Biden’s approval rating should be expected to win no more than 48 percent of the two-party vote. As of Wednesday afternoon, Kamala Harris is currently projected to win about 47.5 percent of the popular vote. Her result does not scream underperformance. In context, it seems more like a normal performance.
In other words, there was no value in incumbency in 2024 and, while technically not an incumbent, Harris was generally viewed as one. If they are correct, there was only one path to victory for Democrats and it was a very narrow and tortuous one. That path had to begin with Biden, and Biden refused to clear the path until it was far too late.
Biden surprised a lot of people, me included, in his response to the economic crisis. I anticipated a return to neoliberal policies and what we saw was neoliberal lite, more FDR than Bill Clinton. He was also hampered by intransigence within his own party. But he was never intended to be more than a caretaker president and his decision to seek reelection robbed the party and the nation of an opportunity to go in a different direction. When he finally relented it was not only too late, but it also left us with only one untenable choice, Kamala Harris. To quote Tyler Austin Harper, “. . . her grave was dug before she ever took the podium at the Democratic National Convention.”
When should Biden have formally announced his decision not to run? In retrospect, the best timing would have been right after the 2022 elections or, better still, during the drawn-out GOP Speaker of the House shitshow. Or, he could have eliminated the need for an announcement altogether by clearly stating a desire to serve only one term in his inaugural address.
If this sounds like a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking, it is, and it probably would not have done us any good even if he had cleared the path in 2021. The path would have shifted to a Democratic presidential primary and the hope that Democratic voters would pick a suitable candidate. However, it’s likely that we Democrats would have picked the wrong candidate, i.e., Harris, the heir apparent. I do not want to open a meaningless debate over hypotheticals, but I will say that there were probably only one or two candidates who had chance to win, and Harris wasn’t one of them.
This leads me from the why to the how. How did we lose the election? In the mental and metaphorical fog of Wednesday morning, it seemed to me that Trump won because he was able to penetrate historic Democratic strongholds. That was one story from Tuesday and it’s not inaccurate. But as Wednesday progressed, people here and in my personal life pointed to the bigger story. Over 10 million 2020 voters sat this one out and the results indicate that the overwhelming majority were Biden voters. This is also the first time that independents surpassed Democrats and tied with Republicans. We tried very hard to get those 2020 voters to the polls, but we failed to convince them.
Trump can claim a mandate, but it’s a weak one. He received less votes in 2024 than 2020. But the results also indicate that most GOP votes are locked in, at least for now, whereas Democratic voters are fluid.
Those 10 million voters and the 33% of eligible voters who annually decline to participate are sending messages. There are doubtless millions of reasons why people didn’t vote, but the overall message is “We are dissatisfied.” We all have opinions on how they might be satisfied and brought back into civic discourse, and we will have those conversations. The pain of defeat is always intense, but it serves no purpose to blame the voters. The fault lies elsewhere.
