Democrats Had One Job

What failing to do it, and the subsequent loss to Trump, does and doesn't mean.

Nobody should be under any illusion. Despite his claim of a "mandate," Trump's victory had less to do with the American people's ratification of his agenda and more to do with their rejection of his opponent's. In this century, with the possible exception of 2008, Americans have in every election voted against the candidate they most disliked, rather than for the candidate who represented their vision of American governance. Since I have been voting, neither party has put forth a candidate who came close to my standard for what constitutes a good president. Many voters will say the same. Most voters choose between the lesser of two evils (as they define them). Clearly, a narrow majority of voters in 2024 saw Donald Trump as the lesser of two evils, although a sizable plurality of voters held the opposite view. 

All of which is to say that rather than interpreting 2024 as a vindication of Trump (unless "vindication" merely means "winning a popularity contest with only one other contender whom a majority of Americans dislike"), we should see it as a repudiation of Democrats. Rather than asking themselves what could possibly be wrong with Americans to cause so many of them to vote for a failed real estate developer who has said he would date his own daughter, Democrats should be asking themselves, "How could we possibly have managed to screw this up?"

Whether that sort of soul-searching involves more personal responsibility than we can reasonably expect from a progressive movement founded by the likes of Richard Ely and Charles Beard and schooled on Theodor Adorno's convenient explanation for the unpopularity of the left (i.e., that rightism is a psychological malady which runs from mild repression to outright fascism and this malady prevents everyone to the left of Lyndon Johnson from seeing clearly), is a question I will not attempt to answer. There are those within the progressive coalition who have lost their minds, but there are also many Democrats who care about winning and who are smart enough to engage in the hard work of course correction. It remains to be seen which of these factions will win out. 

​I'm more interested in discussing what happened than predicting what will come next. Let's start with Joe Biden.

You Had One Job to Do

For a moment there in 2021, it looked like Joe Biden had managed to put an end to the Trump era. This was, after all, what Americans elected him to do. They were sick of the chaos and the weirdness and they just wanted things to go back to normal. But instead of making good on that, Biden tried to be a "consequential" president. He took his narrow victory as an opportunity to run wild with progressive priorities, which exacerbated inflation and annoyed tens of millions of Americans. If he had attempted to govern responsibly, he could have made the 2020s like the 1920s, an era of normalcy and optimism in which the horror of pandemic and authoritarian tendencies from the previous president could be left in the past. But he didn't do that. 

When did Biden's approval rating drop precipitously? When we pulled out of Afghanistan. When we stabbed our Afghan allies in the back and split like gutless cowards, handing the country to a raping, pillaging, medieval war machine which proceeded to oppress the Afghan population, stone women for not wearing the veil, end women's education, shoot Hazara children in the street, sell virgins into sexual slavery (excuse me, "arrange forced marriages"), and starve hundreds of thousands of children. 

If the Afghanistan withdrawal was "progressive," I don't know what that word means. To this day, the president remains proud of the Afghanistan withdrawal, as if undoing twenty years of success overnight is an accomplishment. But Biden, who was sold to the American people on the lie that he had empathy for the downtrodden (especially racial minorities), has wanted to pull out of Afghanistan since Obama's first term. When told what the Taliban would do to the people of Afghanistan, he said (his words, not mine), "F--k that... We did it in Vietnam" and we can do it again. This from the man who voted to send the Vietnamese "boat people" back to die at the hands of the Viet Cong. 

In addition to the lie that he was anything other than a self-serving lightweight, President Biden also treated the American people to the biggest coverup of presidential infirmity since Woodrow Wilson. As it grew painfully obvious to anyone who wasn't a paid shill of the Democratic Party that Biden was in mental decline, we heard endlessly from the media that Republicans were unfairly pouncing on Biden for misspeaking. Clearly, the narrative went, Biden was totally with it and the rest of us needed to stop believing our lying eyes. Behind the scenes, he was giving "masterclasses" in foreign policy and he was "intellectually, analytically… the best Biden ever.”

Then, while debating Trump, he told us that he "beat Medicare," and that no American soldiers had been killed on his watch (another lie, as the families of the Abbey Gate fallen well know).Trump gave us the memorable line which summarized the debate, "“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

Biden was elected to be Warren G. Harding. Harding came in on the heels of Woodrow Wilson to undo the damage wrought by Wilson's War Socialism. Wilson had crushed free speech, free press, and civil liberties. Harding restored constitutional protections. Wilson was a racist eugenicist. Harding was one of the most pro-Civil-Rights presidents in American history, giving speeches in the South about civil rights and equality of blacks, denouncing the Tulsa Massacre and shepherding anti-lynching laws through Congress. Wilson threw political prisoners in jail without trial and had gangs of thugs beat up dissidents. Harding disbanded the fascisti and released the prisoners. 

Biden didn’t attempt to bring a return to normalcy. Instead, he stopped enforcing immigration laws, allowing millions of border crossings every year and creating humanitarian crises in cities throughout America, crises about which he did nothing. When inflation shot through the roof, he demagogued "shrinkflation" and "price gouging" and threatened to introduce price controls, which have failed every time they have ever been tried. His idea of a winning campaign strategy was to issue unconstitutional executive orders "forgiving" student loan debt, which amounted to taking money from the working class to bail out folks with grad degrees. 

Harris, when asked what she would have done differently from Biden, said, "not a thing."

No doubt there are those today who blame America's latent misogyny for the fact that Donald Trump has now beaten two female candidates, while the only candidate to ever beat him was a white male. But Harris did not do as well with women as Biden did, and the story of the 2024 election is that minority voters are shifting away from the Democrats.  Harris did better with white men and women with college degrees. 

Still, it will be hard for some to escape that perception. Sarah Isgur stated that it might be 20 years before a major party runs another female candidate. Alternatively, maybe what needs to happen is for the Republicans to run a female candidate in 2028 and win. I like Glenn Youngkin and Brian Kemp, but it would be a good thing for the country if a conservative woman in the mold of Margaret Thatcher was elected to follow Trump. I don't see too many options on offer (Liz Cheney will not win a Republican nomination after having campaigned for Harris). Nikki Haley is not that person (in my view). But still, I would like to see it. 

Rather than blaming America's sexism, progressives need to look in the mirror. What turned off voters about progressivism? The constant charges that anyone who isn't all in on the latest transgender celebrity is a bigot, that anyone who isn't onboard with antiracism is a racist, and that any man who doesn't constantly virtue signal his undying love of female empowerment is a misogynist. The majority of Americans of all races and both sexes are not bigoted in any way. But they hate being told they are. Harris ran a campaign which treated people as interchangeable members of identity categories. They sought to appeal to female voters, black voters, Arab voters, etc. Creepily and disturbingly, they even turned this tactic on white men, trying to appeal to "White Dudes for Harris.” The Trump campaign tried to appeal to voters as Americans. That's the difference. (I have harsh criticisms of the Trump campaign, but his strategy – as bad as it was – managed to be just a little more successful than Harris's, and voters apparently ignored the comments about Puerto Rico and the "enemies within." Anyone who has read Nassim Nicholas Taleb should know that it’s an illusion to imagine that Trump’s victory is indication that Trump ran a good campaign – it only means that he ran a campaign that was as good as it needed to be.)

The Harris campaign's problem was that they seemed to actively believe in a competition between men and women, a zero-sum world in which for one sex to win the other has to lose. They sought to capitalize on and exacerbate the divide between men and women, and when that failed they tried to appeal to men on the basis of gross stereotypes, and then when that failed they went back to appealing to women in ways that divide the sexes. For those of us who believe that men and women are not competing for anything, but are complementary (men need women and women need men) and that a positive vision of the future is one in which both sexes live flourishing lives together rather than separately, this was yet more evidence of the Harris campaign's tone-deaf ability to misread average voters. 

The ad narrated by Julia Roberts, for instance, is condescending to both men and women and appeals to the idea that marriages should have secrets. It was strange. It wasn't, as some have alleged, an encouragement of adultery. But it wasn't a positive vision of healthy marriage, either. Given that the election featured a serial philanderer and abuser running against a woman who began her political career by sleeping with a married man (the fact that he was estranged from his wife in no way makes this morally acceptable), we didn't exactly have much on offer in the way of positive visions of healthy marriages. But still, this ad reflected a total lack of awareness when it comes to how normal Americans live. If the woman featured in the ad has that relationship with her husband, why does she stay with him? Out in real America, people like their spouses. 

Democrats, You Managed to Lose to a Guy Who Wants to Be a Whale Psychiatrist

But we should make no mistake that the Democrats' unpopularity is a sign the public has signed on to Trumpism. Many of Trump's own voters disapprove of him. They merely prefer him to Kamala Harris, which as we have established, is not a high bar to clear. I would guess that in this environment almost any Republican would have won. Certainly, Glenn Youngkin or Brian Kemp or Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley (probably not Vivek Ramaswamy). 

It's worth pointing out that for all those inclined to either despair at Trump's victory as a sign of the end of Reagan conservatism, or for all those New Right types inclined to see Trump's narrow win as a victory for post-liberal integralism and economic nationalism, most Republican voters still like the idea of small government, low taxes, deregulation, American capitalism, the Constitution, and individual liberty. Many not closely tuned to national politics assume that Trump represents all of the things Republicans traditionally represented. As John Hood points out: 

80% of Trump supporters prefer a smaller government providing fewer services to a larger one providing more… Republican voters overwhelmingly disapprove of labor unions and think their decline has been good for working people and for the country as a whole. Most Republicans, including those who self-identify as MAGA, see both China and Russia as America’s enemies, are rooting for Israel to win an Vladimir Putin to lose, and want the U.S. to remain the most potent military power in the world. Few agree, or will ever agree, with fringy causes such as integrating church and state or repudiating the classical-liberal legacy of the American Revolution.

It's true that many Republicans aren't interested in reforming entitlements. American innumeracy is not a new issue, and it afflicts both sides. Most Americans do not understand the basic math problem posed by Social Security and Medicare, and assume the national debt can be solved by cutting foreign aid and taxing billionaires. But to hear Republican voters talk about these issues is to realize that they still believe in fiscal responsibility. They are just mistaken about the gravity of the sacrifices that will require. 

The reason they are mistaken is that no politician since Paul Ryan has been willing to do the hard work and take the risks required to explain to the American people the scope of the impending crisis. But voters who believe in the principle of responsibility are voters who are potentially persuadable on this issue. While I doubt Donald Trump is the man to do the persuading, I don't believe it is impossible that some future Republican could be. But that would require courage, which appears lacking everywhere in national politics these days. 

Blame America First

Some Democrats and Never-Trumpers are already learning the wrong lesson from this election. Rather than engage in any introspection, they blame America. America is too corrupt, too racist, too sexist, too venal, and too lacking in political virtue. There isn't nothing to this critique, but it doesn't apply to all Americans, nor even to the majority of Trump's voters. Are the Jewish voters who held their nose to vote for Trump based on the real worry that a Harris administration might desert Israel in its hour of need while protecting antisemites on college campuses here at home really lacking in political virtue? Are the ordinary voters who - when told Trump would prosecute his enemies for made-up crimes - asked, "Isn't that what Alvin Bragg is already doing to him?" really part of the problem? Are the struggling parents who placed the economic wellbeing of their families ahead of abstract concerns about democracy somehow lacking in purity? I believe that Donald Trump is unfit for office, that his conduct after the 2020 election was unamerican and disgraceful, and that if he lived a thousand years he would never live down the disgusting spectacle of January 6th, but that doesn't mean I don't sympathize with people who felt these things were less important than the price of food. What kind of person doesn't put the day-to-day welfare of their family first? 

You and I may look at Trump's tariff proposals and various other economic suggestions and conclude that this is not the man to solve kitchen table issues. But average voters don't pay attention to that. They know that they could afford food under Trump and couldn't under Biden. They believe actions speak louder than words.

I'm not justifying support for Trump, an incompetent moron and a profoundly weak human being. I'm explaining it. Unlike many Trump opponents, I'm not willing to write off this country or my fellow citizens on the basis of one election result. I love America and Americans too much to do that (though this country tries my patience at times). 

Cosmopolitan blogger and former Guardian columnist Jill Filipovic called Trump’s election, “an indictment of America.” Law professor Jed Shugerman blamed, “America, toxic masculinity, and white supremacy.” But I found the most irksome comments came from ostensible right-winger Tom Nichols, who said:

The urge to cast blame will be overwhelming, because there is so much of it to go around. When the history of this dark moment is written, those responsible will include not only Trump voters but also easily gulled Americans who didn’t vote or who voted for independent or third-party candidates because of their own selfish peeves.

There is no middle ground, in other words. The Cause is paramount. You are not allowed a private life. If you choose not to decide you have cast your lot against The Cause. All your efforts must be for The Cause. Any action you take which does not further The Cause will be held against you. 

Nichols also wrote on Twitter, “I hope writing in Ronald Reagan or some other performative bit of nonsense was worth it when the government is in the hands of a sociopath and his Renfields.” Which is rich coming from a guy who for the past year has been insulting anyone who even dared to think about not voting Democrat, under the theory that this strategy would win Democrats more votes than it alienated (which, judging from the election results, it didn’t). Never-Trumpers need to take a hard look in the mirror and realize that alienating potential converts is a good way to re-elect Donald Trump. 

As I’ve been exploring in this overly-long column, there are a variety of factors that led to Trump’s victory last Tuesday. But this is why Trump won. The condescension and outright contempt on the part of some Democrats and Never-Trumpers alienated wide-swathes of the American electorate. The insistence that only they held the high ground on moral purity. The anti-Americanism. 

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t for one minute believe Donald Trump is a paragon of patriotic virtue. But Nichols is one among a number of Never-Trumpers who have been very clear for a long time just how little they think of a supermajority of Americans. Why would they expect now that any of us would listen to them, let alone vote the way they want? Those of us on the right who did not vote for either Trump or Harris have been subjected to surprising vitriol – mostly, this year, from the Never-Trump crowd – for our choice. And while I’m not personally hurt or offended, I’m also never going to have my mind changed by someone who insults me and acts as though he shouldn’t even need to try to convince me of his position. Most people feel the same. 

I’ve gone very long, and I’ll be back later this week with more, but if there is one theme running throughout this election, it’s this: politicians who want to win majorities need to work to persuade voters and need to try to reach Americans where they’re at. And ideologues who want to bring converts over to their side need to do the even harder work to change hearts and minds. 

Coda: The Assassination Attempt

When Trump stood up with blood running down his ear on July 13^th and raised his fist in the air, I said that he’d just won the election. Certainly, it wasn’t the only factor in his victory. But that rallied many people to his side who had been thinking about sitting out. I don’t know that he would have lost without the assassination attempt, but I think it gave him momentum at a crucial moment in the race and won the hearts and minds of many persuadable Americans.

Ben Connelly is a writer, long-distance runner, former engineer, and author of “Grit: A Practical Guide to Developing Physical and Mental Toughness.” He publishes short stories and essays at Hardihood Books. @benconnelly6712