This post is adapted from of a message I sent to friends and family on Nov. 24, 2024, a few weeks after the election.
Opportunity
This loss was not Harris's fault. She ran a strong campaign given the context. She had very little time, was dragged down by the low popularity of Joe Biden and incumbents worldwide, and of course had to contend with reluctance to elect a non-white woman. I continue to believe bringing her in quickly was the right choice for that moment and gave us the best chance of winning.
Joe Biden is an easier candidate for blame, not only because he ran again and then waited too long to drop out, but because throughout his term he has been extraordinarily weak at communicating to the American people his administration's achievements and the reasons for its actions. The campaign didn't begin when Harris took over, or even when Biden launched his bid for 2024. It began when Biden won in 2020, and he has been trailing from the beginning.
But the failure goes deeper. It is now clear that Donald Trump is a transformative political figure, something which comes along so rarely that we have trouble recognizing it. Many of us thought his 2016 victory was an aberration, made possible not only by his willingness to marshal hatred and fear but by his unique celebrity. In that view, Biden's victory was a return to sanity. Now, it is clear that his victory is not the aberration; Biden's was.
Harris may not be to blame, but she was not the candidate we needed. She was a conventional Democratic nominee: pragmatic, technocratic, sympathetic to progressive social causes, with a compelling persona to sell the package. That formula worked against the familiar Republicans of the last thirty years, men like George H.W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and even John McCain, whose elite aloofness, ideological rigidity, or insensitivity were vulnerable to the combination of inspiration and moderation that Democrats offered.
Trump is not a familiar Republican. He is irreverent, improvisational, charismatic, iconoclastic, and authentic (though not honest), and he has a keener sense for public perception and attitudes than any of his predecessors in either party. He is bound by neither orthodoxy nor established party lines, and so he embraced ideas that would never have been part of a Republican platform and courted voters that would never have been part of the Republican coalition twenty or even ten years ago. In short, he created a moment of transformation, and Democrats responded by insisting that it wasn't happening; the irony is that while we lambasted Trump for looking backward, we were the ones acting as though it was still 2008. It was enough to bring us within striking distance of winning, but not enough to meet the moment.
The worst response to this defeat is apathy and resignation. Next is simple, unreflective resilience: we need to keep "fighting." That fight isn't working. Democrats will often boast that Americans largely agree with us on core issues, even if they vote Republican. That shouldn't be a source of pride. If the majority of the country agrees and we still lose, that’s incompetence.
A better response is that we should listen more, be less politically pious, take more seriously the complaint of the Americans who sent us a message. That’s the right impulse, but is still inadequate. We absolutely should broaden the range of voices and concerns we hear, but this thinking easily slides into bloodless moderation and a sacrifice of principle. It may be possible to win an election that way, but it won’t get us to long-term victory and progress. Inauthentic, passionless leadership cannot rescue America.
The best response is to recognize the unique opportunity to define a new vision and build a new coalition, larger and stronger than what Trump built. Trump deserves credit for seeing beyond convention and having the audacity and insight to successfully court women, young people, and racial minorities that were assumed to be beyond his reach. Why can't we do the same? He has triggered a realignment. Will we be content to fight to regain what we lost, or do we want more? I do want to win back the blocs that the Democratic coalition lost, but I also want to win voters that have been assumed beyond our reach. Many Democrats look at an electoral map and see seas of red across the heartland. They think of those places and those people as a foregone conclusion, so uninterested in and even hostile to our values that it is not worth trying to reach them. The accepted understanding, so ground-in that progressives treat it as a law of nature, is that something about living outside of a city, or being white, or not having a college degree, or being a man, or a combination of these makes a person inherently hostile to fairness, justice, and progress.
I don't believe that. Despite our sense that Americans are deeply, irrevocably divided, my sense and experience is that with a couple of hours at a kitchen table, I could find shared values and hopes with most Americans. I don't believe that we would agree on many issues or that we would end up voting the same way, but we don't need to, yet. We only need a base from which to build.
I am not talking about moderation or a swing to the right, but an appeal to deeper, shared values. I want to discard the assumed policy positions and coalitional loyalties that have dominated the Democratic party in my lifetime and start from scratch. I want to reach every American. This is a shift that cannot happen in one election, or at the hand of one candidate. But, it cannot happen at all without the first step.
Action
Where do we begin? We can start by asking, how did Trump do it? For as long as Donald Trump has been in politics, commentators have been trying to understand his appeal: what makes millions of people support a candidate who is not merely unconventional, but who specifically and deliberately violates norms of democracy and political decency?
One explanation is that Trump activated a racist, nativist, conspiracy-minded, and "anti-woke" base. Another is that he won transactional support from the Christian right. Another is that, for all his unconventional presentation, he offers fiscal conservatives the same deal Republican candidates have for generations: lower taxes, lower regulation, and opportunities for influence. A favorite explanation attributes his mass appeal to "disaffection," "grievance," "alienation," or other terms indicating the gap between those that hold cultural, political, and economic power in the country and everyone else; as the story goes, many Americans felt so disrespected by elites that they were willing to elect a wrecking ball to the White House.
There is truth in all of these explanations, but they explain how a candidate like Trump builds a base, not how he gets to fifty percent or more. These explanations miss something fundamental about Trump's appeal: the elemental simplicity, clarity, and consistency of his message.
That message follows a simple formula:
There is a major problem with America
There is a clear solution to that problem.
Only one person has the strength to make that solution a reality.
The problem: America has declined from its past greatness, because outsiders are taking advantage of us and insiders are letting them.
The solution: Put America first, by getting the upper hand and restoring our strength.
And the savior, in Trump's telling, is Trump.
Trump's erraticism as a candidate - the bizarre, rambling speeches, the digressions and fixations, the drive-by provocations - is superficial, because he has been unfailingly consistent on that underlying story for nearly a decade. Every signature cause and policy proposal underscores it: birtherism, derogatory comments about immigrants, the wall, the Muslim travel ban, the trade war with China, pulling back from NATO and other alliances, criticism of American support for Ukraine, etc. Every one of them drives home the message of American victimization and Trump's determination to end it. Trump's proposed blanket tariffs are bad policy, certain to set back the American economy and make inflation worse if passed. But as an expression of his message, they are clear and forceful; ultimately, whether they are passed doesn't matter.
We need to understand: the simplicity and coherence of the message have enormous power, greater even than its content. A strong, clear message allows the world to make sense, and to seem fixable. Every injustice and irritation can be traced back to the same source: if I can’t get my illness treated, it’s not because the healthcare system is broken and underfunded, but because hospitals are doling out resources to immigrants. If jobs are going overseas, it’s not because of structural factors in the economy or failures of investment, but because we haven’t been tough enough in trade policy. The promise is that these problems can be eliminated, swiftly, and the details are less important than the candidate’s conviction. Trump got past 50% because, even if they were not fully on board with his message or his character, voters saw strength in his clarity and conviction.
This point may be difficult to accept, particularly for those trained to believe that there is a linear logic underpinning voters' choices: principles define policy preferences, and policy preferences define political choices. I believe in sustainability, so I want more investment in renewable energy, so I choose the candidate who promises that. That is one mechanism by which political choices are determined, but it is not the only one, or even the most important. There is a deep, human hunger for the world to have order, intrinsically if possible and by force if necessary. A political leader who offers that is promising something deeper than policy preferences and group identities. He is promising that a bewildering and indifferent world can be mastered. That can win converts.
I expect that, despite all the noise he generates, even minimally engaged American voters could articulate the basic points of Trump’s message, including what he believes the problems facing America are and what he would do about them. In contrast, I could not articulate the same for Harris, or Biden before her - or Obama before him, for that matter. Against that strong, consistent message, Harris had a basket of policy positions that were hard to communicate, hard to remember, and hard to understand as a whole. Her final rallying cry, "Freedom," wasn't clearly connected to a vision, let alone any policies, with the important exception of reproductive rights. In the end, Trump was by far the more disciplined candidate.
Trump's message is wrong. Its problem statement is hateful and false and its prescribed solutions are cruel and idiotic. He cannot make America great again, because he is ignorant, incompetent, and corrupt. But, he found a message that resonated and he stuck to it. Until there is a more compelling vision for the American people, Democrats may flip enough voters to win in a given election, but the country will not move past this era.
This is the problem I have been thinking about. I do not want Democrats to mimic Trump's message, in form or in content, but to articulate a vision that is as clear and as resonant with a broad range of Americans, from the familiar Democratic coalition, to independents, moderates, and the perennially undecided, to Republicans ready to vote for their values. The message I want transcends a left-right political spectrum, and gives people something to believe in, rather than a pile of issues and policies to sort through.
More to come.