Usually I agree with your takes, but not with what seems to be your acceptance of the idea that the Trump victory was part of the global rejection of incumbents because of post-pandemic misery. The failures were two: first, Biden’s signal failure to educate the American public about the post-pandemic situation and what his policies were doing to get us through this period. We see the trade off: a few more points of unemployment means suffering for a relatively small group but reduces inflationary pressures that would lead to price increases for the population as a whole. Inflation — precisely because it expresses itself across the general population is politically riskier than protecting the well-being of the otherwide unemployed, a fraction of the population. You can defend the policy choice for more stimulus on grounds of compassion and the common enterprise, but do recall any such case? I don’t. You know Bill Clinton would have been making that case. And more generally to explain and defend success in navigating the post-pandemic environment.
Our publishing interface tells me I’ve written well over 40,000 posts in just shy of 24 years doing this. The ones I remember most clearly are the ones I wrote after big electoral defeats and shocks. I think of 2004 and 2016, and then, of course, the more subsidiary setbacks. I think about what I believe people need to — or what would be helpful for them to — hear, or what scaffolding of analysis or meaning one can use to begin to construct a place to house those feelings of shock, disappointment, desolation. More than anything else I try to capture the truth of the matter as I’m able to make sense of it. Because that’s my real job.
Not sure I’ve ever written in before. I’m feeling crushed, and fearful, and grim—of course. But thanks to all your efforts, for better or for worse I’m not shocked and I’m not demoralized.
You see the same numbers I do. We don’t know the results of the presidential election yet. It all comes down to the Blue Wall states. But the margins in critical areas do not look promising. I heard from one source about an hour ago that Harris still had a shot in each state. I don’t know where that stands. It doesn’t look promising from the reports I see currently. There’s no point in my speculating. We’ll know soon enough.
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.
Okay, we are clearly down to the Blue Wall and what seems to be Harris’s only path. We have to wait for the vote to come in. To set expectations, I don’t sense a lot of optimism from the people who I trust to be able to look at the nitty gritty results and see where things are going. But again, we wait to see the results. You have to count the votes. They can surprise you.
Apart from those critical contests we see movement to the right in many states, in non-swing states. I don’t have the full picture but it seems like we have movement to the right in rural areas and relative stasis in the suburbs. Again, I don’t have a full enough panoramic view to be able to say that part definitively. But I think that’s the general picture. We also see Democratic Senate and House candidates running ahead of Harris. So that feature of the 2024 polls was not a mirage or a delta that was destined to close by the election day.
Regardless of who wins the presidency, I think the overall verdict has to be that the polls were pretty accurate, both in the swing states and nationwide.
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The fight for the House is still competitive, and may take days or weeks to conclude. Devastated Democrats will be desperate to flip the lower chamber as a check on Trump’s agenda.
From cutting children’s disability benefits to allowing employers to pocket workers’ tips, Trump tried to slash protections for the working poor in ways that have been forgotten by many.
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