Editors’ Blog
The Aftermath of Competitive Hyperbole 
I think this post will displease or even enrage some readers. But I have to write it. I’ve spent the last several days thinking through various things Democrats will need to do to confront and challenge the incoming Trump administration and things Democrats should now do differently. That is not only with what they’ve learned from this campaign and defeat but with a hand now free of the locked-in realities of Joe Biden’s incumbency and the first two years especially of his administration. That to-do list is critical to get right. The tasks are real, super-important and Democrats need to get down to work on them right away.
But for many people, the dire consequences of Trump’s election are distorting our understanding of just how he was elected. They’re not the same thing. And the difference matters. I see repeated headlines about how the Democratic Party and its political coalition have been “shattered” or are now in “shambles.” I’m having an, I hope, friendly email exchange with one reader who told me this morning that he felt no one, including TPM, prepared him for Trump’s “overwhelming victory.” Analysis pieces in the big papers state as a given that it will take years or possibly decades of rebuilding for the party to recover.
I really have no choice but to say that all of this is immense and innumerate bullshit. This isn’t even a subjective point. What we have is a bout of escalating competitive hyperbole in which the wild overstatement keeps getting ramped up because no one is willing to step up and state the obvious for fear of being shouted down as being in denial or naive or not recognizing the gravity of the crisis or whatever. Without anyone willing to push back, the chorus just keeps moving to more and more over-the-top claims. A party with a bit more self-respect and spine would be less bowled over by claims from the opposition and a press in the habit of portraying Democrats in the most negative terms. But here we are.
Read MoreThe first picks for Trump’s Cabinet show more commonality between terms one and two than some might have expected. None of these are “power” positions in a Trump administration. Those are going to be in the White House, the Pentagon, Justice, CIA and Treasury. But Stefanik, Zeldin and Rubio aren’t ideologues either. They’re mostly loyalists, people who remade themselves not so much in Trump’s image as reflexive supporters. Marco Rubio is less a hardliner than a thin and insubstantial slice of soap. What he is mostly is servile, soft. At least in these positions that seems to be what Trump wants – people who’ve already been broken in.
Read More
Reckonings of Contempt
You can’t turn a virtual page these days without finding a new article or column or editorial forecasting or demanding a “reckoning” for Democrats after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris for the presidency. In some respects that’s as it should be. It was a critical election and Democrats came up short. So it’s important to ask why and come up with good answers to launch back into the fight against Trumpism and everything it represents. But it would be my failure if I didn’t point out that many of these reckoningers, let’s call them, are born of the same tilted playing field we discussed leading up to this defeat and played some role in creating it.
Read MoreIn response to today’s Backchannel, longtime TPM Reader LS wrote in to say that while she generally agreed with my evaluation of Kamala Harris’ campaign, she thought digesting the mechanics of campaigns were sort of beside the point now. The problems and the roots of Democrats’ defeat ran far deeper. I wrote back to tell her that I actually thought we were saying the same thing. Since there was probably similar unclarity with other readers I wanted to tell you more or less what I told her.
Read MoreI wanted to note that quite a few of you have subscribed to TPM over the last 48 hours – currently more than 200 readers and continuing to rise. We get that people are exhausted, despondent, angry, and probably just tired of feeling so many things, none of them pleasant, all at once. Folks here feel many of the same things. I’ve spoken to you about our membership system at many points and in many ways over the years, about its importance and centrality. Today isn’t the time for us to be getting into that. What I wanted to say is that we greatly appreciate the show of support, the vote of confidence in our importance in the larger politico-media ecosystem, or simply in your world. Thank you.
How Good or Bad a Campaign Did Harris Run?
Running for president is a “no excuses” endeavor. If you win you become the most powerful person in the world and if you lose you become a dumping ground for disappointment, ridicule, blame, recrimination. And that’s just from your friends. It’s an enterprise both binary and brutal.
Democrats have much bigger challenges ahead than worrying about Kamala Harris’ feelings or future reputation. That’s not my concern here. But it’s important for every aspect of what Democrats have to do going forward to understand as well as they can what happened, why it happened and more. You know my opinion. I wrote the day before the election that I thought she ran a near-flawless campaign. I wanted to commit that to virtual paper in advance of the result because we inevitably judge campaigns by reading back from the result.
Read MoreFrom TPM Reader K …
Read MoreThanks for these reaction dispatches. This morning after reading the great discussions about the lack of a liberal or Democratic social media/current media landscape, I had a discussion with my 22-year-old son and wanted to add some commentary from a Gen Z (male) voice.
When asked why he (a Democratic Socialist who has reacted very emotionally to the election outcome) thought the younger male vote turned to Trump, he said this:
From TPM Reader JD …
Read MoreAs we all go through our collective grief processing, I just wanted to throw down three markers:
– It looks like the popular vote margin shifted by like 8 points from 2020 to 2024. The margin in the key battlegrounds looks more like a 2-3 point shift. Harris smoked Trump’s ground game. In a slightly less hostile national environment it would be her winning the EC while losing the PV. Unless the goal was to get votes in Chicago and the Bronx, neither Musk nor LaCivita’s grand schemes did anything. Cold comfort indeed, but good to bear in mind when we see the inevitable crowing. And also, personally, that is a much more dramatic ground game benefit than I imagined.
From TPM Reader AB …
Read MoreBeen reading these and thought I would throw in mine, even though in an ideal world we would mandate a cooldown period where everyone had to hold off a week for any takes. So many of them seem to be either people lashing out because they’re upset and terrified or score settling for their particular hobbyhorse that they would be advocating for regardless of what the outcome had been. It’s going to take another beat before we can find any constructive path forward.
As someone who has worked on abortion for a long time, I don’t think it’s fair to say that it doesn’t have electoral salience for Democrats. While abortion was on the ballot in a lot of states, it wasn’t actually a large part of many federal campaign’s messaging. There seems to have been an assumption that it would be self-evident, but that’s just not true, particularly because of the confusing way it happened through the courts and technically under Biden. And a lot of Republican candidates flat out lied or fundamentally misrepresented their position on abortion in ways the media didn’t pick up. I’m sure a lot of the people who voted for both abortion referenda and Trump genuinely thought they were picking a pro-choice candidate.
From TPM Reader NL …
Read MoreI just had to chime here because I am deeply worried that we will learn the wrong lessons from 2024.
I understand Reader DS’s (#7) frustration with the outcome, but Reader AJ (#4) is much closer to the mark in my book. Look, 2024 was not a landslide for Trump. What makes 2024 so disappointing is that the map looks a lot like the House vote in 2022. Biden’s approval rating has basically been steady since late 2022. The economic conditions do not feel much different than 2022. Prices might not be rising, but they are pretty high relative to 3-4 years ago. Interest rates are high and housing is in short supply. A whopping 67% of people think the country is on the wrong track. Like many others, I thought the democracy argument would win the day. It did not.