Axios this morning leads with the email subject line: “Dems’ private panic.” And then inside the email “1 big thing: Dems fear they’re blowing it.” In this case I’m not really writing to criticize Axios, which I admittedly, and rightly, often do. Because what they’re describing here is real. This post is agnostic on what the result of the election is going to be. And for what it’s worth, I keep in close touch with numerous high level campaign operatives in the swing states and I do not sense panic or pessimism from them. They all know it could go either way but I don’t think they think they’re losing. My topic is this blame feature of Democrats’ mass psychology, which is strongly echoed in the press, and their tendency to panic and almost always think they’re going to lose unless the available evidence to the contrary is simply overwhelming. But it’s not the “bedwetting” that interests me most. It’s the second version of the headline, that blame feature: “Dems fear they’re blowing it.”
This is a framing theme throughout political discourse in the United States. It shows up in many ways besides panicking in the days before a big election. (It’s why we often see more headlines about what Democrats should do about the crazy thing Trump says than the thing he said itself.) There is an assumption that it is the natural course of things that Democrats should win elections. If they don’t win, it’s not only that they failed but that they did something to upset the ordinary course of events. In other words, they blew it. They ran a bad campaign, made some fatal error, didn’t do the one thing they should have done.
Of course, much of this is a matter of perspective. Losing is by definition failure. The reaction to defeat is seldom, “Job well done. It is what it is.” Some degree of recrimination is natural. But “blowing it” means messing up something you should have and could have won. It’s a curious form of myopia: the belief that Democrats are the only players in the political world with agency. It’s akin to the way newborns, in their emerging consciousness, lack the ability to distinguish between themselves and the world beyond their physical body. Everything is just an emanation of themselves.
Needless to say, I don’t think this is a realistic or good way of looking at the world. It’s simply not how the world actually works. It’s also a recipe for a form of permanent self-recrimination. Some people, perhaps some collectivities, find this comforting. It went badly but I was actually in control the whole time. I just didn’t do the right thing and next time I will. That doesn’t seem comforting to me. But regardless, it’s not reality. There are some people who still think that Harris should be running away with this. The fact that she’s not shows the shortcoming of her campaign. Let’s remind ourselves that incumbent parties are getting crushed post-pandemic basically everywhere in Europe and in other industrial democracies. The idea that Harris should be ahead is not obvious at all. The fact that Harris has a good chance of winning this is some mix of the quality of her campaign and the rancidness of Donald Trump.
In any case, this is something to consider generally about how we think about elections, political life and simple reality. We don’t control everything. Some things, many things are out of our hands. The problem is that it’s hard to know which is which. So we do our level best. We see what the results are and then we move forward.