From TPM Reader JD …
As 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.
– Can we have a new rule for Democrats? If you give people money, fucking tell them. No, not just with signing statements or campaign speeches or ads; that’s not good enough (although those didn’t happen either). When Dems passed that temporary fully refundable family tax credit, those $500 checks should have been paper, they should have had Biden’s signature, and they should have been at the bottom of a letter saying, “This check is your tax refund from President Biden’s plan to improve lives for working families. You will receive one per month as long as the program lasts” with the names and numbers of their congressional representatives and how they voted underneath. When the program started approaching expiration, they should have gotten a letter with a bright red border warning them that the program was going to expire if Congress didn’t renew, and the same Congress info again.
Would this one weird trick really have changed the outcome? Actually I think yes. But this principle should be applied to every single thing Democrats do. If Dem elites feel like this is somehow improper, they need to get the true lesson of the last 30 years of Republican politics: decorum is for losers. Read any of the interviews with the undecided or disaffected voters who decided this election. Think what it would take to get a political fact to stick in their head and survive the talk radio/podcast propaganda. Act accordingly.
– Trump’s coalition includes Latinos and Great Replacement theorists, billionaires and resentful union workers, a fierce determination to tariff everything and a lot of voters who just want prices to go down. That, to me, seems less like a new dominant political juggernaut and more like a minecart of dynamite with a lit fuse. It’s easy for everyone to have their own imaginary version of Trump when he’s not in office doing things.
