The post-mortems that Dems go through every time we lose an election are brutal and stupid. Everything is thrown at the wall, we argue for months over tiny issues that we’re sure lost us the election.
This one is simple:
Harris started in a hole created by the perception of a bad economy and Biden’s resulting dismal approval numbers. The fundamentals sucked. Trump had a sizeable electoral college advantage already even in the Spring. Sure, GDP and stocks were up, but working class people register the price of groceries and gas, not the Dow or nuances of unemployment stats. Legit models showed that Trump was the early favorite even despite Biden’s age problems. If Biden had stayed in, Trump would have had a 9 in 10 chance of winning. Due to Harris’s surprise entry into the race, that dropped to a 3 in 4 chance. Bad odds no matter what.
Couple that with some misogyny to cement the issue (esp among certain key demographics like Latino men) and Trump is elected.
My sense is Trump’s win was baked in by early summer. Harris ran a great campaign but nothing she did could overcome the fundamentals. Her VP choice wouldn’t have mattered much, nor would her position on Israel or a host of other issues. The only thing that might have made a difference is if she could have materially changed the cost of living for the working class—i.e. caused gas and grocery prices to go down or interest rates to drop to 3%—and bucked what many people saw as Biden’s economic slump. Sure, that perception isn’t fair (“the economy is booming! the GDP!”) but the sirens had been blaring for a year that working people saw and felt a bad economy.
Legit pollsters were telling us this all along (with several prominent misses like Selzer). Many of us just didn’t want to believe it and sought out affirming polls. Or tried to rationalize the idea that polls were overcompensating for misses in 2016 and 2020, that there was a hidden Dem vote, that Republican wives en masse were secretly voting against their husbands. I too sought out these complicated, magic narratives.
The issue, once again and always, was the economy. Let’s call it the felt economy, not the statistical economy. The pocket book and the kitchen table. Misogyny played a role too, yes, but it was mostly fundamentals.
I realize this is cold comfort. But my hope is that Dems stop relitigating every tiny nuance of the past three months and get back to working for working people. That’s what ultimately matters.
