The Backchannel

I’ve written in general against post-election recriminations since November 5th. This post may seem like one such recrimination on the surface. But I think if you bear with me, you’ll see that it’s really not. I should be clear, too, that being anti-recriminations, whatever that might mean, doesn’t or shouldn’t mean people shouldn’t try to figure out what was done right or wrong, criticize whoever needs to be criticized. Of course they should. What it means to me at least is that in the desolation of a really, really hard defeat, a very consequential one, people shouldn’t rush in to take shots at the folks they’ve always had it in for, using the devastation less as a wound to overcome than an opportunity for the old score-settling.

So here’s the issue I want to discuss.

Until his campaign began to come undone this last summer, it was widely understood and accepted among Democrats that Joe Biden, to the surprise of many, was the most progressive Democratic president, with the most consequential progressive legislative agenda, in at least half a century. This was widely believed because it was unquestionably true. Because of a series of decisions by both Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden ended up governing with a trimmed down version of the legislative agenda of the progressive left. What counts here as “trimmed down” is obviously a pretty critical question. There was no Medicare for All. But on lots of policy and regulatory positions, the left’s agenda was Biden’s. This isn’t just me saying this. Ask Bernie Sanders, or at least ask him until a week ago. The point I’m making here really isn’t open to much debate.

In the waning days of the 2024 presidential campaign, Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos became the target of widespread and deserved disgust for nixing The Washington Post’s policy of endorsing presidential candidates to avoid antagonizing Trump. As I wrote at the time, it’s not that there’s anything magical or even necessary about newspaper endorsements. The whole concept strikes me as a bit dated. The issue was why they were being dropped. Bezos wasn’t being paranoid. There is abundant and persuasive evidence that Trump used the levers of government to punish Bezos through Amazon and his Blue Origin space delivery company during his first term. The phrase many people used to describe this behavior is “anticipatory obedience.” (I’ve been told the phrase might originate with Timothy Snyder. I don’t know if he coined it or simply brought it to wider use.) But there’s another kind of anticipatory obedience I’ve seen like a torrent in the days since Trump won the election, and it’s more paradoxical because it comes from people who feel they are the most intense of opposers.

During harrowing times some people become overwhelmed and even lose hope. It’s not a one-way progress. Almost everyone has their moments. But there’s a particular kind of militant doomerism afoot at the moment. Any discussions of next steps in the battle against Trumpism or the preservation of civic democracy, any suggestions or strategies, are met with a chorus of, “don’t you get how it worked under Hitler and Stalin!!?!” Or “don’t you know rules don’t matter to Donald Trump!?!?!”

Today is the anniversary of this site, founded 24 years ago today.

It’s always been one of the features of TPM’s history that these anniversaries come right on the heels of elections — so either another milestone amidst the reverie and relief of good results or a reminder of the long view in the daze of bad ones. And it’s no accident. The site literally began as an effort to cover an election that was already over, or that was supposed to be over. That wasn’t the only reason the site began. I had it hazily in my mind to do something like it. There were even a few false starts at it in the few months before I did. But the election was the trigger. I had planned to spend a week with my then-girlfriend in New Haven after the 2000 election was concluded. But it turned out not to be over. The story was fast-moving, couldn’t wait on daily publishing schedules, let alone the weeks-long ones at my day job at The American Prospect, where I wasn’t going to have free rein in any case. So I just dove in and it never stopped.

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.

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.

There’s a delicate balance in moments like this for anyone who has any level of megaphone. You don’t want to sound pollyannaish or appear that you’re in some kind of denial about the gravity of the situation. Just as much, though, you don’t want to affirm perceptions or feelings that are natural and even healthy but are still not altogether accurate.

America is not in or destined for autocracy. We took a step closer to it on Tuesday. And it was a pretty decent sized one. We elected a man all of whose instincts and desires are to govern as an autocrat. And that was after the country got a chance to see who he was up close once already. So we not only got that but we got that with a majority, though the tiniest of ones, voting for it with every reason to know who Trump is. I said in an earlier post that I don’t believe a majority of the country wants the future Trump is promising. In response, one reader wrote, with a lot of intensity, that I was letting voters off the hook. They knew exactly what they were getting, etc.

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.

What did this mean? Why did this happen?

We are going to be here a while today. And when I thought about writing today’s Backchannel, a standard post didn’t make sense to me since anything you receive in the late afternoon will be immediately dated. So I thought I’d write a simple cheat sheet of ways to watch election results tonight — if you’re into that sort of thing — and how to get as much signal and as little noise as possible. You’ll know many of these things. But I’m just putting them here in one place.

The great secret and poverty of campaign reporting is that the majority of it is based on reading the polls or the eventual result and then writing a story of the campaign to match that outcome, predicted or real. Every losing campaign is run by idiots and vice versa. With that reality in mind, I wanted to share some opinions in advance of the results. I think Kamala Harris has run an almost flawless campaign. Many people think a great campaign is made up of a great strategy, or perhaps a great speech. The truth is that campaigns are almost all down to execution. That’s particularly so in an early 21st century American presidential campaign, when the main constituencies and issues are chosen in advance and not by the candidate.

An upstart city council or even House candidate might upset the status quo with an outside-the-box campaign or set of issues. Presidential campaigns don’t work that way. Presidential campaigns are won by energizing and mobilizing key constituencies, shaping the issue agenda in your favor and having more days on offense than defense. On the constituencies front, that means base and reach constituencies. On issues, it’s mostly about raising the salience of issues where a majority agrees with you. Above all, it’s about not making mistakes. It’s also about running a campaign of the quality that you force a lot of mistakes by your opponent. As I said, it’s mainly about execution.

I told you a week or more ago not to try to interpret early voting data yourself. And don’t put much stock in a hot take on it you see from someone on Twitter. It’s a fool’s errand. If you have access to a lot of data you can draw inferences. That can be real-time modeling data the campaigns have access to or it can be various other datasets that provide context for interpreting the data. Even with all that, the hallmark of someone who actually knows what they’re talking about is a lot of tentativeness and uncertainty. With a lot of knowledge you can point to patterns or a tightened ranges of possibilities, not certainties.

I’m doing this post both because the findings are interesting but also because it’s an illustration of how you can actually pull some signals out of the data when you really know your stuff.