In 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.

I 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.

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.

From TPM Reader K …

Thanks 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 …

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.

From TPM Reader AB …

Been 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.