The Day After

Donald Trump's victory was exactly what we progressives have been warning about. It's imperative that we rationally analyze what happened to determine where we go from here

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Cutting Through The Day After

The election of 2024 was a devastating setback for progressivism. In fact it was devastating for humanity.

Progressive pundits are scrambling to put a positive spin on this today, and to divert blame from the Democratic party strategic leadership that has proven itself so incompetent so often. If that’s what you’re looking for, you will not find it here, but don’t fret, there’s plenty of it out there.

The moment calls for two things: first, an honest and uncompromising assessment of what happened and why; and second, developing a serious plan for what comes next.

The first part is much easier, and I’ll be getting into that in a moment. The second part requires a much broader and lengthier conversation, one that encompasses various strands of progressivism that can come together on broad principles, overcome areas of disagreement, and press for a different political playing field even while we each pursue those causes to which we have, individually and collectively, decided to dedicate our efforts.

I’ll chip in with some thoughts to try to stimulate that long term conversation in a video companion to this piece. Here, let’s look at the mess we find ourselves in.

Trump 2.0

This is not the 2016 Donald Trump, my friends. Trump is personally less dynamic than he was back then. As autocratic and fascistic as he is, he is also 78 years old. You could see it in his campaign, where his appearances were much more sporadic, and he was less energetic on stage than he was eight years ago.

That sounds like an advantage, but it isn’t. Trump’s capriciousness and impulsiveness are still there, but this second term is going to be less about him than it will be about those around him. And that cast of characters is going to be markedly different than the one we contended with in Trump’s first term.

This time around, they aren’t surprised they won. There are lots of plans for the next four years, the most infamous being Project 2025, and they’ve been lining up the tactics, resources, and professional personnel to make them reality. The upshot of this, whether your cause is immigration, Palestine, climate change, the judiciary, or any other issue is that neither grassroots organizing nor policy advocacy is going to be enough by themselves. If those two tactics are not merged in a strategic and holistic way, we will not have the Trump administration’s lack of preparedness and confusion to fall back on as we did last time.

The dismal failure of the Harris campaign

There are many factors that go into a winning or losing campaign, and not all of them are quantifiable. Those of us who work in politics, whether in lobbying, advocacy, strategizing, or campaigning, need to be able to make honest assessments of why a campaign succeeds or fails, not look for excuses or convoluted ways in which we were really right all along.

The difficulty is that it is often impossible to do more than produce a theory that can’t be proven until the next election and, by then, it’s too late if the theory is wrong.  

The resistance among liberals to recognizing why they keep failing, the desperate clutching to find reasons for that failure that are beyond their immediate control, is an intolerable flaw and a major reason why Republicans make as much headway as they do. We have to do better at our assessments.

Structural issues

Democrats are not wrong in pointing to certain structural issues that stack the deck in favor of rural, southern, former slave states as well as in favor of the dominant, white supremacist ideology that remains fundamental to the United States.

The electoral college and the Senate are the obvious structural issues we face in elections and in advocacy, but entrenched, oligarchical wealth and outdated ideas are also key pieces, and they impact these races powerfully.

In 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump lost the popular vote. This time, he won it, and, at this writing, it seems like the margin of his popular victory will be significant. So this time, the electoral college isn’t the problem.

But Kamala Harris also had to contend with racism and misogyny. It would be naïve to believe that these were not factors.

But there is also no good reason to believe that they were decisive. After all, she was a Black and South Asian woman when she entered the race and immediately soared in polls, erasing the considerable deficit that Joe Biden faced with Donald Trump.

Then she hit a wall. Why? This is where we need to look at a truly historic failure of campaign strategy.

Harris had the benefit of two prior campaigns against Donald Trump, both of which ended in decisive popular vote victories for the Democrats despite neither candidate having been particularly strong. Yet, inexplicably, she decided to turn to the strategy that lost the electoral college in 2016 rather than the one she was part of winning in 2020.

Some have pointed to Harris’ “limited time frame” and wondered if things might have been different if Joe Biden had stepped aside earlier. One can never be certain about a counter-factual, but this one seems as close as you can get to being absolutely wrong.

Harris didn’t need more time. She entered the race with a fully staffed and engaged national campaign team, and a loaded war chest that got a huge infusion of cash when she replaced Biden. Strategies were already developed. She was able to simply step into an already functioning machine whose only problem was the man she was replacing.

In fact, it was the Trump campaign that was thrown off balance by her entry. Once a significant number of major Democratic donors withheld their donations until Biden quit the race, it was clearly only a matter of time before that happened, yet the Trump campaign was unprepared and was scrambling for the first few weeks to recalibrate their attacks to suit Harris instead of Biden. In the end, the abbreviated time frame was a boon for Harris.

No, her problem was poor decision-making and a terrible approach to attracting voters.

Where’s the base?

Joe Biden had to step aside because he had lost the base of the Democratic party, and the donors recognized this and used their muscle to oust him. But what is the “base?” The thing is, it’s not the progressives, even though on policy, progressives are the majority of the party, as we can see from opinion polls on the issues.

The base of the Democratic party—that is, the mass of the party faithful, who make up the bulk of the crowds, who vote “blue no matter who”—are liberals, tend to be professionals, are more often than not in the middle or upper middle classes economically, and are a diverse mix of ethnicities and identities.

But, while they often agree with progressives or leftists on many, though not all, policy questions, that base also tends to take a more incremental approach to change. They are enthusiastic about minor policy changes, like those that Biden managed on issues such as climate change and guns, as long as they are improvements over the status quo. Given the awful track record both parties have on such issues, the most insignificant change is enormous by historical comparison.

Progressives and radicals tend to identify more with Nina Simone singing about things going “too slow.” The policy goals of the people, rather than the leaders, are often the same, but where tactics fall on the scale between incrementalism and revolutionary change—a much more complicated scale than the simple binary that question is often presented as—is where the differences lay.

Those same incrementalist liberals also made up Barack Obama’s base, but Obama was able to reach beyond the base. Obama brought in voters who might not have liked him, who might have been deeply bothered by his very skin color, but voted for him because he promised change. The fact that he didn’t deliver and was seen (accurately) as bailing out Wall Street over bailing out ordinary citizens, among other shortcomings, disillusioned many who had bought into his “change you can believe in” rhetoric.

That’s where many have erred. In 2016, I was very much among those who underestimated Donald Trump and his ability to reach beyond his base. In 2020, he had a much harder time doing that because so many people had been mobilized not only by Trump’s bumbling of the COVID crisis, but by the ruptures in our society that first COVID and then the murder of George Floyd laid bare.

But after 2016, we all should have understood that Trump, for all his insanity and bizarre behavior, for all his fascistic and autocratic leanings, was capable of reaching beyond his base.

He did it again in this race. We laughed at the staged nature of his McDonald’s stunt, or his attempt to salvage the Madison Square Garden debacle by riding in a garbage truck with an orange vest on. We thought how silly it was that Mr. Muslim Ban was visiting mosques all over Michigan.

The stunts themselves may or may not have won Muslim or Latinx votes, but what they showed was a candidate who was reaching out to voters beyond his base. Perhaps a given Muslim woman in Michigan was unconvinced, but maybe some guy down the street from her saw that and felt like Trump was at least making the effort to get votes, and was impressed by it. Or perhaps the stunts were directly effective at communicating to voters who were open to being convinced.

Even after the MSG debacle, 45% of Latinx voters supported Trump. In 2020, that figure was 32%. That’s a huge leap, despite the anti-Latinx rhetoric in Trump’s campaign.

On the other side, Kamala Harris alienated voters in so many ways.

First, she doubled down heavily on a strategy of “are you really going to vote for Trump?” On issues like immigration and Gaza, Harris took a conservative position, sticking close to her current boss. This reflects a belief that the argument of “Trump will be even worse” is persuasive, despite decades of evidence that this sort of negative pitch is ineffective.

More broadly, Harris pursued Hillary Clinton’s failed strategy of tacking to the right, appealing to conservative voters by embracing people like Liz and Dick Cheney, two incredibly unpopular figures, and two people whose conservatism is as far to the right on the political spectrum as Trump himself. No, they don’t back autocracy, but Liz Cheney voted in support of Trump 92.9% of the time when she was in Congress. That’s slightly higher than current House Speaker Mike Johnson. She’s a champion of Trumpism. She just wants someone else to lead it.

Not only did this alienate voters Harris desperately needed to win over, it did so for no benefit. Conservative Democrats, Never-Trump Republicans, and right-leaning Independents who are mistrustful of Trump were already solidly in the Harris camp. They have been for the past eight years. There was no need to shore up their support.

It went beyond the Cheneys. Harris, after quickly improving her poll numbers and overtaking Trump in August, made sure to reach out to business and conservative leaders, assuring them that she was going to be more friendly to their concerns than Biden. Her policy proposals were so modest as to be virtually unnoticeable. Her anti-price gouging plan that so much was made of would have done nothing to address the massive increase in food prices over the past five years, as it would only prevent price gouging during emergencies, just to cite one example.

Harris moved far away from some of Biden’s more successful policies. She offered no proposal like the CHIPS Act, or student loan relief (an issue she avoided like it was a new strain of super COVID).

Harris believed she could paper over this lack of appeal to people who are struggling with a “campaign of joy,” an attempt to contrast Trump’s constant flow of grievance. For people who felt better in 2024 than they did in 2020, who were reasonably secure or at least stable financially who recalled the madness of the Trump era, this was effective, and we saw the positive responses at her rallies. But, again, that’s her base.

For the people who are struggling to put food on the table and who, while perhaps working now, are laboring just to get the same insufficient income they were getting in quarantine five years ago, it comes off as tone deaf.

Where Trump pretended to understand people’s struggles, even if it was a pathetically transparent performance, Harris demonstrated the sort of condescension that has been the bane of Democrats for decades.

People campaigning for her fell into the same trap. Whether it was Obama berating Black men as if they, rather than white people, were the key to Trump’s support or Bill Clinton going on a racist, anti-Palestinian, arrogant diatribe, the high-profile Harris boosters implied that people owed Harris their support rather than Harris owing her service to the voters. It reinforced the alienation of many Arab, Muslim, young, and progressive voters.

The Harris campaign’s failure was epitomized in two words: “I’m Speaking.”

Harris decided that the way to respond to legitimate questions from key constituents about a major policy issue was to say that her being heard was more important than the fact that she is part of an administration that is committing the worst genocide of the 21st century.

Even if you were not a Palestine solidarity activist, this was a bad look if you were not already sold on Harris. The response at her rallies was overwhelming applause when she said these words, and she did it several times. Her base loved it. But it alienated a lot of people outside that base and those were the voters she needed to win this election.

Joe Biden has been, since he arrived in the Senate in 1973, one of the most conservative figures in the Democratic caucus. But he is also a very (perhaps TOO) experienced politician, and in 2020 he recognized which voters were outside his base that he needed to reach. Perhaps it was the lesson he learned from Clinton in 2016, but wherever he learned it, Biden realized he needed progressives. He made deals with Bernie Sanders to bring in those voters, and he kicked Trump’s ass out of the White House.

Harris repeatedly alienated progressives, showed contempt for Arab and Muslim voters and anyone who cared about Palestine, and made the decision to reach to the right, just like Clinton did. Given the well-known definition of insanity, Harris, by copying Clinton’s suicidal strategy instead of Biden’s winning formula, marked herself insane,

As I explain in my video, this is also the lesson we progressives need to learn. We need to stop devaluing ourselves and our support. Whatever strategy we pursue, whether that’s within the Democratic party or outside of it, we need to recognize our own value and our own power.

Democrats or any other candidates who are to the left of the Republicans, can’t win without us. We need to be smart about that, we need to be strategic, and not reckless. But we also need to be confident in that reality  and bold in our use of it. Voter turnout was down from 2020, and that is always bad for Democrats. It was a result of her alienating voters outside of her base.

Kamala Harris’ horribly flawed campaign has left us with four more years of Donald Trump and the very real possibility that he will use those four years to put us on an authoritarian path we may not be able to get off of any time soon. We have the power to change that, but only if we use it starting now, not when the next election (if the Republicans permit one) comes around.

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News Roundup

How Israel's wars and Trump comeback are changing Iran's national security doctrine

By Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Middle East Eye, November 6, 2024

‘Israel will keep invading – with more ease’: Gaza dreads Trump presidency

By Mohamed Solaimane, Al Jazeera, November 6, 2024

This Time We Have to Hold the Democratic Party Elite Responsible for This Catastrophe

By Jeet Heer, The Nation, November 6, 2024

Trump is Eyeing Iran Hawk Brian Hook as First Foreign Policy Pick

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Israeli army 'preventing' return of forcibly expelled Palestinians to north Gaza

By Mera Aladam, Middle East Eye, November 6, 2024

Turmoil at the ICC as fears rise over Israel and the U.S. interference

By Craig Mokhiber, Mondoweiss, November 5, 2024

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