There Is No Back to Normal
Rethinking everything we know about American politics
Ever since the polls closed, I’ve had trouble figuring out what to say. It’s not just the dread of our having delivering a mandate for pugnacious reactionism, the fear of a vengeful Donald Trump, or the anxiety about what a more-prepared Trump administration and a potential Republican trifecta will mean for the country and the world. The 2024 election was truly stunning because the results upended what we took for granted about our political system and institutions.
There are so many things we didn’t know we didn’t know. Reckoning with that revelation will mean rethinking how we understand American politics forever.
How were we to expect that Trump would win not just the election but the popular vote? The polling averages ended up to be decently accurate, overestimating Kamala Harris’ strength by only about 2 points overall, a smaller miss than 2020 or 2016. But there were other signs that we — by which I mean I, but I wasn’t alone — assumed would tip the balance in her favor. The bellwether Washington primary was a signifier of strength. An Iowa poll from a notoriously accurate source looked like a gutsy harbinger of Democratic strength that other, suspiciously herded surveys had missed. Harris’ camp had a highly touted ground game and reported lofty turnout on Election Day, while the Republicans dealt with the debacle of Elon Musk’s mismanagement. Yet Trump won in a landslide, or at least what passes for one in today’s polarized environment. He is on track to win all seven consensus swing states. Nearly the entire country shifted right, regardless of demographics or geography. Trump even made large inroads in deep blue states. As I write this, he is only five points behind Harris in New Jersey. Here in the liberal bastion of Rhode Island, where a GOP Presidential candidate had not reached 40 percent since before I was born, the margin is closer than it is in Texas, which the Democrats believed they could keep close. Can we ever trust such signals again?
Was there any way for the Democrats to win? A loss this large, in which Harris underperformed Biden with virtually every constituency, is hard to explain through any one factor. Would Harris pivoting to the left instead of campaigning with Liz Cheney have encouraged the base to turn out? There would at least be some poetic justice in it if you believe the electoral consequences of supporting the genocide in Gaza were decisive. Could she have cannibalized more conservative votes if she had gone full Blue Dog instead of framing her bipartisan outreach in supra-ideological terms? Would staking out a clearer worldview in any direction instead of committing herself to the unpopular Biden administration have helped her? Should she have done more interviews? Fewer rallies with celebrities? Was this the normal incumbent-backlash red wave pundits had expected during the midterms, merely stalled two years by Dobbs instead of fully forestalled? I was certain that Biden would lose to Trump had he stayed in the race. As hard as it is to imagine that Biden would have done any better than Harris, I’m humbled enough now to wonder if him dropping out was a mistake.
Why did Trump pay no price for all his crimes and scandals? Most observers assumed that the January 6 insurrection was the end of his political viability. He was convicted of 34 felonies after he left office. Do his legal troubles make him seem cool and strong? After nearly a decade of opponents decrying his uncouth remarks and cartoonish corruption, do voters simply tune it out? Would Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein have been a more-effective line of attack, and has the party erred in holstering that talking point to avoid reckoning with what that would say about Bill Clinton? Has the dissonance between the seriousness with which the Democrats have described Trump’s actions and their lackadaisical approach to prosecuting him made the whole thing feel like a campaign smear? And how do you explain that such a candidate not only maintained his popular appeal, but that notable swaths of Trump voters split their tickets and supported downballot Democrats over less-scandal-ridden Republicans?
How are we to make sense of the electoral trends? Voting against one’s apparent interests is often turned into a condescending meme, but honestly engaging with why is crucial to understanding this political moment. A man whose signature political position is being racist towards Hispanics just became the first Republican in history to win among Latino men. Is the tide of racial depolarization stronger than the headwinds of a Trump surrogate calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage”? Or did the Democrats lose their aura of compassion when they tried to outflank Trump on immigration draconianism? Is young voters’ move away from the Democratic Party a function of right-wing social media ecosystems? Or is it because of the Biden administration’s disinterest in the priorities of those who will inherit our planet, and their tacit endorsement of police beating up their friends at peaceful protests? Do those who voted for Trump out of frustration with inflation not realize that his tariff plans would send prices even higher? Or is it enough that the Republicans acknowledge voters’ economic pain instead of the Democrats’ approach of Shut Up Everything’s Fine?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. And after this election, I’m skeptical of anyone who claims to.
Through all this, some things we have learned for sure. The first is that the Democrats’ theory of politics failed. For four years, the Biden administration and the Harris campaign have stubbornly insisted that their incremental, technocratic approach to governance was prudent and effective, and dismissed criticism from all sides as naïve or disingenuous. The economy is working for ordinary people! We’re doing everything we can to protect abortion rights and prevent humanitarian disaster in Gaza! Should we just send COVID tests to everyone? As far as party spokespeople and loyal pundits were concerned, thoughts to the contrary were all nonsense from TikTok. It turns out the voters’ opinions matter too. Even in the last few hours, I’ve heard supporters insist that Harris ran a great campaign. The hell she did! Set aside the miscalculations that were obvious before Election Day. She lost in a landslide to a deflated sack of sadism and tanning lotion. The idea that Harris (or Biden, or Clinton, or whoever) cannot fail, they can only be failed, is not just a turnoff for those who aren’t already Voting Blue No Matter Who, but a delusion that lulls the party into thinking they can skip the work of doing politics.
The second is that Trump’s noxiousness is not politically fatal. This matter is now settled. Over the last few days, some of his earliest scandalous sound bites — calling Mexican immigrants rapists, mocking a journalist’s physical disability — made the rounds on social media, with people asking: Why wasn’t this the end of it? It surely should have been. But it wasn’t, so we must adapt to this reality. For the second time in eight years, the Democrats lost a bet that they could run on a platform of continuity and still win disillusioned voters if they framed the election as a referendum on Trump’s character. We cannot afford to waste any more campaigns wishing that his countless criminal acts were disqualifying for the electorate.
The third is that whatever’s coming is not good. Elon Musk says he plans to cut the federal budget by a third, even understanding that doing so would bring “hardship” to the country. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to strip the Food and Drug Administration to the studs and put his own unscientific stamp on our public-health system. Courts and government agencies will be further shaped in service of a reactionary agenda. Immigration, climate change, foreign policy, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive health. It’s hard to fathom how far they will go to make the world a worse place. After this week, I wouldn’t even deign to try.
Whatever comes next, we need to be good to each other, to protect our marginalized communities, and to start working towards building a better world. It will take some humility and new perspectives to get us there.
The last paragraph says it all
Great perspective, Lewie. Really hurting here in the Nutmeg State 😢