THE WOMAN FACTOR, LOST MORALITY FACTOR, BRANDING SUCCESS, NORMALIZING TRUMP
Harris lost in large part because 9 to 10 million “reliable Democratic voters” just stayed home. She lost to “the couch” as they say. Why they stayed home is still being assessed.
According to John Della Volpe, the late deciding voters (most of them less aware of the policy differences between the candidates), broke for Trump not Harris.
Many voters said they remembered the stimulus check they had gotten during the pandemic that was signed by Trump instead of the head of the Treasury Dept., which had been the norm in the past. Biden also sent Americans stimulus checks but he was too bound by precedent to sign them himself. Trump breaks the rules and norms because he understands how important it is to make an impression on voters. He is a marketer and understands branding. And he was successful. Voters thought the money was coming from Trump and voted for him to return the favor.
When it came to moral leadership and moral character, exit polls showed that voters did not recognize which candidate had the better moral character. 45% of them said Trump has moral character. They also thought that Trump tells the truth as much as Biden. Many voters claimed they “did not know who Harris was”. She had changed her position on such things as fracking, for example, but Trump has done that in spades. The press bears a lot of responsibility for this public confusion about morality. Trump has been normalized. Not only Fox and conservative media but mainstream media have generally been treating Trump as they would any president running for a second term. They failed to condemn his behavior. And so have the complicit Republicans. They all failed to stand up to Trump. The electorate yearns for stability and order. They have accepted Trump’s behavior as the new normal.
The electorate also did not get the message that Trump is all in for the wealthy, not the working class. Many voters were in the dark about what Biden had done to help them. Biden failed time and time again to take a victory lap and brag about his accomplishments the way Trump or Clinton did as president. When it came to student debt relief, that effort by Biden angered many blue collar workers who felt they did not get a break like that themselves and resented it.
I believe that being a woman gave Harris an immediate handicap that was too big to overcome in a country as divided as ours where the victor in a presidential election wins by a handful of votes in each district. There has been a general cultural shift reported in the Reykjavik Index for Leadership in the past few years – trust in women leaders has gone down from 54% to 47% not only in the US but also in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the UK. Is it just too hard for women to overcome the drag of such a cultural belief? When it comes to voters in this country, I think too many Americans are not aware of the policy issues and living busy lives. They look at the choice of a man v a woman and choose the man because in their minds the man looks like what a leader should look like, especially since male leadership has been the norm. It’s wrong and it’s unfair. But maybe Democrats should factor it in as a reality for our current times. For a woman to become president in this country it is significantly harder than it is for a man. In a country this closely divided, even the smallest baggage can shift enough voters in district after district.
THE LOST AMERICAN DREAM
Not distinguishing herself from Biden turned out to be a huge problem for Kamala Harris and may have been the single biggest misstep she made. Biden had dug himself into a hole with working Americans. He would most certainly have lost this election given the sour mood of the electorate. Touting his policy successes did not get him anywhere with working Americans who were not able to get ahead in this country. The American Dream was not a reality for them. Biden got blamed because it happened on his watch. Even Biden’s infrastructure bills that got passed to help “fix the damn roads”, for example, meant nothing to many blue-collar Americans who were not feeling the direct effect of a new bridge or road in some other state, struggling, working two jobs, and not able to meet the cost of living for their families. Even if Biden had messaged better, it is unlikely that he could have appealed to enough working Americans who make up about 60% of the electorate.
FIRST TIME VOTERS WENT FOR TRUMP
An unexpected large number of younger voters, especially the first time voters, and especially boys, chose Trump over Harris. John Della Volpe reports that 18 to 24 year olds, especially boys, saw Trump as an anti-hero. First time younger voters had the biggest movement towards Trump. They learned about him through their engagement on the internet during the time of the pandemic and post-pandemic starting with sports, or music or entertainment and then got pulled into rightwing spaces which played up masculinity and apparently influenced these young men to vote for Trump and overlook his flaws- if they even knew about them. This is especially so since the Democrats appealed to more women because of the reproductive rights issue.
WOMEN DID NOT SHOW UP ENOUGH FOR HARRIS
And yet women also failed to show up in large enough numbers for Harris to win. Many of them believed Trump when he said the states would decide the abortion issue. 7 out of 10 states voted for the abortion rights initiative on the ballot in their state. After voting for that, many women felt freed up to vote for Trump at the top of the ticket. They did not connect the dots when it came to the danger of putting Trump and his rightwing Christian nationalist allies into power. They may be sorry about that if Trump simply decides one day to tell HIS justice department to enforce the Comstock Act which is still on the books. He could create an immediate national abortion ban and claim he didn’t because the law was already on the books, therefore he did not create it.
THE WAY FORWARD: DEMOCRATS MUST GIVE REAL POWER TO THE NEXT GENERATION OF LEADERS
The next generation of up and coming Democratic leaders needs to be at the table and entrusted with real power. We have a deep bench of outstanding, smart, capable, articulate younger politicians: Mallory McMorrow, Ben Wikler, David Hogg, Maxwell Frost, Hakeem Jeffries, Max Rose, and many others. They know how to communicate with their generation. They are not wedded to the old ways of running a campaign that do not work as well in this social media era. The Democrats also need to learn from people like Ruben Gallegos who won his senate seat in Arizona, to understand how to listen to and communicate with Hispanic voters. The Democratic Party should also listen to Gov Andy Beshear (Kentucky), who understands how to connect with working people in red states. If there had been an open primary he would have been a contender in the race for president and might have won. He knows how to message more effectively because he has won in his red state, not once but twice when Trump won Kentucky by a large margin.
HOW TRUMP WON
Trump ran a campaign that got him and his messages in front of way more Americans. His messages were lies, an alternate reality where Biden was the criminal and he was being unfairly indicted. He convinced millions of Americans to buy into his alternate reality with the help of rightwing social media including Elon Musk’s X . “Bad guys are coming across the border for your jobs and to attack your family! The reason you can’t get ahead and you feel dissed is the result of those awful coastal elites! I will fix it!” He bypassed legacy media (remember he cancelled a 60 Minutes interview?) doing interviews with Joe Rogan and other podcasters with huge audiences instead, had rallies in places like the Bronx, Madison Square Garden and other venues where working Americans could hear from him and feel closer to him. He pretended to be a populist on the side of the working man. His campaign directly appealed to the lost bros on the internet, namely young men who were feeling left out and unheard. His campaign had also been setting up his path to victory in battleground states for a long time with the help of Republicans state legislators and True the Vote using tactics that included massive voter roll purges, voter suppression, and micro-targeted ads that lied about Harris’ policies.
TRUMP’S NARROW VICTORY- NOT A MANDATE TO BURN IT ALL DOWN
Trump held a 1.7-point lead in the popular vote as of Monday morning, according to The New York Times. That is smaller than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s 2.1 point popular vote win in 2016 and less than half of President Joe Biden‘s 4.5 point win in 2020.
People vote for any given candidate for an array of reasons and have mixed views on political issues. Many…may vote based on a “gut assessment” on a candidate, rather than any specific policy issue. While there is usually a “mood for certain problems or issues,” this doesn’t necessarily translate to a “mandate.”
“What there is a mood for this time around is to have inflation completely tamed while not tanking the economy, to have the border made less chaotic, and to avoid on-the-ground overseas military commitments while still projecting strength. That’s a long way from saying Trump has a mandate to fire government workers, or raise tariffs, or round up and deport all people who are here illegally.”
If Trump overstates his mandate, Republicans could see electoral consequences… in the next election cycles. [Newsweek]
Lawrence Tribe writes:
“Don’t buy into the illusion that Trump has a mandate to trample the rule of law or ignore the Constitution. He does not. Under 1/3 of eligible voters picked Trump. That is no mandate but a narrow victory,” he wrote. [Lawrence Tribe on X]
Democratic strategist David Axelrod says Trump should “understand what that mandate was about.”
“It was about boosting working people and dealing with the border, not appointing extremists to seek vengeance on his opponents,” [David Axelrod on X]
As the votes continue to be counted in California, Trump’s lead in the overall vote totals keeps dwindling. He is under 50%. Not a landslide. Not a mandate. This was one of the narrowest victories in presidential election history.
WHAT TRUMP WILL DO TO HURT HIMSELF: OVERREACH CREATES BACKLASH
Americans need to brace themselves for a very ugly Trump presidency 2.0. The moment Trump takes office he will overreach; his administration will be too extreme, too chaotic, too mean and too vindictive for most Americans. That’s both good and bad news. It will be a painful time for everyone who cares about other human beings and has empathy. But overreach triggers backlash. Americans voted Trump into power to get a reset on the American Dream for working people in this country. Trump’s draconian tariffs will force Americans to pay more and could trigger a recession. What Trump will try to sell Americans is the idea that punishing immigrants will give Americans back their American Dream. It won’t. When he carries through with the policies in the Project 2025 playbook and appoints TV personalities to not run our country but ruin our country, Americans will feel betrayed. It will take time. But that betrayal is coming.
