Various people have takeaways from the American presidential election. For what it’s worth, here are mine.
Money may talk, but it doesn’t dictate
The 20th-century California Democrat Jesse Unruh once observed that “Money is the mother’s milk of politics,” and he wasn’t entirely wrong. But if money was the prime determinant, Kamala Harris would now be president-elect. After being anointed as Joe Biden’s replacement, she quickly raised a mind-boggling billion dollars, which put her in a position to substantially outspend Donald Trump in the critical final months of the campaign.
Cultural disconnect
And money wasn’t the only thing Harris had going for her. Along with support from academia and the media, the likes of Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey and Harrison Ford all came out swinging on her behalf. When Swift endorsed Harris, there was even speculation that it would be electorally decisive. In effect, voters would take their political cues from their favourite pop star!
At the end of the day, though, all this support from the ostensibly powerful failed to pull Harris across the line. To paraphrase journalist Salena Zito, there’s an obvious disconnect between the “cultural curators” and large swathes of mainstream America.
The candidate really does matter
Whatever one thinks about the personal qualities of Kamala Harris, she was a poor fit for the role of presidential candidate. Absent the peculiar circumstances of 2024, she’d never have won the nomination under her own steam.
As a San Francisco liberal whose career developed in the safe confines of Democrat-dominated California, Harris came with a set of ideological preferences that were always going to be a hard sell on the national stage. And when she ventured outside California in search of the 2020 presidential nomination, her campaigning ineptness was such that she quickly flamed out.
However, many of the positions Harris took in that ill-starred effort came back to haunt her this year. Although she formally jettisoned them, she could never adequately explain why. She tried taking the tack that she’d changed her positions but not her principles, which only made her look either evasive or superficial. And trying to run as both the “change candidate” and an integral member of the (unpopular) incumbent administration compounded her credibility problems.
Pollsters still don’t get it
For the third consecutive presidential cycle, pollsters generally underestimated the level of Trump’s support. And while the statistical margin of error will be cited as an explanation, pointing out that a three per cent margin really means that 50/50 could actually be 53/47 in either direction isn’t a great advertisement for the utility of polls in close races.
By far, the most egregious miss came from Ann Selzer, hitherto acknowledged as the gold-standard Iowa pollster. Selzer’s final pre-election poll had Harris three points ahead of Trump in a state he’d won easily in both 2016 and 2020. Driven by a purportedly huge shift in the female vote, Seltzer’s findings created great giddiness. Perhaps they were indicative of a seismic shift with the potential of creating a Harris sweep across the Midwest. But when the votes were counted, Trump won Iowa by 13 points, leaving Selzer with a hard-to-explain 16-point miss.
Relative newcomer Atlas Intel had a better night. Its final numbers were prescient, projecting Trump to win the national vote and run the table in the seven swing states.
The Democrats need another Bill Clinton
After losing a string of presidential elections between 1968 and 1988, some Democrats, most notably then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, concluded that their party’s leftward drift had alienated too many of their traditional supporters. Rather than listening, they were lecturing. So, thanks to a carefully calibrated set of policy and rhetorical adjustments, Clinton went on to win two terms.
On the morning after the election, long-time Democratic activist Lanny Davis recalled Clinton’s feat in a column criticizing the intolerance of his own party’s progressive base and how they use political correctness as an “ideological enforcement tool” to punish “any deviation from their stance on an increasingly long list of sacred cows.” Meanwhile, unhindered by any such inhibitions, Trump made impressive inroads into natural Democratic constituencies, particularly the Latino vote. It’s time, Davis believes, for moderate Democrats to take their party back again.
Regardless of how personally obnoxious or reprehensible Donald Trump may be, he’s showing preliminary signs of building a new multi-racial Republican coalition with a historically atypical working-class component. Democrats ignore that at their peril.
Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical – well, perhaps a little bit.
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