The Myth That Anything Could Have Been Different

 

This dipshit's return was inevitable.

'Tis the season of Democratic election postmortems, and I've read too many to reference, from people like Bernie Sanders to centrists like Matt Yglesias to the far left writers of Defector. Opinions are like assholes, and everyone's got one! Here, let me tell you my opinion of all these stupid opinions, so that you may know the one true opinion and be enlightened. I'm going to proceed in list format, since I grew up reading Cracked back when that site was still cool, and I'm fucking lazy, so let's go over all the common takes on why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump and dispel them with as much reason and wit as I possess (which ain't a lot, but it'll have to do).

1) Kamala lost because she veered too far toward the center! Give the people something to vote for, and they'll elect the socialist utopia of our dreams!

This take ignores history completely, as well as Biden's term. Joe Biden ran in 2020 as a moderate, and he beat out more liberal candidates, such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris by campaigning as an establishment figure that would return the country to normalcy after the Covid pandemic. After the Meet-Too, Black Lives Matter, and Defund the Police movements, Democratic primary voters didn't pick a candidate running on social justice or economic populism--they picked Joe Biden, a long-time Senator with a very moderate voting record. Black voters in the South Carolina chose Biden over Sanders, probably because black voters are more moderate than other groups in the Democracts' coalition. I would also like to point out that despite running as a moderate, Biden governed as a liberal. He was the most pro-union President since FDR; he passed a historic climate bill and forgave billions of student loan debut. He approved the American Rescue Plan, which literally gave free money to people during Covid! I'm only going to mention in passing the Infrastructure Bill and the CHIPS Act, which were bipartisan, but contained a lot of meat for the working class, bringing jobs to many communities. Yet Trump made inroads with union voters in Pennsylvania, as well as the entire electorate. Working class voters in rural areas came out in droves to support Trump, despite his comments about overtime and his praise of Elon Musk for saying he'd fire striking workers. Immigration was one of the chief concerns of the 2024 election, with many Latinos voting for Trump because of his promise to deport illegals.

In short, the people gave Kamala and the Democrats no credit for Biden's progressive legislation and instead voted for a racist anti-immigrant candidate who promised to roll back workers' rights.

Also remember that Obama's popularity took a nose dive after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and Democrats had a historically bad midterm in 2010. Obama gave people a government run health care marketplace, and they punished him for it! How anyone could draw the conclusion that America will reward politicians for progressive policies is beyond me. Winston was wrong; the proles will not rise up and overthrow the bougies.

2) Kamala lost because she moved too far to the left! Democrats need to throw trans-people and migrants under the bus! Ah, yes, the woman who campaigned with Liz Cheney and promised to appoint a Republican to her cabinet moved too far to the left. Harris did have one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate, but her campaign was focused on meat and potato issues, like giving new home buyers cash and restoring abortion rights. Her campaign mostly avoided trans-rights discussion, and she vowed to curb illegal immigration. Harris was a former district attorney and certainly didn't support defunding the police.

3) The Democrats lost because Kamala was tied to Genocide Joe! Exit polls state that democracy and the economy were the top two concerns of voters in the 2024 election, with abortion and immigration being the next two. Foreign policy was a distant fifth, with only 4 percent of voters choosing it as their top issue. The fact that incumbent parties lost worldwide is the real reason the Democrats were doomed.

4) Kamala was a shitty candidate! We should've run the corpse of Joe Biden or held a primary! Joe Biden's approval rating was in the mid-thirties before he stepped down, and it remains very low. It's a hard argument to make that such an unpopular President would've done better than Kamala. Despite losing the popular vote to Trump, Harris only lost by about three points in swing states. She actually outdid Biden's 2020 totals in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Trump just drastically improved his turnout all over the country. Considering the abbreviated campaign and the global headwind against incumbents, Harris did just fine. Were Democrats really going to pass over the first black woman Vice President for an open primary? How would they have handled the inevitable legal challenges that would've come from someone other than Biden or Harris accessing Biden's campaign funds? An open primary would've been a messy option that very likely could have resulted in a disaster. Republicans have a slim majority in the House, undoubtedly leading to dysfunction, and Democrats actually retained four Senate seats in states Trump won, keeping Republicans from a super-majority. I don't think people realize how big a blowout it might have been had Biden run.

5) Why is Trump so hard to beat? He's a convicted felon and sexual abuser! He was impeached twice! He tried to overthrow the government! Democrats had to have fucked up somehow! Yeah, I completely understand the sentiment. Perhaps this article from the New Yorker, which is behind a paywall, answers this question:

"Low-information voters—people who pay little attention to political news—seem to have once been spread pretty evenly between the political parties. Some voters who turned out for Bill Clinton in 1992 may have known little more than that he played the saxophone; some George W. Bush voters may have simply associated the former governor of Texas with the South. But, by 2016, low-information voters appeared to be moving to the right. “Trump’s whole playbook was to attract these people,” Richard Fording, a professor of political science said. Low-information voters, he found, are more likely to embrace stereotypes of other groups, and less likely to fact-check claims made by politicians. “Trump was kind of the perfect candidate for them,” he told Charles Bethea. Bethea reports from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district in Georgia, speaking with low-information voters—and their neighbors who argue with them—about how they view the media and the current political situation: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/4Chg24"

Democrats didn't fuck up. I'm not saying they couldn't have been better--supporting Israel while they indiscriminately bomb Palestinians isn't good--but I'm not convinced anything would've changed an electorate determined to punish the party in power.