What went wrong

The election post-mortems since November 5 focus on the tug of war within the Democratic Party in the wake of Kamala Harris' defeat. The press loves to report a messy "Dems in Disarray" story.

So how did we get here? The irony is that this election was shaping up to be rather boring. For most of the election season, observers were resigned to the inevitability of a rematch few wanted. Polling between the two candidates was etched in stone.

Until it wasn't.

Joe Biden, a president in his 80s seeking re-election, turned in an atrocious June debate performance that sent the Democratic Party into panic mode. Donald Trump, a former president in 70s who attempted a coup after the last election, surged across the battleground states as polling shifted dramatically. Reliably Democratic states suddenly looked to be in play. Biden stubbornly refused to heed calls to withdraw. The race looked like an unwinnable death march to November for Democrats.

By the time Trump dodged an assassin's bullet by mere fractions of an inch in Pennsylvania, his party's convention in Milwaukee was more of a victory party. A potential landslide was not out of the question.

Then everything changed.

Here are a few takeaways.

Kamala Harris turned inevitable defeat into the possibility of victory

In late July when Biden finally accepted he could not win and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to succeed him, the switcheroo was as flawless as one could hope. Democrats, buoyed by the thought they could pull off a victory in November, responded. Harris raised $81 million from 880,000 donors, more than half of which were from first-time givers. (This includes your humble writer.) Spontaneous grassroots organizing calls raised millions more. By the end of August, she raised $300 million. More than $1 billion by the time it was over.

Harris rode that early momentum. Suddenly she was even with Trump. Then, establishing leads nationally and in battleground states. The Trump campaign thought it had the race wrapped up in July and steamroll through November. Instead, allies questioned the selection of JD Vance to join the ticket as utter hubris with the campaign openly flailing.

The second presidential debate (Harris' first and only) in September proved to be such a disaster for Donald Trump that he refused to debate again. According to public polling, Harris pulled off monumental feats including an improved favorability rating and fought Trump to a draw or gained the advantage on economic issues.

In October, Trump's campaign regained its footing and, after weeks of struggling to land quality punches on Harris, settled into lines of attack that ultimately proved fruitful.

Had a mortally wounded Joe Biden stayed in the race, we may be looking at a map with a lot more red. Harris won New Hampshire, a swing state most cycles, by less than 3 points. Biden carried it by 7 points. In reliably blue New Jersey, which Biden carried by 16 four years ago, narrowed to under 6 points. Trump shaved the margin in New Mexico by nearly half, from just under 11 points to 6 points. Even New York saw a dramatic decline from 23 points four years ago to less than 12 points in 2024. Nationally, Trump gained a modest 2 million in raw vote. Harris' total fell by 7 million from Biden's haul four years ago. This is evidence Democrats, perhaps many of whom voted with ease via mail four years ago, stayed home.

Targeting crossover Republican voters was a predictable failure (again)

Harris' campaign spent significant time in October touting Republican support and sharing stages with Liz Cheney, a former congresswoman from Wyoming who served in Republican leadership before her excommunication for principled opposition to Trump's role in January 6.

It proved to be a predictable failure. At the macro level, Harris drew less Republican support than Biden four years ago. According to exit polls from CNN, Biden drew the support of 6 percent of Republicans. Harris received just 5 percent.

The strategy did not help to win over independents, either. Democrats' edge fell from 13 points in 2020 to just three points. Trump's narrowing of the gap among independents may speak to his campaign's strategy to target low propensity voters, many of whom are unaffiliated with either party.

According to NBC News exit data, 14 percent of self-identified conservatives voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Only 9 percent backed Harris.

At the micro level, Trump improved his support in Republican communities one would argue epitomized the intent of the crossover strategy. The Nation's John Nichols noted:

This reality is most apparent in the election results from Ripon. The east-central Wisconsin city where abolitionists, land reformers, and utopian socialists founded the Republican Party in 1854 seemed ripe for a cross-party appeal. Ripon has been a Republican stronghold for 170 years, but the city is also a college town that in the past has shown a good measure of enthusiasm for Democrats such as Barack Obama. But that’s not how things played out on Election Day.

On November 5, Trump won 53.8 percent of the vote (2,097 ballots) in the city of Ripon, while 45 percent (1,753 ballots) voted for Harris.

That was a worse finish for the Democratic ticket than in 2020, when Joe Biden won 46.6 percent (1,820 ballots), while 51.7 percent (2,019 ballots) voted for Trump.

But, surely, Ripon was an anomaly.

No. Definitely and unequivocally no.

The strategy had a particularly familiar feel to it. Eight years ago, Hillary Clinton made direct appeals to Republicans disgusted with Trump and sank campaign resources into longtime red states like Texas, Indiana, Missouri, and Arizona. (Prior to Biden's narrow victory in the state in 2020, no Democratic candidate carried Arizona since Bill Clinton's re-election in 1996.)

Clinton, faced with stronger third-party opposition in the Green Party's Jill Stein, lost all of the swing states except for narrow wins in Nevada and New Hampshire. Donald Trump, who faced third-party complications from Gary Johnson's Libertarian bid, was elected by 76,000 votes across three "blue wall" states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Trump's unique ability to turnout his voters

For three presidential elections in a row, polling firms have yet to nail down how to properly gauge Donald Trump's support. (AtlasIntel, the most accurate pollster in 2020, again led the polling industry, predicting a Trump victory.)

Under the political orthodoxies at the time, a Clinton victory in 2016 was treated as inevitable. (Not the first time that did not work out.) The consensus of a shaken polling industry was that Trump turned out "white voters with lower levels of education" much higher than predicted. A lot of these voters showed up in the rural Midwest and the Florida panhandle.

Four years ago, national polling showed an average 8 point national lead for Biden. Though Biden did win the presidency, his final popular vote margin was roughly half that. A special task force convened by an industry trade association found pre-election 2020 polling to be the "most inaccurate in a generation." Their findings cited several potential explanations, including higher turnout amid a deadly global pandemic where many states opted for mail voting as a safer solution.

So how is Trump able to defy expectations? To many of his voters, Trump embodies both who they are and who they want to be.

Trump's bucking of political norms code him as anti-establishment and anti-status quo, tapping into their dissatisfaction with institutions. (Some of this dissatisfaction is, of course, engineered or heightened by right-wing media.) His constant complaints about how "unfairly" he's treated speaks to his voters' frustration in which they believe, rightly or wrongly, is a result of external forces such as failing institutions or the consequences of policies from both parties.

He's also a creature of the New York tabloids and the wealth-worshipping 1980s. His business acumen embellished to mythic proportions by reality television. (People watched Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and reality shows about wealthy celebrities for the same reason.) He's crass, misogynistic, and racist in public and doesn't care about the consequences. In fact, there are few actual consequences anyhow.

Biden's agenda for the working class stymied

The early months of Joe Biden's administration proved far more fruitful than many progressives expected. Within six weeks, he signed the American Rescue Plan, the first prong of his Build Back Better agenda, which included direct support for Americans in $1,400 cash payments, a child tax credit up to $300 a month per child that ultimately cut child poverty in half, and increased unemployment benefits.

Following the passage of the COVID relief within the American Rescue Plan, Republicans and some Democrats, primarily Joe Manchin, slowed down Biden's legislative momentum. Weeks of fruitless negotiation resulted in a fracturing of the final two phases—focused on infrastructure and social policy—into two separate bills against the strategic advice of progressives in Congress who knew infrastructure was the carrot to get proposals like child care passed.

In the end, progressives were proven right as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was signed into law in November 2021. Within weeks, Joe Manchin—there he is again!—pulled support on the basis of cost and clean energy measures. (Of course his family's coal investments earning him millions surely played no part.)

While some elements, particularly less aggressive climate policies, made it into the Inflation Reduction Act the following year, much of the social agenda was abandoned, including:

• Hundreds of billions for universal pre-K and affordable child care targeting households of four earning up to $300,000. The plan was designed to reach as many families as possible with a cap of 7 percent of income spent on child care. Poorer families would pay nothing.
• An extension of the expanded child tax credit for monthly cash payments $300 per child under age 6 and $250 for children between 6 and 17. When the expanded child tax credit lapsed at the end of 2021, it led to a spike in child poverty to 2019 levels.
• Expansion of premium-reducing subsidies in the Affordable Care Act and the permanent extension of a program that ensured
• A federally subsidized four weeks of paid and medical leave which faced stiff opposition from, you guessed it, Joe Manchin.

Working class families would've greatly benefitted from these measures had they passed with the rest of Biden's agenda. As a father with two children, we could only send one of our two sons, now 5 and 2, to day care three days a week despite earning roughly 50% more than the median household income for Alameda County. If we did not both work from home, it is unclear how we would pull it off at all. Three days a week for roughly $600-$800 a month. It would be more than twice that to send both of them full-time.

Child care and housing costs. It is too much for a lot of families and it is borne out in the data. The median first-time homebuyer age reached a record high of 38 in 2024. (I turned 40 this year.) The average homebuyer age, also a record high, is 56.

Democrats lacked any message on immigration for years then played catchup as Republican Lite

During Trump's presidency, Democrats hammered Trump's family separation policy and migrant children locked in cages as deeply inhumane. Biden took more immigration-related actions in his first three years than Trump, including an expanded temporary protected status for certain migrants. Right-wing media and Trump's permanent campaign made migrants at the border a central focus early on, often with bogus or exaggerated claims, misleading figures, or outright lies. Migrant caravans always seemed to form two weeks out from an election.

Democrats haven't learned how to win these fights, if they ever show up to them at all. The issue is, frankly, viewed with trepidation. Rahm Emanuel once claimed it was the "third rail" of politics. This hesitation boxes Democrats into a corner, foolishly hoping the issue won't come up rather than putting together a coherent, positive message. Immigration is good for the country. We benefit from it tremendously. The system is dangerously under resourced. There are 3 million cases. The average case load for an immigration judge is 5,000 cases. The only voice the electorate hears lately are the angry voices of the right and those trying to sound like them.

By the time Biden tried to staunch the bleeding in early 2024, it was too late. Trump, who made immigrant-bashing central to his political identity since 2015, was the established voice on the issue and commanded Republicans sink a harsh bipartisan immigration bill for political reasons. His campaign then proceeded to prey upon racial fears about crime for months.

Voters didn't care Trump sank the bill. They didn't care Harris promised to be harsher on the border. Voters backed the guy who was yammering about it all along, regardless of his horrifically racist rhetoric and dangerous plans.

Biden's steadfast support for Netanyahu's war in Gaza

Hamas' stunning October 7 attack—killing over a thousand Israelis and capturing over two hundred more, including Americans—was compared to 9/11. Acknowledging the horror, many feared Israel, under a politically weakened Benjamin Netanyahu, would disastrously overreact. Israel's response continues to produce images of mangled bodies of children, hospital patients engulfed in flames, entire villages leveled, genocidal language from within Israel's own government, and fears of annexation.

Young voters, often the frontline of protest, were galvanized in opposition to Israel's war. Biden's unrelenting support for Israel eroded his support.

Israeli Defense Forces brazenly livestreamed war crimes on social media. Humanitarian aid blocked from reaching starving Palestinians. Killings of journalists and aid workers. Still, Biden defended Israel, twisted facts, ignored its own red lines, and acted to strongarm international institutions. All of it while Netanyahu often contradicted or regularly embarrassed Biden, leading some observers to wonder who was the client state here.

Once Harris assumed the top of the ticket, there were hopes she would make a public break with Biden on Gaza. Prior reporting suggested she was more sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. Chances for a reconciliation between organizers behind the Uncommitted effort and the Harris campaign evaporated when Ruwa Romman, a Harris-supporting Muslim lawmaker from Georgia, was denied a speaking slot at the convention.

Trump made an aggressive turn to capitalize on Muslim and Arab-American dissatisfaction, securing endorsements from prominent leaders in Michigan—only to immediately burn them upon sealing victory.

Harris' unwillingness to break from Biden

One of the key missteps by Kamala Harris in her short run at the top of the ticket was not from a hard-hitting interview with a prominent newscaster. Rather it was a relatively easy and predictable question from a friendly interviewer, The View's Sunny Hostin.

Asked what she would do differently from Joe Biden (an unpopular incumbent, mind you), Harris responded: "There is not a thing that comes to mind..." Harris ended the thought noting, "I've been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done."

It was an uncharacteristic fumble for Harris since taking over. She masterfully avoided Trump's attempts to bait her into mudslinging over race and gender. The press often ridiculed her message discipline. (In politics, that's usually a positive thing.)

Harris had spent late summer and early fall running as the change agent versus Trump the incumbent. She had an opportunity to hold on to once wavering supporters who contemplated a vote for Trump or staying home with Biden atop the ticket. Once she became the presumptive nominee, didn't Biden and Harris understand she would have to distance herself at some point? Her answer appeared completely unexpected and Harris could not come up with a previously worked out reply.

She later returned to the question. Perhaps she realized her previous answer was insufficient and scraped together an example that incorporated the strategy du jour of wooing Republicans and pledged, "I'm going to have a Republican in my cabinet."

CNN exit polls showed Biden held a 40-59 approval/disapproval rating on election day.

Right-wing propaganda reach spreads far beyond its original borders

Concerns over "fake news" with misinformation spiked during the 2016 election. Lies, often published to websites masquerading as legitimate news sources, spread like wildfire across social media. One example was the false claim that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump.

The stories, often intended to buoy Donald Trump's political interests and sink Hillary Clinton, also carried a dark side. "Pizzagate," a conspiracy falsely alleging leading Democrats were involved in a child sex abuse ring, originated in intentionally dishonest "decoding" of hacked materials from Clinton chairman John Podesta's personal email account. The lie compelled an armed young man to travel to D.C. to investigate a nonexistent basement in a pizza parlor to "free the children." Many of these bogus stories were either produced and/or promoted by Russian intelligence to sink Clinton's presidential campaign.

In 2024, foreign intelligence services still attempted to influence the outcome. A suspected Iranian hacker named "Robert" was considerably less successful with hacked materials from the Trump campaign. (Mainstream outlets reported they received the materials but refused to publish beyond banal characterizations. Reporter Ken Klippenstein eventually published select materials.) Russian intelligence played a role in the circulation of Hurricane Helene misinformation, prompting even local Republican officials to try to tamp down the lies.

A significant shift between 2016 and 2024 is the social media landscape. In 2022, Elon Musk, who by that time was secretly funding millions into a right-wing group running anti-immigration and anti-trans ads, purchased Twitter. His acquisition for $44 billion was partially backed by foreign investors.

Musk is notorious for his disdain of tech journalists, temporarily suspending the accounts of several. Once he took over the platform, he leveraged those who prized the verified blue check as a status symbol to devalue its purpose, delegitimize traditional reporters, and turn it into a moneymaking scheme.

Under his ownership, Musk reinstated accounts previously banned for "threats, harassment, and misinformation." An academic in cyberlaw, Alejandra Caraballo, described the move as "opening the gates of hell." The shift in ownership also led to a growth of Russian propaganda spreading on the platform.

To illustrate the lengths to which Musk is willing to go to distort the platform, in early 2023, Musk was so enraged Joe Biden's Super Bowl tweet received more engagements than his own, he flew back to headquarters and "threatened to fire his remaining engineers" until they devised a system to uniquely promote his own content. A study published by the Queensland University of Technology in Australia found that Musk tweaked the platform's algorithm to boost content about himself and Republicans following his endorsement of Donald Trump.

Musk, among the users who receive the most Community Notes for erroneous information, often has corrections deleted from his posts. Experts say he and the platform are a "sewer of disinformation."

There's a saying that "Twitter isn't real life." Under Musk's ownership, he's determined to refute it.

Authenticity

Three years as Joe Biden's vice president, Harris kept a relatively low profile. Despite serving in the U.S. Senate for four years and over three more as vice president, few voters knew much about her or what she stood for. Suddenly she had to introduce herself to the electorate—and quickly. She managed to boost her approval considerably in the weeks that followed but was persistently hounded by questions about her policies and what she believed.

Team Trump were all too eager to fill the gaps. After attempts to denigrate her as a "DEI hire" flamed out, the subtext of that charge was made more plain. Republicans castigated her as an "empty suit," "dodging the press" because she was "unable" to handle an interview. (Trump, of course, would rarely venture outside of his safe spaces like Mark Levin and the junior varsity squad on FOX & Friends Weekend.) Trump questioned her intelligence, a favorite trope of Trump's to insult black women, and "lazy as hell." Trump's running mate JD Vance painted her as a government mooch. (Surely those are not racist and sexist dog whistles, right?)

With Trump, one aspect to always consider is the viewer. To most objective observers with some experience following politics, his rambling and incoherent speeches are clear indications that he is unfit to be president.

Right-wing ideological audiences, however, don't care so long as he can win. The clearest example was set by Grover Norquist, longtime conservative luminary, famously said in 2012, "We just need a president to sign this stuff."

Low information and undecided voters, however, take a different view. Their takeaway? They may not like or even agree with what he says but, "he speaks his mind."

The unorganized rants out of left field are not just political counterculture but a sign of authenticity. It has an air of George W. Bush's frequent refrain in 2004 to contrast with accused flip-flopper, John Kerry: "Whether you agree with me or not, you know where I stand."

What now?

The next four years will be decided, in part, by how the party responds to Harris' loss. The first test will be how the new Democratic minority in the House and Senate react in the early days of Trump's presidency.

Will we see a stiffening of the spine or a willingness to play ball?

My fear is centrist Democrats will win the internal argument. Party leaders, buying into the notion Democrats are beholden to "the woke," will choose a new DNC chair promising to shift the party to the right. Centrists in the House will leverage Republicans' razor thin margin to offer their votes for parts of Trump's agenda, providing a veneer of bipartisanship to odious and historically wrong policies.

They will come to learn, as Democrats did twenty years ago, voters will not support Republican Lite when they can get the real thing.