Archives for 2024

I was on a train and in the city when responding to comments in the last post, so I was limited by the constraints of typing on my phone.  But I want to make it clear that I’m going to criticize Democrats in future posts, that such criticism is welcome in the comments, and that nobody should be shy about commenting with constructive criticism or even just plain old bitching.  With that said…

Here’s Greg Sargent, hardly a guy outside the tent pissing in:

Some Democrats believe that the leading pro-Harris Super PAC, Future Forward, failed to spend enough of its enormous budget on advertising early on that might have reminded voters of the horrors of the Trump presidency. That perhaps allowed him to slowly rehabilitate himself and edge up his favorable numbers while Democrats weren’t looking.

“There was a calculation among Democrats after 2020 that Trump was disqualified and wouldn’t be back,” Democratic data analyst Tom Bonier told me. “That evolved into a calculation that he would be disqualified by his legal troubles and could end up in jail. Democrats undeniably failed to disqualify him. The result was that by the time the Harris campaign started, it was too late.” […]

But surely a key part of this [Trump not getting blamed by voters] is that Trump was permitted to rehabilitate himself and his presidency relatively unchallenged, after running the economy into the ground and presiding over countless needless Covid deaths, then inciting a violent coup and facing an array of serious criminal charges. Trump and his media allies launched years of propaganda designed to erase 2020 from voters’ memories entirely while hammering Biden’s recovery as a catastrophe despite it actually proving a largely successful one, which Trump will now undoubtedly take credit for as president.

All throughout, this effort from Trumpworld met little resistance from Democrats and woefully inadequate scrutiny by the news media. That the unpopular Biden remained in the race so long—keeping voters focused on him as the target of blame for inflation and the awful post-Covid hangover—may have further enabled Trump to shake off association with those national wounds, slowly rewrite the story of his presidency and burnish retrospective approval of it.

There was a fundamental error made by the Biden administration and by its political consultants:  they thought Trump was done and that people wanted to turn the page.  So Biden appointed a institutionalist Attorney General and generally ignored Trump’s antics.  I’ll grant that any AG would have had an uphill battle — but Garland’s slavish devotion to the norms of the institution also led to the Hunter Biden special prosecutor and a two-year delay in appointing Jack Smith.

We all liked Joe Biden, and it’s difficult to acknowledge that he failed in what is in hindsight the most important task in his Presidency, going after Trump.  We all saw how diminished he was in the debate, and that didn’t happen overnight.  Rather than advising him to step down (preferably by not running again in 2024), his advisors doubled down on a losing strategy of not acknowledging the importance of the economy, and not spending money on anti-Trump ads.

Compared to any of us, these advisors and consultants have a massive audience in the DC media.   Now we’re hearing a bunch of nonsense from them arguing that the real problem is that Democrats were too “woke” and how Democrats need to throw trans people under the bus.  And, oh yeah, “headwinds”.  I’ll grant that there were headwinds, that Democrats were caricatured as overly woke by right-wing media, and that the lies told about trans people hurt us.   But when has all of this trimming that these consultants advise ever worked?  Even if we Democrats decided, for example, that we have to throw trans people under the bus, it wouldn’t fucking matter because the right-wing media tells whatever anti-trans lies they need to put Democrats in a box.  These consultants have had years to figure out how to get us out of that box, and they have completely, utterly failed, despite the billions of dollars spent on them and the advertising they recommend.

One of the things on my long, long list of topics to write about after the election is the plague of Democratic PACs that just hoover up hard-earned, earnestly-given donor money without showing results.  We need to name, shame and avoid most of these useless grifters.

‘Disqualified’Post + Comments (314)

Here’s today’s edition of what I’ve been reading/watching.

Tik Tok and YouTube feminist yv_edit has released her election take centered around the misogyny inherent in the Harris vote.  Towards the end there’s some hunker down advice for women.   Overall it’s a scathing indictment of white men.  Her take on the white women who voted for Trump is coming, and I’m interested in what she’s going to say.

Michael Tomasky at TNR has a piece on the media environment and how it was essential in electing Trump:

This is a crisis. The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.

This is a long take by Ian Williams, who teaches college, based on post-election reactions of his students.  Most of them voted for Harris, but even the Harris voters have great disdain for Democrats.  They all get most of their news from podcasts.  The celebrity endorsements (Tay-Tay, Beyonce, etc.) actually lessened the Harris’ voters respect for Harris.  Really worth a look to understand just how damaged the Democrat’s brand has become.

Here’s a post-mortem on the horrible Merrick Garland.

I’ve written here that I think Harris ran a good campaign.  But this piece makes some good points about mis-steps, and certainly about accountability for her campaign managers.  First, on “headwinds”, there are countries where governments have survived the pandemic, including Taiwan, Spain and Mexico.  (And if we’re talking about reaching voters who aren’t tuned in to “normal” media, is there a better example than Mexico?)  Second, the whole Cheney / Cuban strategy to appeal to Haley voters certainly didn’t yield much, and that includes the kumbaya debate between Walz and Vance.  Finally, while I think re-litigation of the fine points of the campaign isn’t especially helpful (there’s not one trick Harris could have used to win, in part because her campaign was so short), I’m not going to let Matt Yglesias and David Schor, idiot conveyers of “popularism”convince me that if we just ditched trans folk, everything would have been better.  Fuck those guys.

Edited to add:  Here are some ballot cure phone banks, a worthwhile thing to do.

Morning ReadsPost + Comments (218)