Open Threads

This is a long, somber one from Popehat, Ken White.  I won’t excerpt it.

Digby has a whole post from James Fallows today.  Again worth a read.

Scott Lemieux’ take on Harris is roughly what I think (post also has some good embedded threads):

I know data and logic can never stop a pundit’s fallacy, and “the operation was a success but the patient died” is of no consolation at this point, but the idea that the problem last night was the result of marginal messaging choices is completely delusional […]

This is a nationwide shift to the right and against the presidential in-party, and the shift was notably less pronounced in the contested battleground states, which is the opposite of what you would expect if Harris ran a poor campaign. There is no such thing as a flawless campaign but Harris had much higher net approval ratings than Biden, correctly identified the most competitive states, improved Democratic margins there, and was notably more competitive than other incumbent parties have done since COVID inflation (or than Trudeau is looking).

In the comments on my last post, people were re-litigating the Biden step aside.  Here’s my take:  if you’re going to talk counterfactuals, I also want to hear how you think things would have gone if Biden had chosen to be a one-term president and there had been a robust Democratic primary, where we had a lot of TV time and attention in the vacuum left by Trump’s coronation by the Republicans.   I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m firmly in the camp that Biden would have gotten creamed worse than Harris.

Some More Good ReadsPost + Comments (71)

Here are a couple of posts that struck me as making good points.  First, just an overall acceptance of how fucked up our “fellow Americans” are by Barry Petchesky at Defector.

I agree with some of this post by Steve M, and not with other parts, but overall I think he’s really on point when he talks about the negative way that Democrats are perceived, including the great deal of self-hate embodied by some of our campaigns.   He also says that Trump’s followers view him as some kind of angry Andy Kaufman.  The anger part is important because it partially masks his mental decline (angry still seems “with it”).

Just to address the “Biden didn’t seem to care about high prices” part of Steve M’s post — this is the strength of Trumpism, and the weakness of politics based in rationality.  Trump is going to fuck up the economy, but at the same time he and his myth-making machinery (Fox, X, etc.) will build up a story that denies that the economy is bad, explains how it isn’t Trump’s fault (“the Biden/Harris economy I inherited”) and then will provide myriad distractions to keep people’s minds on something else.  You saw this a few months after Biden was elected,  with the “I did that” stickers plastered on gas pumps in red states (and in some blue ones — I saw one on a “Black Lives Matter” poster in Denver).

Democrats just don’t have this in our DNA, from soup to nuts.  We’d never print out these stickers and put them on gas pumps.  We are pretty terrible at combating right-wing fables because we basically ignore them as stupid, and we think the smart thing to do is accentuate positive progress of our agenda.   So, in hindsight, Biden missed an opportunity to address higher prices head-on, though I doubt any other person with Democratic DNA would have done better.

There is a god damned firehose of stupidity channeled through social media directly at persuadables.  We must develop the talent of picking a few peanuts out of this shit and pushing it back at the people producing it — disrupting the deny, blame and distract cycle that’s so effective for Trump.  Otherwise, it’s just death by a thousand cuts.  We need our own media ecosystem, it’s been said forever, but, as Atrios points out, the money Democrats spend on elections generally doesn’t build us anything.  (I specifically don’t mean B-J fundraising, which I think is quite good and helps build organizations.)

More on this to come.

Some Reads This MorningPost + Comments (345)

I went to bed at midnight eastern last night because it wasn’t looking good and I figured that I didn’t need to suffer in real time.  And here we are.

Thinking back, there’s one campaign artifact that I think will probably be the tale of this election — Tim Walz’ attempt to convince four undecided voters to vote for Harris/Walz.  They were three middle-aged males and one first-time woman voter.

The males were all wearing union shirts and worked, or had worked, union jobs.  Their main concern was cost of living.

Walz’ talk about preventing price gouging didn’t seem to convince them of much.  Biden being the best president for unions in modern history didn’t mean shit, because they still had anxiety about their jobs and, let’s face it, the Democratic party hasn’t been all that great for unions in the couple of decades before Biden.

I think the other factor is “Trump is just Trump” which makes it hard for Democratic attacks to do much to someone whose negatives are so baked in.   His voters don’t care about his racism and, frankly, I’m sure racism played a part in Harris’ loss, as did sexism.

When you have a prosperous economy and prices are “too high”, well, it’s tough for the incumbent party.  Losing the Senate was pretty much baked in to anything but a shockingly good Harris/Walz showing.  The House is still possible and boy do we need it.  I hope Pelosi is right.

Anyway, as LBJ on Twitter said, welcome to Texas. We’re all living in it now.  Get your shots!

A Little HindsightPost + Comments (132)