It May Feel Good, But It's Not Going To Do Any Good To Hate Voters For The Mistake They Just Made

Progressives Have To Figure Out If The Democratic Party Is Their Home

Rex Huppke is pissed off— at the American people. Turnout was high, over 60% of eligible voters and… “We are a country that just elected— that just willfully chose— one of the most cruel, unscrupulous and transparently self-serving political figures in modern history to be president. Again. We just elected a convicted felon who has normalized bullying, spread hate like an industrial sprinkler and shown us over and over and over again he sees laws as irrelevant and self-enrichment as sacrosanct. Faced with a billowing ocean of red flags— from indictments for trying to overturn the 2020 election from to the coddling dictators who rule enemy nations—  a majority of Americans cast their vote for the man who is a totem of the worst in all of us. So spare me the wails of ‘This isn’t who we are!’ I’ve got bad news for the sane and decent among us: This is exactly who we are... Voters chose Trump. He won. Cruelty won. Bullying won. And that’s who America is right now. We are Trump, and we will own every bit of the shameful and painful and embarrassing things he does. We are not ‘better than this.’ We lost the right to make that claim the moment the presidential race was called.”

Come to think of it, most pundits are as pissed at the voters as Huppke. On Wednesday George Conway wrote that we did this to ourselves— and now we’ll get the suffering we deserve. And we already knew, unlike in 2016. “By 2020, after the chaos, the derangement, and the incompetence, we knew a lot better. And most other Americans did too, voting him out of office that fall. And when his criminal attempt to steal the election culminated in the violence of January 6, their judgment was vindicated. So there was no excuse this year. We knew all we needed to know, even without the mendacious raging about Ohioans eating pets, the fantasizing about shooting journalists and arresting political opponents as ‘enemies of the people,’ even apart from the evidence presented in courts and the convictions in one that demonstrated his abject criminality. We knew, and have known, for years. Every American knew, or should have known. The man elected president last night is a depraved and brazen pathological liar, a shameless con man, a sociopathic criminal, a man who has no moral or social conscience, empathy, or remorse. He has no respect for the Constitution and laws he will swear to uphold, and on top of all that, he exhibits emotional and cognitive deficiencies that seem to be intensifying, and that will only make his turpitude worse. He represents everything we should aspire not to be, and everything we should teach our children not to emulate. The only hope is that he’s utterly incompetent, and even that is a double-edged sword, because his incompetence often can do as much as harm as his malevolence. His government will be filled with corrupt grifters, spiteful maniacs, and morally bankrupt sycophants, who will follow in his example and carry his directives out, because that’s who they are and want to be.”

So there! A little less dramatic, Annie Lowrey blamed it on the high prices of groceries. “In poll after poll, focus group after focus group, Americans said the economy was bad— and the economy was bad because prices were too high. This was always going to be a problem for Kamala Harris. ‘Excess’ inflation— defined as the cumulative growth of prices in one presidential term compared with the term preceding it— is highly predictive of electoral outcomes, according to the Northwestern economist Robert Gordon. It is a crucial part of how voters decide whether they are better off and want to stick with the incumbent. The measure strongly pointed to a Trump victory. Indeed, since the global post-pandemic inflation spike began, ruling parties around the world, on the left and the right, have been toppled.”

Things were getting better, at least on paper… but voters “do they seem to appreciate pundits and politicians telling them that their lived experience is somehow incorrect— that they are truly doing great; they just don’t know it… Going to the polls, voters still ranked the economy as their No. 1 issue, inflation as the No. 1 economic problem, and Trump as their preferred candidate to deal with it. In interviews, many voters told me they felt as if Democrats were gaslighting them by insisting that they were thriving.”

In his post-election analysis, Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik noted that the election marks the biggest shift to the right in our country since Reagan’s victory in 1980 and that Trump’s sweeping victory was a repudiation of the Biden presidency. The voters wanted change and they saw Trump as the change agent, not Kamala. “Trump,” he wrote, “increased his share of the vote in over 92% of the counties in the United States. His 2016 victory was fueled by white working-class voters. His victory last night was due to support from a multi racial working-class group of voters:

• Nearly one in three voters of color voted for Trump.

• Trump increased his support with Hispanic voters by 25 points compared to 2020.

• Trump carried Hispanic men by 10 points.

• Trump improved his support with voters aged 18-29 by 11 points

The NYTimes began its own post mortem with an essay by Reid Epstein, Lisa Lerer and Nick Nehamas. “A depressed and demoralized Democratic Party is beginning the painful slog into a largely powerless future, as its leaders grapple with how deeply they underestimated Donald Trump’s resurgent hold on the nation. The nationwide repudiation of the party stunned many Democrats… [and] as they sifted through the wreckage of their defeats, they found no easy answers as to why voters so decisively rejected their candidates.” 

One thing neither the Democrats, nor The Times, would ever do is to look at the quality of those candidates. The DCCC, for example, presented the voters with the worst roster of candidates certainly since I started following House races systematically in 2006. But I’ll get to that in a few days, when all the races are called. What Epstein, Lerer and Nehamas wrote was that “The issues the party chose to emphasize— abortion rights and the protection of democracy— did not resonate as much as the economy and immigration, which Americans often highlighted as among their most pressing concerns.”

They spoke about misinformation and the struggle to communicate the party’s vision in a diminished news environment inundated with right-wing propaganda. They conceded that Harris had paid a price for not breaking from Biden’s support of Israel in the war in Gaza, which angered Arab American voters in Michigan. Some felt their party had moved too far to the left on social issues like transgender rights. Others argued that as Democrats had shifted rightward on economic issues, they had left behind the interests of the working class.

They lamented a Democratic Party brand that has become toxic in many parts of the country. Several noted that the independent Senate candidate in Nebraska ran 14 percentage points ahead of Harris in the state.

…Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the longtime progressive standard-bearer, blamed what he called a party-wide emphasis on identity politics at the expense of focusing on the economic concerns of working-class voters.

“It’s not just Kamala,” he said. “It’s a Democratic Party which increasingly has become a party of identity politics, rather than understanding that the vast majority of people in this country are working class. This trend of workers leaving the Democratic Party started with whites, and it has accelerated to Latinos and Blacks.”

Sanders, a political independent who has long criticized the influence of the party’s biggest donors and veteran operatives, offered a pessimistic forecast: “Whether or not the Democratic Party has the capability, given who funds it and its dependency on well-paid consultants, whether it has the capability of transforming itself, remains to be seen.”

Sanders was hardly the only one who diagnosed the party’s problem as being too beholden to the needs of its identity groups. Trump spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-transgender television advertising, which went unanswered by the Harris campaign and its allies.

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