I have to admit that like most other election prognosticators I was wrong about the 2024 Presidential election.
Like many of you I spent the last month a bit depressed and very scared about the election of Donald Trump with the GOP in control of the US Senate.
I spent of that time reading other people’s opinions and thinking about what had gone wrong. Yes, the Senate was a difficult map with Sherod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana running for re-election in heavily red states. But I had really believed that voters would reject Trump and elect Kamala Harris.
I noticed that almost everyone who offered an initial opinion on what the Democrats had done wrong and what they needed to do differently to win the next time was basically giving the same opinion they had been giving for years. I think that most of them continue to be wrong.
- Race of candidate. There are some who said the lesson of 2024 was that America would not elect a black candidate because of inherent racism and therefore the Dems should go back to the old practice of nominating white men. I just don’t believe this. Not only did America elect Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but Republican racists have shown themselves willing to vote for idiotic black men (Herschell Walker for Senate in Georgia in 2020 and Mark Robinson for Governor in North Carolina in 2024. Both candidates ultimately lost – not because they were black but because they were uniquely unqualified for the office they were seeking. If the voters were truly unwilling to vote for a black man, you would not have seen so many Republicans in Georgia and North Carolina voting for them despite their lack of qualification.
- Gender of candidate. There are some who said that the Harris’ defeat in 2024 (along with Clinton’s defeat in 2016) proves that America will not elect a woman president and that therefore the Democrats should go back to the prior history of only nominating men for President. I think this argument also is wrong and leads to the wrong prescription.
- Too far left. Of course, the centrists in the Democratic Party were out immediately saying that the election proved that the Dems had gone “Too Far Left” and needed to come back to the so-called center. This in my opinion is absolute rubbish. The Republican party has moved so far to the extreme right that trying to find the “center” would inevitably make the Democrats into moderate Republicans. (I think that’s what these people really are and want). If the voters rejected the Dems because they were too far left then why didn’t they reject the Republicans for being so extreme right wing?
- Dems abandoned the working class. Some of my friends and people I admire including Bernie Sanders immediately came out with the opinion that the working-class voters abandoned the Dems because the Dems had abandoned the working class. It’s a nice slogan and certainly fits into what Bernie has said for the past 45 years but it really doesn’t make much sense. Truth is that Biden was the most pro-labor President in modern history. He was the only president to ever walk on a Union picket line and his original build back better bill (which was defeated because Manchin and Sinema would not support it) had many components that would have directly benefitted lower income Americans. Harris herself ran on a distinctly pro working-class agenda that included raising taxes on the wealthy and a ban on “price gauging” by food suppliers.
- Dems supported Gaza war. Some say that the Dems lost because their voters were angry because both Biden and Harris refused to join those calling for a cut off of military aid to Israel. I imagine that there were some voters who sat out the election thinking they were “punishing” the Dems for not doing what they wanted them to do about Israel and probably there was even a small number who voted for Trump in an absolutely delusional act of “virtue signaling” showing how much they cared about the issue. Without arguing the merits of the policy on Israel and Gaza at this moment, I think the politics and the numbers just don’t add up. If Harris had called for a cessation of support for Israel, she would have lost many more pro-Israel voters.
So what was it? It is possible that by the time Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee in July it was too late and she would have lost no matter what she did. Someday perhaps we will learn why Attorney General Merrick Garland waited until November 2022 to appoint Special Counsel Jack Smith to investigate the crimes that Donald Trump allegedly committed in January 2021. Perhaps someday we will learn who in Biden’s inner circle convinced him to run for a second term and more importantly who was responsible for letting him go on the debate stage on June 27, 2024. We will never know but I deeply believe that things would have turned out differently if 1) Garland had appointed a special prosecutor as soon as he took office and the major Federal charges in DC could have gone to trial; 2) if Biden had announced after the mid-terms that he was not running for re-election and let the Dems have a regular full nominating contest and even perhaps 3) if Biden’s staff had simply announced that Biden was ill and could not take the stage for the debate.
Some say that Harris “lost” the election when she fumbled her answer to the question “what would you have done differently from Joe Biden ?” Her reply when she was asked that question on The View in October was ““There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of — and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact…” I wish she had pivoted and done exactly what Biden had never done and promoted the good policies that had been stopped because every single Republican in the Senate had voted against them. Biden should have done it all through the 2022 mid-terms campaigning against the do-nothing Republicans in Congress that had voted against everything he had proposed. Harris could have answered the question by separating herself from Biden on style and attacking the Republicans for having blocked lots of really good and important legislation.
THIS IS IT:
In my opinion. Most Americans know that systems are corrupt and crumbling. Our education system fails young children. Our legal system fails. Our elections and our government bought and paid for by the Oligarchs. Elizabeth Warren ran her 2020 campaign for the Presidential nomination with the slogan “the system is rigged” and the promise to fix it. I think that was the right message in 2020 and it will be the right message in 2028 (although don’t get me wrong Elizabeth Warren born in June 1949 is too old to be the 2028 nominee). Most Americans know the system is rigged by the super wealthy and unfortunately Trump was the only candidate who explicitly saying that and promising to disrupt the system. Too many voters didn’t care that the specifics of his proposals would make everything worse and voted for him to blow up the corrupt system. Harris’ mistake was campaigning on a promise to make the system work better. It’s that simple.
In 2028 the Dems need a populist candidate who will campaign with an overtly progressive platform who will attack the corruption of Trump and his cronies.
That’s it.
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