Feels only right to start this post-election TOTI with one of my (NSFW, you’ve been warned) favorite videos from the Trump1 era.
This week has been filled with take upon take from the left, middle, and right about exactly why Democrats ceded so much ground to Republicans pretty much across the country. And we’ll dive into those specific debates momentarily. But, as the votes continue to get counted and analysts take time to examine what happened in the context (“in the context” 🥲) of developed nation elections worldwide, a picture of an extraordinarily challenging prevailing environment is clearly emerging.
Every single governing party in the developed world that has stood for reelection in 2024 has lost, the Financial Times notes. This has never happened before in the 120 years of data it has followed. –New York Magazine
Three very difficult truths on election post-mortems
1. “Dems could have won if they’d only done X.” Everyone has a version of this. But in virtually every case they *did* do X, often to an unprecedented degree. Economic populism, working class wages, abortion. $200m ads on the economy. If you’re asking why she didn’t message on X, the answer is she did, relentlessly; it just didn’t hit your blue bubble twitter feed.
2. It actually did work! In states where both Harris and Trump campaigned heavily, she outperformed national trends by D+3 to D+5. That’s huge!
3. But was overwhelmed by an R+6 swing that blew through every state and demo. This is consistent with the anti-incumbent swing hitting every developed democracy on earth. Tactical campaign choices cannot explain a global trend. And it is extremely difficult to imagine a campaign that could’ve overcome it.
Well… Kamala and some state parties saved the broader Democratic Party. Though it’s hard to feel this way after such a resounding defeat, the election night sense that maybe impeccable ground mobilization didn’t matter after all is – fortunately for Democrats! – proving quite wrong.
If there is one early front runner for villain of the 2020 election cycle, it is President Biden.
Scranton Joe, supposed paragon of aw-shucks decency, ultimately wouldn’t relinquish his power. He decided in the spring of 2023 to run for reelection despite no shortage of warning signs, including a basement-level approval rating, flashing bright red. He also ignored the will of the voters. As early as 2022, an overwhelming percentage of Democratic voters said they preferred a candidate other than Biden, and support for an alternative candidate persisted even as the president threw his hat back in the ring. This past February, one poll found that 86 percent of Americans and 73 percent of Democrats believed Biden was too old to serve another term, and another revealed that only a third of Americans believed that he was mentally fit for four more years. –The Atlantic
Speaker Emirata Nancy Pelosi, not one to let some bad news ruin her legacy, came out swinging – mostly against Biden, but also making clear Kamala Harris was never the party’s default pick.
Nancy Pelosi to the NYT: “had the president [Biden] gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race.”
“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary. “
“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”
Read more in Part 2.
Today on the Internet 