Election Reflections

With the US presidential election more than two weeks behind us, the question of why Donald Trump won is still being examined—new polls analyse voting patterns in more detail and new articles discuss the lessons Democrats need to learn from their defeat. As we move past the election and into what promises to be a tumultuous second Trump term, it is still important to review those lessons.

I say this as a Kamala Harris voter with centrist, libertarian/conservative politics who is strongly opposed to the so-called “woke” Left—a position that I believe was compatible with a vote for Harris. Aside from my belief that Trump represents a brand of identity politics and illiberalism at least as toxic as the “woke” kind, the paramount issue for me in 2024 was Trump’s attempt—through spurious lawsuits, the misuse of his office, and finally the instigation of a mob to storm Congress—to disrupt the transfer of power and overturn the results of the 2020 election. I still believe that this alone should have been disqualifying and that his election in itself degrades the American system of governance.

Nevertheless, I strongly disagree with fellow Trump foes, including people I like and respect, whose response has been to pass harsh and sweeping judgment on the Americans who voted for Trump. To say that nearly 77 million voters knowingly endorsed democracy subversion, authoritarianism, and bigotry is both counterproductive and incorrect. People cast their vote for Trump for many reasons, and often with very limited knowledge of his disqualifications. As Adam Serwer notes in The Atlantic, his voters tend to rationalise or ignore—or genuinely not know about—his negative traits and extreme rhetoric.

In any case, as former Justice Department prosecutor Ankush Khardori has argued in Politico, preventing Trump’s return to the White House was up to Congress (where Senate Republicans foiled his conviction after his second impeachment by the House, in part because then-majority leader Mitch McConnell believed that Trump’s political career was finished anyway). Failing that, it was up to the Justice Department, which could have pursued election interference charges against him sooner and more aggressively.

If this sounds like an argument that the “elites” should have thwarted the will of the people, there is nothing undemocratic about holding a former president accountable for a brazen assault on the constitutional order he was sworn to uphold. (Indeed, author and podcaster Sam Harris makes a strong argument that failing to hold Trump accountable for this act already damaged democracy.) After Trump’s election victory, many conservative pundits have dismissed anxieties about the integrity of democracy as elite concerns, in contrast to the economic issues motivating ordinary people. But surely a healthy political order must incorporate both. Conservatives are usually the first to point out that the American republic was not meant to be a direct democracy, which its founders associated with mob rule; the will of the majority has always been mediated not only by protections for minority rights and individual rights, but by the stewardship of elites, in particular the judiciary.

When the justice system and the political class let Trump off the hook, it was neither fair nor realistic to expect voters—many of whom pay little attention to political news and have a low level of engagement with politics—to deny him legitimacy. For millions of Americans, he was simply another politician (albeit a maverick one) whose refusal to recognise the 2020 election was not substantively different from other self-serving election disputes.

Once Trump was seen as acceptable, the problems plaguing Harris and the Democrats became more salient. These problems have already been extensively discussed elsewhere. Statistician and writer Nate Silver has summarised the four principal factors as: “the global backlash against incumbent parties in an era of high inflation and failed promises for a quick return to normalcy after COVID”; inflation itself; Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term at the age of 81; and immigration, specifically the border crisis created in part by Biden’s decision to drastically expand parole for asylum-seekers.

Stepping in for Biden after the first presidential debate gave Harris a brief boost—people were clearly happy and relieved to see the change—but it also put Harris at multiple disadvantages. Not only did she have to run a truncated and untested campaign, but she also found herself in the no-win situation of either cleaving to the very unpopular president she had served or throwing him under the bus after he put her on the Democratic ticket in 2019 and then endorsed her 2024 candidacy. Harris chose the first option, and it cost her dearly (although it’s hard to say how a more aggressive attempt to distance herself from Biden would have been perceived).

Harris’s run was also damaged by the radical persona she adopted during her disastrous primary campaign in 2019 and, to a lesser extent, during the 2020 campaign when she was Biden’s running mate. Among other things, she praised the “defund the police” movement and suggested that putting more cops on the streets in disadvantaged communities was not the way to safety. (In fact, members of those communities overwhelmingly want a strong police presence.) She declared her support for slavery reparations, albeit in the race-neutral form of tax credits for low-income Americans. She enthusiastically endorsed transgender advocacy, even introducing herself with pronouns—“she, her, and hers”—during an appearance at CNN’s “LGBTQ town hall” in October 2019. During the summer of 2020, she repeatedly praised the racial-justice protests that followed the murder of George Floyd while making no mention, until late August, of the violence and looting that accompanied those protests in many of America’s largest cities.

This baggage hurt Harris in two ways. First, it made it easy for the Trump campaign to paint her as an extremist, despite her pivot toward more centrist politics in 2024. Second, it made her seem inauthentic, since she abandoned or reversed many of her earlier positions—on policing, for instance, or on fracking—without explaining why. This contributed to a general sense that no one quite knew what Harris stood for. When she talked about freedom, an opportunity society, and America’s legacy of liberty, it was certainly a welcome change from the Left’s politics of victimhood, anti-capitalism, and claims that America’s legacy is one of white supremacy. But stirring rhetoric is still just rhetoric. Talk-show host Bill Maher urged Harris to explicitly repudiate the far-left, but she never did. Indeed, the day before the election, she passed on a chance to express support for a California ballot measure to toughen penalties for drug offences and shoplifting (which ended up being approved by an overwhelming 68.5 percent of the vote).

Overall, during the campaign, I found Harris to be more impressive than I had expected based on my memories of her 2019 run and her stint as vice president. I thought the claims that she was unable to produce anything other than “word salad” without a script and a teleprompter were egregiously unfair, and often based on out-of-context snippets. Even so, I had a bad feeling during a CNN town hall when she responded to a question about mistakes she had made with this:

I mean, I’ve made many mistakes, and they range from, you know … if you’ve ever parented a child, you know, you make lots of mistakes. In my role as Vice President—I mean, I’ve probably worked very hard at making sure that I am well versed on issues, and I think that is very important. It’s a mistake not to be well versed on an issue and feel compelled to answer a question.

This debacle was not about incoherence or stupidity, as some Harris detractors have suggested, but it did sound like an evasion of a question that Harris felt she couldn’t answer without alienating some segment of her potential voters. Since the question was easily anticipated, it’s baffling that no one on Harris’s staff could have come up with some good suggestions, so perhaps this was also a sign of a poorly run campaign.