So What Went Wrong?
You can learn more from your losses than you do your wins, so let's start learning...
After a national election the party that loses has to think about why it lost and, as usual, there’s no shortage of people willing to offer their theories and kick some people while they’re down.
As Murray Kempton once said: “All newspaper editorial writers ever do is come down from the hills after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.”
A memorable quote sure to make all of us ask ourselves an important question: “Who the fuck is Murray Kempton?”
So I typed “Who the fuck is Murray Kempton?” into Google’s search bar and it turns out Murray was a newspaper columnist, so maybe he knew what he was talking about from personal experience and if that’s the case, let’s get busy and start shooting some wounded.
I’m not going to pretend I know precisely why the Democrats lost and the people who currently are pretending to know precisely why the Democrats lost sound like those blind guys describing an elephant: everybody’s describing the elephant based on the part they’re touching and nobody’s seeing the big picture and that includes me.
(And I really hope the part of the elephant I’m touching is its trunk.)
Anyway…
I recently read an essay about the Democrats looking for scapegoats and first up on the available scapegoat list would be blaming voters for being too sexist and racist to vote for a woman of color, so it’s really the voters fault.
I don’t think the Democrats saying that are totally wrong.
In 21st Century America I believe sexism and racism are still just below the surface in many cases and in other cases are right out there above the surface and building gated communities that wouldn’t welcome Halle Berry if Halle suddenly decided she wanted to live with a bunch of misogynistic racists.
But sexism and racism don’t explain everything.
In 2016 Hillary Clinton got about 2.9 million more votes than Donald Trump (thanks a bunch, Electoral College) and Barack Obama got elected twice.
So one more time…
Sexism and racism definitely played a role in this last election – no argument – but does that explain everything that went wrong for the Democrats and now here’s something else to think about even if you don’t want to.
Democrats and the Working Class
Bernie Sanders (who now seems like a reasonable alternative) says the Democrats have taken the working class for granted and paid the price, so today let’s briefly examine that part of the puzzle and see if it holds water and yes, I just mixed my metaphors, but let’s not change horses in the middle of the stream because rolling stones gather no moss and a stitch in time without anesthetic hurts like a motherfucker.
This will be a sketchy version of historical events because when you start reading about this stuff it gets really complicated really fast because people can’t even agree on what the terminology means or who was a “New Democrat” and who wasn’t or how “stagflation” is defined or when you should enforce the Infield Fly Rule.
BTW:
Keep in mind that the people who call themselves political experts want it to seem really complicated and use insider terms to keep the rest of us from understanding because if we understood, then we wouldn’t need them to explain things and right now I’m thinking of lawyers and doctors and people who work in the analytics departments of baseball teams.
In other more direct words: if you keep things simple a lot of people are going to be out of work.
Without further ado (which means “a state of agitation or fuss, especially about something unimportant” so at least we’ve cleared that up) here’s a very simplistic version of history because the complicated version is complicated.
An Overly-Simplistic View of Semi-Recent American History
When I was growing up (insert discovery of fire and saber-tooth tiger joke here) it was pretty clear: if you were blue-collar working class you were a Democrat, but if you spent your days riding around in limos, lighting cigars with burning 50 dollar bills and adopting Little Orphan Annie you were a Republican.
But then Democrats like George McGovern and Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis got their asses handed to them in presidential elections and the Democrats decided they were out of touch with voters and came up with the “Third Way.”
Which meant positioning yourself somewhere between being a Liberal and a Conservative which is kind of like positioning yourself with one foot on the dock and one in the boat and trying to avoid getting wet.
Bill Clinton also promoted “triangulation” which, when you cut through the bullshit, means adopting your opponent’s ideas and taking credit for them, so all of a sudden you had “liberal” Democrats advocating deregulation and balanced budgets and no heavy petting below the waist.
During his 1996 State of the Union address Clinton declared the “era of big government is over.”
Apparently, the Democrats’ thinking went something like this:
“We’ve already got the blue-collar vote and what are they going to do, vote Republican? So now let’s go after some of those rich jerks who make big donations to political parties so we don’t have to keep financing our campaigns by holding raffles and bake sales and selling pencils out of a cup.”
If you’re not going to be a liberal on economic issues, now all that’s left are cultural issues and as the last election demonstrated, a whole bunch of Americans don’t give a flying monkey crap about using the correct pronoun or removing the N-word from Mark Twain’s novels or making sure the only two transgender kids in your state get to play soccer with a bunch of other minimally-talented nine-year-olds.
And if you’re going to try to win elections based on cultural issues in America, you’d be well-advised to remember a lot of Americans prefer Garth Brooks over Bjork, McDonald’s over The French Laundry and Ford trucks over Teslas.
Since we’re all over the place when it comes to what music to listen to and where to eat and what to drive, what issue unites Men and Women and Blacks and Whites and Gays and Straights and Cats and Dogs and Royals Fans and Cardinals Fans?
As political strategist and possible space alien James Carville once said:
“It’s the economy, fuckwit.”
I may have that quote slightly wrong, but you get the gist: a whole bunch of people are going to vote based on how they think they’re doing when it comes to their wallets and pocketbooks and paychecks and aren’t all that excited about making a political statement with their votes.
Something to think about:
In 2020 Joe Biden got 81,283,501 votes and Donald Trump got 74,223,975.
In 2024 Kamala Harris got 73,759,465 votes and Donald Trump got 76,433,539.
So Trump improved by about 2.2 million votes and about 7.5 million Democratic voters stayed home because they weren’t motivated by the chance to vote for a woman of color for president.
And while we’re talking about what motivates the working class…
The federal minimum wage was set in 2009 at $7.25 which is $290 a week and $1,160 a month and $13,920 a year and Barack Obama did not raise the federal minimum wage even though he talked about it (the first Democratic president who didn’t) and neither did Joe Biden even though he talked about it and Kamala didn’t specifically say she would support raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour until late October.
So lots of talk about raising the minimum wage and not much action and the federal minimum wage is still $7.25.
(Don’t be confused, Obama did raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers, but not Joe and/or Josephine Average and if you go online – which I did – to ask why Obama didn’t get the federal minimum wage raised, you’ll find lots of people making excuses and blaming others and quibbling about how long Obama had a supermajority in the Senate – enough Senators to avoid a filibuster – but even if it was only 72 days, raising the federal minimum wage didn’t seem to be a priority.)
In this recent election Democrats were jacked up about Kamala raising a billion-with-a-b dollars, which sounds awesome until you ask who she was raising it from.
And if you think the kind of rich people who make big donations to political campaigns are super-excited about raising the federal minimum wage or providing universal health care or sending poor kids to college, you might be in for a rude awakening and on November 6th a lot of us were.
The following article points out that the Harris campaign spent lots of that money on celebrity appearances (the celebrities weren’t paid, but production expenses were) and if you didn’t get your invite to see Jennifer Lopez, Cardi B, Bruce Springsteen or Mumford & Sons, don’t feel too bad, a lot of blue-collar workers didn’t either.
The following two articles talk about the Democrats abandoning the working class and blue-collar workers in favor of sucking up to rich donors and if you need just one more reason to start drinking early today (which I highly recommend on most days including today) here you go:
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/bernie-sanders-democrats-working-class/
If you read the first article you saw a number of Democrats saying the idea that they’ve abandoned the working class is bullshit, but as the author points out, the election results show the working class doesn’t agree.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trumps-victory-really-was-about-the-economy-stupid/
And if you read the second article, that author points out that — according to a CBS exit poll — two-thirds of voters thought the economy was in bad shape and 45% of them thought they were worse off than they were when Biden was elected, but instead of separating herself from Biden, Kamala said she wouldn’t do anything different.
If you decide you want to appeal to the wealthy and count on them to get elected, you might find out there just aren’t enough of them; when it comes to elections, the thing to remember about One-Percenters is they’re One Percent.
Bottom line:
In many cases the Democrats have managed to alienate the voters they used to count on and now millions of those working class people stay home and don’t vote, or if they do vote, wear red hats and relate more strongly to a billionaire who lives on a golf course.
The Democrats’ current strategy is badly wounded and someone really needs to shoot it.
The Democratic committee to elect Harris definitely miscalculated, but I still don't understand why voters think Trump and cohorts will make the average citizen's life better.
I don't smoke, but if I did, I would be holding my lighter aloft for this one.