Looking For Loss In All The Wrong Places

We're getting lots of hot takes on why Kamala Harris lost ... but are they correct?

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.

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Math Is Hard

The simplest explanation for why Kamala Harris lost the presidential election is that she was caught in a global wave of anti-incumbency fueled by post-COVID spikes in inflation … as exemplified by this chart.

Financial Times

But that won’t stop people from trying to find another explanation.

Over at the Nation, John Nichols argues that Kamala Harris squandered precious campaign time hanging out with Liz Cheney.

To give Nichols his due — here’s the gist of his argument.

The days spent with Cheney, and the resources expended to promote endorsements from neoconservative Republicans, cost the Democrats in significant ways. They sent a signal to potential Democratic voters, many of who recalled the Iraq War and other Cheney projects, that the focus of the campaign was on outreach to the right, They ate up time that could have been spent campaigning in union halls in working-class communities with figures such as United Auto Workers union president Shawn Fain and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. They burned up time that could have been devoted to sincere, if difficult, conversations about Gaza. They foreclosed opportunities to reach out to Latino communities in swing states. The list goes on and on.

But the bottom line is constant: Every minute that Kamala Harris spent with Liz Cheney was a colossal waste of the candidate’s time.

There are a lot of problems with this argument.

First, Nichols is obfuscating a bit about what happened in Waukesha. Trump did slightly worse in this Milwaukee suburb in 2024 than in 2020 … and Harris slightly improved on Biden’s 2020 numbers, for a 1.2 shift toward her overall in the county. That might not seem very impressive, but when you consider there was a 6.1-point popular vote shift toward Trump nationally, it means that Harris outperformed the national headwinds by 7.3 points in Waukesha. That’s an impressive performance in a county that has long favored Republicans.

Contrary to Nichols's argument, time spent with Cheney in Waukesha might have been among her most productive time on the campaign trail.

To be sure, it’s impossible to say if Harris campaigning with Cheney or her touting of GOP endorsements was why she slightly overperformed in Waukesha. But it’s also pretty clear that it wasn’t a fiasco. Nichols argues that campaigning with Cheney “sent a signal to potential Democratic voters, many of who recalled the Iraq War and other Cheney projects, that the focus of the campaign was on outreach to the right.” This is pure wish-casting. Nichols is making an argument that fits with his ideological priors — and there’s not a shred of evidence to back it up.

Moderates Don’t Get A Pass

To show I’m an equal opportunity critic, I have a few thoughts on Adam Jentleson’s piece in the New York Times over the weekend that is getting a ton of attention in Democratic circles. Jentleson used to work for Harry Reid and, more recently, John Fetterman — and he’s written a well-regarded book about the US Senate.

This, however, is a very dubious argument.

Last week, Mr. Trump showed us what a conservative realignment can look like. Unless Democrats want to be consigned to minority status and be locked out of the Senate for the foreseeable future, they need to counter by building a supermajority of their own … Democrats cannot do this as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power.

No, this election was not a conservative realignment, particularly not when Republicans, at best, broke even in the House of Representatives, picked up Senate seats in mostly red states, and won the presidential election by less than 2 points.

The second part of Jentleson’s argument is the most problematic — and is one that we’ve heard Democratic pundits make in pretty much every election since Mike Dukakis got wiped out in 1988.

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.

I’m broadly sympathetic to the notion that Democratic interest groups tend to hamstring potential presidential nominees (you certainly saw this play out during the Democratic primary in 2019 and the ridiculous focus on, for example, Medicare For All). However, as Jesse Singal pointed out the other day, Jentleson was more than happy to indulge the trans activist community’s worst arguments and most damaging orthodoxies … before crapping on these same groups in the New York Times.

However, my issue with Jentleson’s argument is that Democrats cannot simply “declare independence from liberal and progressive interest groups.” They are the core of the party and, even more importantly, enjoy broad support from the party’s donor base.

The Democratic Party is, far more so than the GOP, a collection of its various parts — Blacks, liberals, college-educated suburban voters (particularly women), Jews, the LGBTQ community, Hispanics (for the most part), and I could go on. Democratic interest groups, unlike Republicans, are far more focused on specific policy issues — guns, civil rights, abortion, the environment, etc — than Republicans. Also, they are more results-oriented and expect Democrats to follow through on their campaign pledges and enact legislation when they are in positions of political power.

Managing this unwieldy coalition is an essential skill for successful Democratic politicians. For most Democrats, not only is it impossible to jettison these groups, but it’s actually a bad political move.

Jentleson cites two Democratic members of Congress, who he says have successfully broken with progressive orthodoxy, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden of Maine. However, these are two of the most conservative members of the Democratic congressional caucus, and both represent districts that were won by Donald Trump in 2020. For them, pushing back on progressive orthodoxy is essential to keeping their jobs. For the vast majority of Democrats, adhering to progressive orthodoxy or, at the very least, not declaring “ independence from liberal and progressive interest groups” is how they stay in office. Surely, Jentleson, who has long worked in Democratic politics, knows this.

So, honestly, I’m not sure what the point of this piece is other than to show Adam Jentleson aligning himself with the prevailing views among a specific group of Democratic centrist pundits. Democrats declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups can’t and likely won’t happen. For better or worse, these groups are the modern Democratic Party. If Democrats hope to retake political power in Washington, they must ensure that these groups are enthusiastic, mobilized, and remain firmly ensconced in the Democrats’ corner. Surely, Jentleson knows this.

What’s Going On

• Beautiful obituary of Pat Koch Thaler. who, aside from being a respected educator, was former NYC Mayor Ed Koch’s sister.

• I got a chuckle from this Q&A in which a Sotheby’s auction house executive tries to justify paying $1 million for a banana and a roll of duct tape.

• Great piece by John Sides on how to interpret the racial realignment in last week’s election.

Musical Interlude