What The Hell Just Happened?
The first in series of post-mortems on the 2024 election.
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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Like many of you, I’m still recovering from Tuesday night and trying to sort through the data to figure out what happened.
I have a big piece at MSNBC, poking holes in the theory that Democrats abandoned the working class … but also why this group of Americans is likely not returning to the Democratic fold any time soon.
Under Biden, Democrats adopted one of the most pro-working class policy agendas in recent political memory, enacted much of it — and accrued no electoral benefit.
As for Trump, his main economic agenda item was a pledge to increase tariffs, which by increasing costs on imported items, would have disproportionately harmed low-wage workers. Did he have a plan for lowering housing or dealing with health care? What about lowering inflation?
What Trump essentially offered the working class were attacks on undocumented immigrants, which his campaign blamed for much of the nation’s ills.
… Democrats are a party of “doing stuff” with an electorate utterly indifferent to the stuff they do.
As Larry Mishel, former president of Economic Policy institute, who has written extensively on politics and the working class, said, there is a glaring lack of connection between material reality, even material gains, and recognition or appreciation for such gains. “Partisanship shapes perceptions. There is simply a disconnect between policy, outcomes, and political rewards.”
Read the whole thing here.
I'm going to trickle out some analysis on what happened over the next week, but I also want to take some time to think about the future direction of this newsletter. I’ve heard from a few of you that you’re exhausted by politics and, in particular, Trump. I feel the same, and I want to figure out how to write about politics and culture going forward without obsessing over every last thing he does. More to come on this soon.
In the meantime, a couple of quick observations from Tuesday that merit our attention.
Why?
This might be the single most revealing chart explaining why Donald Trump won (or, more specifically, why Kamala Harris lost).
As John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times points out, “This isn’t just the first time since WW2 that all incumbent parties in developed countries lost vote share. It’s the first time since this data was first recorded in 1905.”
Why are incumbent parties getting shellacked? Because of the inflation spike in the post-COVID recovery,
I get why people fall back on seductive arguments like “Dems lost because they’re too woke” or “Biden should have dropped out sooner,” … and you will hear quite a bit of that in the next few days and weeks. But it’s hard to square those arguments with “globally, incumbent parties have lost ground in every election this year, which has never happened before.”
What this means for our current politics is that Trump didn’t necessarily win because the country wants mass deportations and right-wing politics … rather, voters were pissed off about the inflation and economy. After all, parties of both the left and right lost elections around the world. The only thing they had in common was incumbency.
The American Metronome
That might seem like a Pollyannish view but consider this data point. In the last four presidential elections, the country has gone Democratic-Republican-Democratic-Republican. In the most recent three elections, the winning party also won both houses of Congress. The first Democratic win in 2012 was Obama’s reelection. In the presidential election before that (in 2008), Democrats also won both the House of Congress and the presidency.
From 1912 to 1988, we had a single one-term presidency—Jimmy Carter. Since 1992, it’s happened three times—twice in the last four years. And only three presidents have won reelection. The clear and obvious benefits of presidential incumbency seem like a thing of the past.
But let’s dig a little deeper.
In 2004 W wins reelection … in 2006 a Democratic wave gives them control of both houses of Congress. In 2008, Dems won the White House and both houses of Congress … but in 2010, a huge Republican wave gave the GOP control of the House. In 2012, Obama won reelection. In 2014, the GOP held the House and won the Senate. In 2016, Republicans won the presidency and kept control of both houses of Congress. In 2018, another wave election gave Democrats control of the House. In 2020, Dems make Trump a one-term incumbent and win the Senate. In 2022, Dems lost the House but kept the Senate. In 2024, they lose the Senate and the White House.
That’s 20 years of these back-and-forth results. One can even long for the days after the 1954 midterm when Democrats controlled the House for 40 years and the Senate for 26.
Maybe the lesson isn’t that one political party is ascendant or dominant … but rather that neither is and that we live in a very narrowly divided country where elections are now determined by relatively small shifts in voter sentiment across a handful of states.
Another explanation is that Americans are so disconnected from political outcomes and actual governance that they’re far more willing to embrace political change. In the past, voters usually stuck with incumbents. Now they call the “f**k it” and throw the bums out.
I’m honestly not sure the best explanation for this political whiplash but it’s our new political reality and an issue that deserves further exploration.
A Few Other Observations
Misinformation is a helluva drug. The more you knew about the state of the country the more likely you were to vote for Harris. The less you knew, the more likely you were to vote for Trump.
I’m hard-pressed to think of a single better example of how voters are disconnected from policy positions and outcomes than Missouri. Voters not only backed a referendum that enshrines abortion rights in the state constitution but also, by a 58-42 margin, supported a ballot initiative that will increase the minimum wage and require employers to provide paid sick leave. Meanwhile, Harris, who supports both policies, got 40 percent of the vote in Missouri, while Trump, who doesn’t, got 58.5%.
About the Dobbs effect … In 2022, Dems won voters who said abortion should be “legal in most cases” by 22 points, 60-38. On Tuesday, they split evenly at 49-49.
Did Harris run a terrible campaign? She didn’t. As of yesterday, the national swing to Trump was around 6 points (that will likely fall as more votes are counted in California and elsewhere). However, in the battleground states, the swing to Trump was closer to 3 points. Those were the states where Harris actively campaigned. So, the more voters saw Harris and her campaign, the more positively they responded.
Considering how bad the national race went, Dems did slightly better than one might expect in the Senate. Democratic incumbents in red states (Brown in Ohio and Tester in Montana) lost, but in blue states, only Bob Casey appears to have lost. Baldwin in Wisconsin, Slotkin in Michigan, Rosen in Nevada, and Gallego in Arizona all prevailed. I’m not quite sure what to make of this. The obvious explanation is that voters wanted to punish the top of the ticket, but usually, you expect anti-incumbency to affect the bottom of the ticket as well. It’s possible that Senate Democrats benefited from running against lousy GOP Senate candidates, and combined with Trump’s popularity with his own party, it led just enough Republicans to split their votes.
The House is still up for grabs, though it looks likely to stay in Republican hands. There’s a reasonable chance that the GOP could have a 218-217 advantage, which would be the highest form of political comedy!
Musical Interlude
This was not a knockout. We're still on our feet - deflated, yes, frightened for others, yes, embarrassed in front of the world, yes, and angry, oh yes. But we are also filled with resolve and conviction, which will stand the test of time.
Everything we were running on was worth it then, and are certainly worth it still. We have not changed who we are and how we feel about equal rights, voting rights, gun control legislation, climate change, pro-democracy, decency and character in our leaders - to name a few. Were we foolish to think most Americans would at least reject the bigotry, vulgarity and lies that Trump, a crackpot conman and convicted felon spews, and accept that character does matter in our leaders, and that a woman really can lead a country? Maybe. But we were right to fight for them anyway.
The values of today's Democratic party are the values that will take our country forward - values that lift up everyone. I can almost smell and hear the sounds of peaceful protests and marches coming on. I'll be there. I'm 80, but I'll be there.
This was an dynamite political analysis of the 2024 presidential election, but you perhaps did not want to state the obvious: Kamala lost because the voting American public did not want to elect a non-white woman, even though she made Trump look like an ignorant fool that he repeatedly demonstrated. Having lived in the Southern states for much of my life, I can tell you that the Civil war did not end with General Lee's surrender at Appomattox. It continued with lynchings and the Jim Crow era. It took many years after the Civil War before women got the right to vote. We live in a white, male-dominated racist society masquerading as "Christian" and lead by their idol Trump, and supported by the Proud Boys and the Oath-Keepers.
In her campaign Kamala failed to take due credit for the tremendous progress of the Biden administration and present it as her own - which she had a right to do. She overly emphasized the issue of abortion rights, alienating many of the women she was seeking to vote for her. Then she failed to take credit for humanizing the immigration problem, by ending the wait in Mexico policy and the draconian problem of separating children from parents at the border that happened during the Trump administration. Friends of ours believe that the Southern border is open, and crossed by undocumented aliens who receive a living handout courtesy of the US government. Yet if that was true, we would not have a labor shortage in this country. It has always been true that immigrants supply most of the low-wage physical labor employment in this country. Today that is the Spanish-speaking South American immigrants who cannot be employed without being processed by the INS, which is itself understaffed by a Trump-led do nothing House of Representatives.
I was a Reagan Republican who was abandoned by my party. I became a Democratic supporter when that party became enthralled by Trump. He is the Count Dracula of American politics.