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      There Were Two Huge Problems Harris Could Not Escape

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      Sarah Isgur, a longtime Republican campaign operative — and my friend and a senior editor at The Dispatch — has a brilliant sports analogy for the process of campaigning. She compares it to … curling.For those unfamiliar with the sport (which enjoys 15 minutes of fame every Winter Olympics), it involves sliding a very large, heavy “rock” toward a target on the ice. One person “throws” a 44-pound disc-shaped stone by sliding it along the ice, sweepers come in and frantically try to marginally change the speed and direction of the rock by brushing the ice with “brooms” that can melt just enough of the ice to make the rock travel farther or perhaps a little bit straighter.The sweepers are important, no doubt, but they cannot control the rock enough to save a bad throw. It’s a matter of physics. The rock simply has too much momentum.What does this have to do with politics? As Isgur writes, “The underlying dynamics of an election cycle (the economy, the popularity of the president, national events driving the news cycle) are like the 44-pound ‘stone.’ ” The candidates and the campaign team are the sweepers. They work frantically — and they can influence the stone — but they don’t control it.One of the frustrating elements of political commentary is that we spend far too much time talking about the sweeping and far too little time talking about the stone. Political hobbyists in particular (and that includes journalists!) are very interested in ad campaigns, ground games and messaging.Those things do matter, but when facing an election defeat this comprehensive, you know it was the stone that made the difference.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Democratic Blind Spot That Wrecked 2024

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      The 2022 election went better than Democrats could have hoped. The party picked up governor’s mansions and state legislatures and expanded their Senate majority. It held down losses in the House. The promised “red wave” never crashed ashore. Perhaps it would have been better if it had.Looking back, the seeds of Democrats’ 2024 wipeout were planted in the quasi-victory of 2022. Three things happened in the aftermath. The pressure on President Biden not to run for re-election, and the possibility of a serious primary challenge if he did run, evaporated. Democrats persuaded themselves of a theory of the electorate that proved mistaken. And as a result, the Biden-Harris administration avoided the kind of hard, post-defeat pivot that both the Clinton and Obama administrations were forced to make after the midterm defeats of 1994 and 2010.In 2020, Democrats had worried over Biden’s age, but were comforted, in part, by the soft signals he sent that he would serve only one term. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” he said in 2020. By mid-2022, as Biden signaled his intention to run again, the party was growing alarmed. In June of that year, The Times interviewed nearly 50 Democratic officials and found that among “nearly all the Democrats interviewed, the president’s age — 79 now, 82 by the time the winner of the 2024 election is inaugurated — is a deep concern about his political viability.”Nor was the public thrilled about the results the Biden administration was delivering. In October of 2022, amid widespread anger over inflation, the Times-Siena poll found Biden with a 38 percent job approval rating and trailing Trump in a hypothetical rematch.If Democrats had been wiped out in the midterms, the pressure on Biden to be the transitional figure he’d promised to be would have been immense. If he’d run again despite that pressure, he might have faced serious challengers. But Democrats fared far better than they had expected. The president’s saggy approval rating and the widespread anger at inflation were nowhere to be found in the election results. In their first referendum under Biden, Democrats did much better than they had under Clinton or Obama. Any pressure on Biden to step aside — and any possibility of a real primary challenge — ended.In its place, a new theory of the electorate emerged, based on the way Democrats over-performed in contested states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and underperformed in safe states, like New York and California. There were two coalitions: the MAGA coalition and the anti-MAGA coalition. The anti-MAGA coalition was bigger, but it needed to be activated by the threat of Donald Trump or the Dobbs abortion ruling. A slew of special election victories in 2023 seemed to confirm the theory. Democrats were winning elections they had no business winning, given Biden’s low approval rating and public anger over inflation. But the anti-MAGA coalition’s hatred of Trump had changed the electoral math.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics

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      Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.Donald Trump won a majority of white women and remarkable numbers of Black and Latino voters and young men.Democratic insiders thought people would vote for Kamala Harris, even if they didn’t like her, to get rid of Trump. But more people ended up voting for Trump, even though many didn’t like him, because they liked the Democratic Party less.I have often talked about how my dad stayed up all night on the night Harry Truman was elected because he was so excited. And my brother stayed up all night the first time Trump was elected because he was so excited. And I felt that Democrats would never recover that kind of excitement until they could figure out why they had turned off so many working-class voters over the decades, and why they had developed such disdain toward their once loyal base.Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).This alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help.“When the woke police come at you,” Rahm Emanuel told me, “you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Elites Had It Coming

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      Everyone has a moment when they first realized that Donald Trump might well return, and here is mine. It was back in March, during a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, when I happened to read the explanatory text beside an old painting. This note described the westward advance of the United States in the 19th century as “settler colonialism.” I read it and I knew instantly where this nation was going.My problem with this bit of academic jargon was not that it was wrong, per se, or that President Biden was somehow responsible for putting it there, but rather that it offered a glimpse of our poisoned class relations. Some curator at one of our most exalted institutions of public instruction had decided to use a currently fashionable, morally loaded academic keyword to address a visitor to the museum — say, a family from the Midwest, doing the round of national shrines — and teach them a lesson about American wickedness.Twenty years ago I published a book about politics in my home state of Kansas where white, working-class voters seemed to be drifting into the arms of right-wing movements. I attributed this, in large part, to the culture wars, which the right framed in terms of working-class agony. Look at how these powerful people insult our values!, went the plaint, whether they were talking about the theory of evolution or the war on Christmas.This was worth pointing out because working people were once the heart and soul of left-wing parties all over the world. It may seem like a distant memory, but not long ago, the left was not a movement of college professors, bankers or high-ranking officers at Uber or Amazon. Working people: That’s what parties of the left were very largely about. The same folks who just expressed such remarkable support for Donald Trump.My Kansas story was mainly about Republicans, but I also wrote about the way the Democrats were gradually turning away from working people and their concerns. Just think of all those ebullient Democratic proclamations in the ’90s about trade and tech and globalization and financial innovation. What a vision they had: All those manifestoes about futurific “wired workers” or the “learning class” … all those speeches about how Democrats had to leave the worker-centric populism of the 1930s behind them … all those brilliant triangulations and reaching out to the right. When I was young, it felt like every rising leader in the Democratic Party was making those points. That was the way to win voters in what they called “the center,” the well-educated suburbanites and computer-literate professionals whom everybody admired.Well, those tech-minded Democrats got exactly what they set out to get, and now here we are. At the Republican convention in July, JD Vance described the ruination visited on his working-class town in Ohio by NAFTA and trade with China, both of which he blamed at least in part on Mr. Biden, and also the human toll taken by the Iraq War, which he also contrived to blame on Mr. Biden. Today Mr. Vance is the vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, with Democrats.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This Is All Joe Biden’s Fault

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      Kamala Harris lost the election this week, but I mostly don’t blame her. At least, I don’t blame her because of anything she did recently. Since she became the unofficial nominee in July, she played a difficult hand about as well as she could have, running a disciplined campaign that sought to reassure Americans about the economic issues that trouble them most, in a political environment that was very rough for Democrats and for incumbent parties around the world.But where did that bad hand come from? It was dealt to her by two people: President Biden, who produced a governing record she could not effectively defend or run away from; and herself, with all the toxic position-taking she did in 2019, generating endless attack ad fodder for Donald Trump. And Mr. Biden even bears blame for Ms. Harris’s pre-2020 baggage, since he put her on the ticket in full awareness that she was carrying it.In his own campaign rhetoric, Mr. Biden focused on the idea that democracy itself was on the ballot this year. But if democracy was on the ballot, his actions should have matched his rhetoric at every turn to ensure Democrats would win the election. Instead, he prioritized his own ego and profile.His electoral instincts weren’t always so misguided. During the 2020 primary campaign, Mr. Biden seemed to understand that the left-wing fever dreams that drove that Democratic cycle were electorally hazardous. So, unlike Ms. Harris, he never pledged to ban fracking or abolish private health insurance. He never even filled out the A.C.L.U. questionnaire that prompted Ms. Harris to support federally funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners and detained immigrants.After winning the nomination, Mr. Biden made his first big mistake that would set Democrats on a path with no route to win the 2024 election: He selected Ms. Harris as his running mate.Perversely, Ms. Harris’s apparent weakness as a potential presidential candidate was an asset to Mr. Biden. It helped insulate him from calls to step aside. The case for him running again was simple, and I even made it myself, before June’s disastrous debate: Ms. Harris had run a terrible campaign in 2019, and at the time she regularly polled worse than he did; if Mr. Biden did not seek re-election, it was highly likely that she would end up as the nominee; therefore, he had better run again.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Luego de la derrota de Harris, los demócratas buscan a quién culpar

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      Un Partido Demócrata deprimido y desmoralizado está iniciando el doloroso camino hacia un futuro en gran medida fuera del poder, mientras sus líderes se enfrentan a lo mucho que subestimaron el resurgimiento de Donald Trump en la nación.El repudio nacional al partido dejó atónitos a muchos demócratas que habían expresado una confianza “nauseabunda” sobre sus posibilidades en las últimas semanas de la contienda. Mientras rebuscaban entre los restos de sus derrotas, no encontraron respuestas fáciles a por qué los votantes rechazaron tan decisivamente a sus candidatos.En más de dos decenas de entrevistas, legisladores, estrategas y funcionarios ofrecieron una letanía de explicaciones sobre el fracaso de la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris, y casi todas ellas encajaban perfectamente en sus nociones preconcebidas de cómo ganar en política.Las críticas discretas, en llamadas telefónicas, chats grupales y sombrías reuniones de equipo, fueron un anticipo entre bastidores de la batalla intrapartidista que se avecina, una en la que los demócratas caerían rápidamente en las desavenencias ideológicas que han definido a su partido durante gran parte de la era Trump.Lo indiscutible fue lo mal que les fue a los demócratas. Perdieron la Casa Blanca, cedieron el control del Senado y parecían abocados a la derrota en la Cámara de Representantes. Obtuvieron peores resultados que hace cuatro años en ciudades y suburbios, pueblos rurales y ciudades universitarias. Un primer análisis de los resultados realizado por el New York Times reveló que la inmensa mayoría de los más de 3100 condados del país se habían inclinado hacia la derecha desde la victoria del presidente Biden en 2020.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      On the Ballot, Abortion Rights Proved More Popular Than Kamala Harris

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      In states like Arizona and Nevada, some voters split their tickets, supporting abortion rights measures while also backing Donald Trump.Democrats headed into the election hoping that abortion rights initiatives would drive support for Kamala Harris in states where the measures appeared on the ballot, including two presidential swing states, Arizona and Nevada.But while the ballot measures, broadly put, performed well on Tuesday, succeeding in seven out of 10 states, Ms. Harris and other Democrats underperformed them across the map.In both Arizona and Nevada, more than 60 percent of voters approved measures to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions, though more votes remained to be counted on Thursday. But Donald J. Trump appeared on track to win both states, according to New York Times estimates. Abortion rights initiatives also passed in Missouri and Montana, two states Mr. Trump won easily.Even as a growing share of women said abortion access was central to their vote, pre-election polling suggested that it wasn’t voters’ top concern overall. Fifteen percent of likely voters in an October national New York Times/Siena College poll said abortion was the most important issue in their vote for president, but roughly twice as many listed the economy, or inflation.The voters who cited abortion as their top concern favored Ms. Harris, 88 percent to 11 percent, and the voters who prioritized economic issues favored Mr. Trump, 72 percent to 24 percent.In states where the ballot measures passed but Mr. Trump won or was leading, voters had, in effect, split their tickets, supporting abortion rights in their states while also backing a candidate who took credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, which had established a nationwide right to abortion. Ms. Harris had made protecting abortion rights a central theme of her campaign.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lo que los votantes de Estados Unidos le están diciendo a las élites

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      Hemos entrado en una nueva era política. Durante los últimos 40 años, más o menos, hemos vivido en la era de la información. Quienes pertenecemos a la clase educada decidimos, con cierta justificación, que la economía posindustrial sería construida por gente como nosotros, así que adaptamos las políticas sociales para satisfacer nuestras necesidades.Nuestra política educativa impulsó a muchos hacia el camino que nosotros seguíamos: universidades de cuatro años para que estuvieran calificados para los “trabajos del futuro”. Mientras tanto, la formación profesional languidecía. Adoptamos una política de libre comercio que llevó empleos industriales a países de bajo costo para que pudiéramos concentrar nuestras energías en empresas de la economía del conocimiento dirigidas por personas con títulos universitarios avanzados. El sector financiero y de consultoría creció como la espuma, mientras que el empleo manufacturero se marchitaba.Se consideró que la geografía no era importante: si el capital y la mano de obra altamente calificada querían concentrarse en Austin, San Francisco y Washington, en realidad no importaba lo que ocurriera con todas las demás comunidades que quedaron olvidadas. Las políticas migratorias facilitaron que personas con un alto nivel educativo tuviesen acceso a mano de obra con salarios bajos, mientras que los trabajadores menos calificados se enfrentaban a una nueva competencia. Viramos hacia tecnologías verdes favorecidas por quienes trabajan en píxeles, y desfavorecimos a quienes trabajan en la industria manufacturera y el transporte, cuyo sustento depende de los combustibles fósiles.Ese gran sonido de piezas en movimiento que has oído era la redistribución del respeto. Quienes ascendían en la escala académica eran aclamados, mientras que quienes no lo hacían se volvían invisibles. La situación era especialmente difícil para los hombres jóvenes. En la secundaria, dos tercios de los alumnos del 10 por ciento superior en las clases son chicas, mientras que aproximadamente dos tercios de los alumnos del decil inferior son chicos. Las escuelas no están preparadas para el éxito masculino; eso tiene consecuencias personales de por vida, y ahora también a nivel nacional.La sociedad funcionó como un vasto sistema de segregación, elevando a quienes estaban mejor dotados académicamente por encima de todos los demás. En poco tiempo, la brecha de los diplomas se convirtió en el abismo más importante de la vida estadounidense. Los graduados de secundaria mueren nueve años antes que las personas con estudios universitarios. Mueren seis veces más por sobredosis de opiáceos. Se casan menos, se divorcian más y tienen más probabilidades de tener un hijo fuera del matrimonio. Tienen más probabilidades de tener obesidad. Según un estudio reciente del American Enterprise Institute, el 24 por ciento de quienes han terminado como mucho la preparatoria no tienen amigos cercanos. Tienen menos probabilidades que los graduados universitarios de visitar espacios públicos o unirse a grupos comunitarios y ligas deportivas. No hablan en la jerga adecuada de justicia social ni mantienen el tipo de creencias sofisticadasi que son marcadores de virtud pública.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More