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      With Trump heading for the White House, the Democrats must learn these lessons – and fast | Owen Jones

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      Did the Democrats really lose because they were too “woke”, too obsessed with minorities, too radical? After defeat, there always comes the battle for the narrative about why the party lost. As the US left is rediscovering, the most influential voices tend to be those platformed by corporate media outlets whose siren cry is always to march rightwards. And yet even the New York Times concluded that one of the main problems was in fact Kamala Harris’s “Wall Street-approved economic pitch”, which her brother-in-law – chief legal officer at Uber – reportedly helped craft, and which “fell flat”.The liberal order, always riddled with hypocrisies and illusions, is collapsing, partly because mainstream liberals cannot be trusted to defend liberalism: they are set to conclude that Trumpism must be defeated through imitation. But here’s a polling fact that cannot be ignored. In the past 50 years, the number of Americans who believe the Democrats “represent the working class” has plummeted, while the numbers who believe they “stand up for marginalised groups” has dramatically risen, now exceeding the former.This is what happens if you lack a convincing economic vision to uplift the working class – in all its diversity – as a whole. Even if your commitment to minority rights is superficial and rhetorical, your rightwing opponents will tell Americans that your interest is reserved for “marginalised groups” rather than “the average Joe”. Or as one Republican attack ad put it: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”This is a feature, not a bug, with the Democrats. Since the civil rights era, they have been a coalition including a chunk of corporate America, a shrinking labour movement and minorities. This cross-class alliance stopped them offering European-style social democracy, which would mean hiking taxes on their wealthy backers. In fact, under the Democratic administrations of John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson in the 60s, hefty tax cuts benefited big businesses and affluent Americans the most. While the tax burden of the average US family nearly doubled between the 1950s and the election of Ronald Reagan, corporate taxes as a share of gross federal receipts fell by a third.This means that the big government spending projects of those eras, like the anti-poverty measures of the Great Society, were largely paid for by middle-income Americans. This encouraged a backlash against the beneficiaries of the programmes, demonised as the undeserving Black poor.In this context, white American workers became increasingly associated with conservatism, as converts to Richard Nixon’s Republicans and the segregationist George Wallace. “The typical worker – from construction craftsman to shoe clerk,” wrote New York Times labour correspondent AH Raskin in 1968, “has become probably the most reactionary political force in the country.” But as the working-class writer Andrew Levison wrote a few years later: “There is nothing strange in the fact that workers began deserting liberalism once liberalism so decisively deserted them.”There are obvious differences today. The previous backlash against liberal failures paved the way to Reaganism, which did at least offer a coherent vision for society. Trumpism, on the other hand, is more emblematic of what the American literary critic Lionel Trilling said of US conservatism in 1950, that it was a series of “irritable mental gestures”, defined by fiery opposition to perceived progressive sensibilities rather than a cogent plan for what the US could look like. Policies that favour wealthier Americans – rather than many of the struggling Americans who voted for Trump – piggyback on this emotive backlash.But Kamala Harris made her dividing lines abortion rights and the defence of democracy: crucial questions, no doubt, but not answers to the struggles of workers on stagnating wages. Trumpism, on the other hand, attempted to vocalise the rage many Americans felt about their difficult circumstances, and sought to portray the Democrats as driven by championing demonised minorities instead, such as migrants and transgender people. That Harris did no such thing in her campaign is irrelevant: the lack of a compelling cut-through message on bread-and-butter issues allowed the Republicans to “flood the zone with shit”, as Republican strategist Steve Bannon puts it.The answer, then, is not to throw minorities under the presidential Cadillac. That will alienate progressive Americans, and given Trump won a similar number of votes as 2020 – while Democrats haemorrhaged natural supporters who stayed home – this would be a political as well as a moral failure. It is also true that the majority of citizens in any country will never be driven by a desire to improve the lot of minorities, and nor should the left wish to focus only on the most marginalised.Instead, an economic populism that champions the interests of the American majority – irrespective of gender, race, religion, sexual or gender identity – will drown out claims that the Democrats care only for the marginalised “other”. Instead of the Democrats being drawn into toxic rows about the existence of transgender people, the Republicans would be forced on the defensive instead: as Reagan once wisely put it, in politics, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing”. The Democrats need a plan that unites the shared interests of low- and middle-income Americans in an age of crisis and turmoil.As for the siren voices demanding a corporate-friendly Democratic party which refuses to champion minorities: the voters were just offered that, and it lost.

      Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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      Harris ran from the Biden policies that were actually popular with voters | Daniela Gabor

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      The post-mortems of Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump all agree on one thing: that Harris stuck too close to Biden. It was deliberate, pundits charge, pointing to the now infamous October appearance on ABC’s The View, where Harris said “There is not a thing that comes close to mind” that she would have done differently. But the pundits are wrong.Harris did distance herself from Biden where it hurt her most. She dumped his Rooseveltian transformative ambitions to bring back big government. Instead, she returned to the Obama-Clinton of a small or neoliberal state that highly influential Democrats like Jake Sullivan had already known was an electoral dead end during the first Trump administration.Freshly bruised from his experience as senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, Sullivan set out a new vision for the Democratic party in his 2018 essay The New Old Democrats. The nutshell: “It’s not the 1990s anymore. People want the government to help solve big problems.”The problem for Democrats, he warned, was not that the party had been hijacked by progressive forces (a familiar lament, now framed in the conservative language of “woke”) but the opposite. The political centre of gravity had shifted, leaving the Democrats behind an American public clamoring for more energised government. To stave off the long-run threat of Trumpism, Democrats had to abandon centrist politics and embrace a new policy playbook, a return of the state guided by Roosevelt’s principles of “bold, persistent experimentation”. The main task was to “embrace the fact that transforming our economy will require substantial public investments”, paid for through progressive taxation of wealth and concentrated corporate power – big government, beating back big business.As Biden hung a portrait of Roosevelt above the Oval Office fireplace after winning the election, his team, with Jake Sullivan as national security adviser, set to work on the return of big, transformative government. Even with congressional politics in the way, the several legislative initiatives together – Chips, IRA, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act – amounted to a $2tn push to reshape the American economy. The conflation of transformative ambitions and China hawkishness, once remarkably absent from Sullivan’s vision, worried some, but most took it as either imperative or the price to pay for bipartisan support.By late 2023, even ideological enemies approved of Bidenomics. The free market evangelists at the Economist applauded Biden’s as the most “energetic American government in nearly half a century”. It helped revive beleaguered unions, and “produced an industrial policy that aims to reshape the American economy”, with immediate results: investment in manufacturing facilities more than doubled, soaring to its highest on recent historical record. Similarly, Lina Khan, chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, was taming concentrated corporate power without destroying corporate profitability or slowing the record number of new businesses created during Biden’s first years.If the Economist expected four more years of Biden to mean even bigger government, Harris backtracked. Where Sullivan called for a Democrat-led economic revolution for America, her “opportunity economy” read like a sad list of bullet points on a crammed slide headed “Smallish Government”: boost child tax credits, increase deductions for new small businesses, help for first-time homebuyers, incentives for new developments.This was not the transformative vision that Biden had championed. Her plans to oppose price gouging framed corporate power as an occasional, rather than structural, threat against American consumers, and said nothing about American workers. Alongside speculation that she would bow to billionaire pressure to oust Khan, Harris dropped union leaders and her early position as a scourge of Big Business to instead court favor with Wall Street, Mark Cuban and the minuscule Liz Cheney fanbase.Under Harris, the Democratic party returned the mantle of change to the Trump campaign, and to a JD Vance prepared to denounce corporate power and voter economic misery often more trenchantly than Harris.What if Harris shifted to the right of Biden because she had no choice? The most energetic government in decades had failed to make it through to voters, who heard inflation when Democrats shouted Bidenomics. But here Sullivan, by now tainted by his unwavering support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza, had already given the answer, or, rather, asked the important question in his 2018 essay: The New Old Democrats, he had insisted, should not ask whether transformative government, but how? How can transformative government both check corporate power and support workers and families?The hard truth about Biden’s transformative project is that it failed its ambitions to roll back the power of capital. There was a brief moment in 2021 when big finance spoke and nobody listened, when investors lamented being excluded from Biden’s old-style “government spending on infrastructure”. But then the “politics of the possible” in Congress curtailed that momentum, in no small part due to conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, private equity’s best friend.Bidenomics might not have started, but it certainly ended, as a capital-first, trickle-down-to-workers project. Its transformative ambitions morphed into generous subsidies (tax incentives) for private investors. These investors got to opt out of worker-friendly tax credits. Where Roosevelt would have decried the new generation of subsidy-chaser capitalists as class and democracy enemies, Biden invited the biggest of them all – Larry Fink, CEO of the asset manager BlackRock – to join him at the G7 meeting in Rome in June 2024. There, Fink delivered a long sermon on why the privatisation of social and climate infrastructure, with state subsidies for investors, is the only way forward.Biden officials might have waved a copy of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution on their way to the White House, but distributional politics hasn’t changed that much since the glory days of neoliberalism. The richest 20% by income account for 40% of spending, twice as much as the poorest 40%. This is the widest gap on record, according to Oxford Economics.Rich millennials got virtually all the $51tn gains to US wealth this decade. Having tried and failed to extend the Covid-19 social safety net, the Biden administration instead continued to hand big finance – in its private equity guise – chunks of the state’s social contract with citizens, from housing to healthcare, dentistry, prisons, retirement homes. Voters heard inflation because nowhere does the paycheck rule as it does in a deeply unequal United States.If Sullivan was right this time too, and there is little reason to believe otherwise, the winning strategy for Harris was to revive and even amplify Biden’s Rooseveltian dream of big government. Democrats now choosing to interpret her defeat as “progressive hijacking” would do well to heed Sullivan’s warning against a return to centrist politics, the most accurate prediction of his entire career.

      Daniela Gabor is professor of economics and macrofinance at SOAS, University of London. She is working on The Wall Street Consensus, a book on the return of the transformative state More

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      Why Kamala Harris couldn’t convince an anti-establishment America | Samuel Hammond

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      Two weeks have passed, and Kamala Harris’s convincing electoral defeat still has Democrats pointing fingers at who – or what – to blame. If only Biden had dropped out sooner. If only Harris had picked a different running mate. If only she went on Joe Rogan’s podcast. If only, if only, if only.There is an obvious reason for the lack of consensus. From failing to defend Biden’s record on inflation and immigration to being perceived as too leftwing, Harris’s loss was in some sense wildly overdetermined. And while Democrats were quick to attribute Trump’s victory in 2016 to white racial resentment, that’s a harder story to tell against the backdrop of Republican’s sizable gains among Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American voters.Harris was a bad candidate, to be sure. But more than any particular individual, this election was a referendum on America’s incumbent political establishment. Starting with Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, swing voters have repeatedly demonstrated a strong preference for change agents. This trend was only briefly interrupted in the 2020 primary, when the pandemic and chaotic dénouement of Trump’s first term allowed Joe Biden to campaign on a “return to normal”. Voters instead got prolonged school closures, surging inflation and a dramatic expansion of progressive cultural politics, putting change back on the menu.The backlash against the establishment is being driven by two longer-term structural trends. The first is the electorate’s political realignment along educational lines. The historic realignment of white, non-college educated voters toward the Republican party won Trump the election in 2016, and brought him to within a hair of re-election in 2020. With this election, the working-class realignment broke through to non-college-educated Black and Hispanics voters as well. As the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini explained on the Ezra Klein Show, minority voters finally “shed that sense of … racial group solidarity” and “moved toward the party that shared their basic ideological predispositions”.The second structural trend is simply the growth of the internet and social media. In his book The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, the former CIA media analyst Martin Gurri observed how the tsunami of information unleashed by the internet tends to leave legitimacy crises in its wake, from the Arab spring to Brexit. With social media, corruption has never been more easily exposed, and mass movements never more easily mobilized.This election was a consequence and accelerant of both these trends. Rather than resist education polarization, the Harris campaign leaned in, targeting Liz Cheney Republicans and college-educated suburban women. Mainstream media, meanwhile, took a backseat to alternative media, Twitter and the podcast circuit.Gurri argues that the internet-era rewards politicians with a degree of unfiltered authenticity, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram Live to Trump’s meandering, marathon speeches. Harris’s authenticity gap, in contrast, was reaffirmed at every turn, from her unwillingness to do interviews, to her stock “as a middle-class kid” non-sequitur in the few interviews she did. Even Harris’s Call Her Daddy podcast appearance was manufactured – literally: the campaign spent six figures building her a bespoke set.Authenticity is ultimately a way to signal one’s independence. In a year when incumbents are losing elections worldwide, Harris had to not just signal her independence from the incumbent political establishment, but to do so credibly. Instead, Harris doubled down on the Democratic party as the defenders of “institutions” – the very institutions that many voters were clearly fed up with.Again, this was less the fault of Harris as a person than reflective of the constraints any candidate in her shoes would have faced. As the party of educated knowledge workers, policy elites and public sector unions, the Democratic party simply is the party of institutional incumbents. And how do you run against the establishment when you are the establishment?Democrats are thus guaranteed to learn all the wrong lessons from this election. They will focus-group economic policies that appeal to the working class and excise wokeness from their political messaging. They will try to engineer their own Joe Rogan and uplift candidates that shoot from the hip. But this will all be a version of treating the symptom rather than the disease. Until the elites in the Democratic party loosen their grip and allow authentic, anti-establishment party factions to arise organically, they will remain the party of control and stasis in a world hungry for change.

      Samuel Hammond is the senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation More

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      To protect US democracy from tyrants, we must protect the truly free press | Robert Reich

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      Reliable and independent sources of news are now threatened by growing alliances of oligarchs and authoritarians.The mainstream media doesn’t use the term “oligarchy” to describe the billionaires who are using their wealth to enlarge their political power around the world, but that is what is happening.This is why I write for and read the Guardian, and why I’m urgently appealing to you to support it.During the US presidential campaign, legacy mainstream media – who mostly answer to corporate or billionaire ownership – refrained from reporting how incoherent and bizarre Donald Trump was becoming, normalizing and “sanewashing” his increasingly wild utterances even as it reported every minor slip by Joe Biden.The New York Times headlined its report on the September 2024 presidential debate between the president-elect and Kamala Harris – in which Trump issued conspiracy theories about stolen elections, crowd sizes, and Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs – as: Harris and Trump bet on their own sharply contrasting views of America.Trump also used virulent rhetoric towards journalists. He has called the free press “scum” and the “enemy within”. During his campaign, he called for revoking the licenses of television networks and jailing journalists who won’t reveal their anonymous sources.Come 20 January, Trump and his toadies – including billionaires such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – will have total control over the executive branch of the United States government. Trump’s Maga Republicans will be in charge of both chambers of Congress as well.Most members of the US supreme court, some of whom have been beneficiaries of billionaire gifts, have already signaled their willingness to consolidate even more power in Trump’s hands, immunize him from criminal liability for anything he does, and further open the floodgates of big money into US politics.All of this is sending a message from the United States that liberalism’s core tenets, including the rule of law and freedom of the press, are up for grabs.Elsewhere around the world, alliances of economic elites and authoritarians similarly threaten public access to the truth, without which democracy cannot thrive.It’s a vicious cycle: citizens have grown cynical about democracy because decision-making has become dominated by economic elites, and that cynicism has ushered in authoritarians who are even more solicitous of such elites.Trump and his lapdogs have lionized Victor Orbán and Hungary’s Fidesz party, which transformed a once-vibrant democracy into a one-party state, muzzling the media and rewarding the wealthy.Trump’s success will likely encourage other authoritarians, such as Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party in France; Alternative in Germany, or AfD; Italy’s far-right Giorgia Meloni; and radical rightwing parties in the Netherlands and Austria.Trump’s triumph will embolden Russia’s Vladimir Putin – the world’s most dangerous authoritarian oligarch – not only in Ukraine and potentially eastern Europe but also in his worldwide campaign of disinformation seeking to undermine democracies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEvidence is mounting that Russia and other foreign agents used Musk’s X platform to disrupt the US presidential campaign in favor of Trump. Musk did little to stop them.During the campaign, Musk himself reposted to his 200 million followers a faked version of Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like the vice-president and saying she “does not know the first thing about running the country” and is the “ultimate diversity hire”. Musk tagged the video “amazing”. It received hundreds of millions of views.According to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk posted at least 50 false election claims on X, which garnered a total of at least 1.2bn views. None had a “community note” from X’s supposed fact-checking system.Rupert Murdoch, another oligarch who champions authoritarianism, has turned his Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post into outlets of rightwing propaganda, which have amplified Trump’s lies.Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, prohibited the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris. Evidently, he didn’t want to raise Trump’s ire because Bezos’s other businesses depend on government contracts and his largest – Amazon – is already the target of a federal antitrust suit.Bezos’s decision demonstrated that even the possibility of a Trump presidency could force what had been one of the most courageous newspapers in the US to censor itself. Marty Baron, former editor of the Post, called the move “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty”.Citizens concerned about democracy must monitor those in power, act as watchdogs against abuses of power, challenge those abuses, organize and litigate, and sound the alarm about wrongdoing and wrongful policies.But not even the most responsible of citizens can do these things without reliable sources of information. The public doesn’t know what stories have been censored, muted, judged out of bounds, or preemptively not covered by journalists who’d rather not take the risk.In the final weeks before the election, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked his newspaper’s planned endorsement of Harris, prompting the head of the paper’s editorial board to resign. Mariel Garza said she was “not OK with us being silent”, adding: “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.”Honest people standing up is precisely what resisting authoritarianism and protecting democracy require. Americans and the citizens of other countries must have access to the truth if we have any hope of standing up to tyranny.The Guardian remains a reliable and trustworthy source of news because it is truly independent. That’s why I’m writing this, and why you’re reading it.Unlike other US media organizations, the Guardian cannot be co-opted by the growing alliances of oligarchs and authoritarians. It does not depend for its existence on billionaires or the good graces of a demagogue; it depends on us.Please support the Guardian today. More

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      Uncommitted achieved its goal in making Gaza a mainstream issue | Camonghne Felix

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      In the days following the 2024 election, a cadre of pundits have been eager to call the uncommitted voters’ impact on the presidential race both a failure and a significant factor in Vice-President Kamala Harris’s loss. Despite those contradicting analyses, the movement’s success lies not in its voter count, but rather in the clarity it offered voters, even those who changed their minds and chose to vote for Harris in the end.As with the anti-war campaigns of the 1960s, the Uncommitted National Movement, the more than 500,000-person effort which called on Americans against the genocide in Gaza to withhold their votes, was a representation of the nation’s shifting consciousness around US responsibility in Israel’s war. By asking the public to confront imperialism, the movement opened the door to a confrontation between the people and the Democratic party, awakening its voters to an issue once seen as someone else’s concern.When the uncommitted movement offered to endorse Harris in exchange for having a speaker at the Democratic national convention and were denied, it allowed the movement to more extensively highlight the contradictions that mark the party. If the Democrats weren’t giving marginalized people an opportunity to speak, what does that say to Muslims, Arabs and voters of color who know intimately this kind of erasure and disregard at the hands of the party that purports to represent them?While some in the Democratic party billed Israel’s carnage as an issue that concerned only the left, many liberals across the spectrum, from the far left to centrists, actually consider it a mainstream issue, one that dominates their political perspectives and positions.More and more people, through the activism of uncommitted voters, learned that American democracy is a feature of western imperialism – Republicans and Democrats alike would supply arms to Israel and allow its government impunity on the world stage. Even though more than 60% of US voters supported an arms embargo, including 77% of Democratic voters and 40% of Republican voters, and even though stopping arms transfers polled highly in swing states, the Democratic party ignored demands for an embargo and ceasefire. (The Biden administration has repeatedly said it is pushing for a ceasefire.) That ceasefire has yet to come, and more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, with many more unaccounted for.The anti-war college campus protests also furthered the cause of uncommitted: students across the country were unduly labeled as antisemitic antagonists because they pressed their universities to divest from weapons manufacturers. Democratic voters across the country became more and more sympathetic to the students’ actions, marking an even more pronounced break from the party position. That consciousness only grew once the expansion of the war into Lebanon and Syria underscored the extent of US involvement in the creation and exacerbation of regional warfare.Uncommitted voters in Michigan, which has the largest population of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslim people in the country, helped deliver a loss to the Harris campaign on election night. To be clear: there is no basis to the accusation that Harris losing Michigan was the lone cause of Trump’s win. But it matters that Arab and Muslim voters in cities such as Dearborn rejected the Democrats’ agenda, while Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian representative from Michigan and Ilhan Omar, a representative from Minnesota, held on to their seats. Biden and Harris had room to choose a different approach on Israel, even if it meant appealing to a smaller group of Democrats who would have been happy to campaign and organize for Harris had the party shown any significant steps to end the war.Even those uncommitted voters who decided to vote for Harris were participating in a consciousness-raising effort that revealed existing contradictions within the party and democracy as a whole. Their demands dominated headlines, especially before the Democratic national convention.Uncommitted voters, in the end, are the ones coming away from this election with a win. In raising awareness, the movement has provided an example for future anti-war actions, by redefining the function of the vote as less of a compulsion and more of an opportunity to center morality instead of myopic harm-reductionist tactics meant to maintain the status quo.The movement also offers a useful retrospective on the race: when the party of the people chooses to remain hostile to Palestinian protests and refuses to show any proportional empathy to Palestinian people, the voters they need will reject them. Anger and disappointment took up the space that hope might have, and was the dominant emotion felt by many in the electorate, due in part to the persistence of uncommitted voters in elevating their voices and pushing others to consider the value of their vote.That this was possible was news to many Americans until uncommitted voters began to organize. Because of their activism, the Democrats are learning that the genocide in Gaza is a hard line for more people than they thought, and that chances of winning back the House and Senate in 2026 will remain slim unless some shift is made in the strategy, a shift that requires the party to aggressively pursue an end to the hecatomb of Gaza.America is slowly opening its eyes to the violent truths of American hegemony. Because of uncommitted, more people now have a working criticism of America’s position on the world stage. This is what the seams of Harris’s loss reveal: the Democrats are in trouble, and democracy is in trouble, too. More

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      ‘Queen of polling’ J Ann Selzer quits after Iowa survey missed by 16 points

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      J Ann Selzer, the celebrated Iowa election pollster, announced on Sunday that she is moving on “to other ventures and opportunities”, two weeks after her survey in the state wrongly predicted a strong shift to Kamala Harris in the days before the election.That poll, which projected a 47% to 44% lead for the vice-president over Donald Trump on the back of older women breaking for Democrats over the issue of reproductive rights, came three days before the national vote, giving Democrats false hope that Harris could win the White House decisively. When the votes were counted, Selzer was off by 16 points as the former president won the state decisively.Selzer, known as the “queen of polling”, shot to fame in 2008 when she predicted that a virtually unknown senator, Barack Obama, would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses.She told MSNBC before the vote that Harris was leading in early voting in Iowa “because of her strength with women generally, even stronger with women aged 65 and older. Her margin is more than 2-to-1 – and this is an age group that shows up to vote, or votes early, in disproportionately large numbers.”Trump disputed the poll in a post on his Truth Social network at the time.“In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT.”According to unofficial results, Trump ultimately won Iowa by 13 points, 56% to 43%.In a column published by the Des Moines Register on Sunday, Selzer wrote that public opinion polling had been her “life’s work” and had made a decision to step back from it a year ago.“Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course,” she wrote. “It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite.”Seltzer ventured that her strong track record had “maybe that history of accuracy made the outlier position too comfortable”.“Polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist. So, I’m humbled, yet always willing to learn from unexpected findings,” she added.A review of Selzer’s final 2024 poll hasn’t revealed a clear reason for missing Trump’s runaway victory in the state, the paper said in a column published on Sunday, adding that it is “evaluating the best ways to continue surveys that will provide accurate information and insight about issues that matter to Iowans”.Editor Carol Hunter wrote that the Iowa Poll “has been an important legacy indicator and we recognize the need to evolve and find new ways to accurately take the pulse of Iowans on state and national issues”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the black eye the polling business has received for failing to predict a strong Trump victory in the electoral college, 312 to 226, and popular vote, taking with him all seven swing states and seeing every state moving Republican, may not be entirely deserved.Most political polls for the 2024 presidential election saw a close race in the electoral college, and a popular-vote victory for Harris. But the election results so far show that Trump added more than 2m votes to his 2020 total, while Harris received millions fewer votes than Joe Biden did four years earlier, in what some are calling the lost “couch vote”.Trump won the electoral college 312 to 226, and currently leads the popular vote by 1.7%. UC Riverside polling expert Andy Crosby wrote that Trump’s margin of victory was within the 2.2% margin of error of most of the final elections polls.After what turned out to be the final Selzer Iowa poll this year, she had offered these words of warning to excited Never Trump podcasters at The Bulwark: “People looked at my methodology … and it’s published in every article in the Des Moines Register, how we do it, but you look at it on paper and you go, It’s too simple, this can’t possibly work. And so far it has, but I’m prepared that one day it will not work and I will blow up into tiny little pieces and be scattered across the city of Des Moines.” More

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      The ‘foolproof’ election forecaster who predicted Trump would lose – what went wrong?

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      Surely not even Nostradamus could get it right all of the time.Allan Lichtman had correctly forecast the result of nine of the past 10 US presidential elections (and even the one he didn’t, in 2000, he insists was stolen from Al Gore). His predictive model of “13 keys” to the White House was emulated around the world and seemed all but indestructible.Until, that is, Donald Trump, the notorious human wrecking ball, came along and broke his crystal ball. Lichtman had prophesied that Democrat Kamala Harris would win eight of his keys, claiming the presidency, forcing him to face the harsh truth that his winning streak was over. Was it a big personal blow?“Of course,” the 77-year-old admits by phone. “But I care far less about the personal blow than I care about the blow to our democracy. Even before the election I said, ‘Look, if I’m wrong, the implications are vastly greater for our society than they are for the keys.’ It’s much more important to look at the broader implications.”Lichtman, a history professor who has been teaching at American University in Washington for more than a half a century, developed his keys to the White House in the early 1980s. With Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a Soviet expert on earthquake prediction, he analysed elections in terms of stability (the party holding the White House holds it) versus earthquake (the party holding the White House is ejected).The pair devised 13 true/false questions: if six or more keys went against the White House party, it would lose. Lichtman used the model to successfully predict Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1984 and (nearly) every election that followed. After the 2016 election, he received a copy of his Washington Post interview with a message written in a Sharpie pen: “Congrats, professor. Good call. Donald J Trump.”The 2024 election was always going to be a tough test for Lichtman. Joe Biden dropped out in favour of Harris while Trump, who survived two assassination attempts, is a norm-busting figure who was bidding to become the first former president to win back the White House since Grover Cleveland in the 19th century.Why did he think Harris would win, and what went wrong? “The keys are premised on the proposition that a rational, pragmatic electorate decides whether the White House party has governed well enough to get another four years,” he explains. “Just as this kind of hate and violence is new, there are precedent-shattering elements now to our political system, most notably disinformation.“There’s always been disinformation but it has exploded to a degree we’ve never seen before. It’s not just Fox News and the rightwing media. It’s also rightwing podcasters and we have a brand new player, the $300bn guy, Elon Musk, whose wealth exceeds that of most countries in the world and has heavily put his thumb on disinformation.”Musk’s Super Pac reportedly spent about $200m to help elect Trump while his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, amplified rightwing propaganda. Musk was a leading Trump surrogate and has since become a near-permanent fixture at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Along with the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, he will now head an effort to reduce wasteful government spending.Lichtman continues: “It’s been reported that the disinformation that he disseminates has been viewed billion of times. The disinformation extends to every aspect of our society and our economy. Many people are living in an alternative universe and that calls into question the fundamental basis of political decision-making in this country.”That includes disinformation about inflation, jobs, employment, the stock market, growth, hurricane aid, the Ukraine war and undocumented immigrants, falsely portrayed as dangerous killers when in fact they commit crimes at far lower rate than native-born Americans.Another problem for Lichtman’s model was a presidential candidate who has constantly torn up the rulebook and defied categorisation. “We’ve seen Trump far more than we’ve ever seen in the history of this country channel the darkest impulses in American life – things that have always been with us but were increased exponentially this time: racism, misogyny, xenophobia, antisemitism.“We’re seeing something new in our politics, which affected the prediction and could affect future predictions but has a much bigger message for the future of our democracy. George Orwell was 40 years too soon. He made it clear that dictatorships don’t just arise from brutality and suppression. They arise from control of information: doublethink. Famine is plenty, war is peace. We’re in the doublethink era and maybe we can get out of it, maybe not.”After Lichtman made his 2024 prediction, he and his wife received a backlash in the form of death threats, vulgar abuse and even people trying to breach their home. They were also the victims of swatting (false reports of a threat intended to draw a heavy police response at the target’s home) and doxing, in which their private information was published online.“I’ve been doing this for 42 years and I have never experienced anything remotely like this,” he says. “I haven’t had to call the police before ever; now they’ve been here several times. They’re on alert. They notified the FBI.”Once an idealistic 13-year-old who watched John F Kennedy speak in New York, Lichtman is dismayed that politics has come to this. “It tells me that America has fallen to an absolute new low,” he reflects.“All I have done is exercise my free speech and yet here I am, subject to all of this hate, attempts to breach the security of my family, and it’s consistent with what we heard from Donald Trump, who’s constantly invoking violence as legitimate, plus for dehumanising those he doesn’t agree with as vermin, scum, something less than human to be dealt with. We’ve never seen anything like this before in America.”Looking back at his 2024 miscalculation, Lichtman is not about to let Democrats off the hook. He had been a staunch defender of Biden until the end and condemned the party for forcing him to step aside in favour of Harris. He is now unimpressed by its epic blame game and self-flagellation over the election result.“They’re pointing the finger at everyone else but not taking any responsibility. This election proves what I’ve been saying for years. I can summarise American politics in one sentence. Republicans have no principles, Democrats have no spine.”As if to prove the point, Trump has nominated Matt Gaetz, a Maga bomb thrower once subject to a sex-trafficking investigation, as his attorney general. The post is currently held by Merrick Garland, whom Lichtman has known for 60 years.“I love the guy,” he says. “I thought he was maybe the greatest federal judge in America and he is now the poster child of the spineless Democrats who have let all this happen. He diddled for almost two years before appointing a special counsel [to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 2021 insurrection].“We all knew on January 7 what Trump had done. Certainly we knew it by the time Merrick Garland was appointed in early 2021. If he had acted as he should have right away, everything would have been different. I believe Trump would have been convicted of serious federal crimes and either be in jail or be on probation and the whole political system would have been different.”Lichtman adds: “He epitomises the spineless Democrats. ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this because I might seem political and Republicans might criticise me.’ Didn’t he learn anything from his supreme court nomination? Republicans are going to do what they’re going to do.“It doesn’t depend on what you do. I always go by the mantra of: it’s not just the evil people who wreak havoc on this world, it’s the good people who don’t do enough to stop them. And Merrick Garland is right front and centre of that.”The Trump-Musk axis “broke my predictive model this year”, Lichtman admits, but he intends to pick himself up, dust himself down and try again in 2028. “I fully expect to adjust the keys according to what I see unfolding over the next several years,” he promises. “The beauty of being a presidential predictor is you have four years to correct your course.“Presuming I’m still around at 81 and fully engaged in my faculties, I will be very carefully monitoring developments over the next few years apropos of the keys and also speaking out in defence of our democracy. The keys are one thing – they’re totally non-partisan – but I have my own political views as well and I fully intend to express them. And when I think the Democrats are worthy of criticism, I don’t hold back.” More

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      To the stars vowing to flee Trump’s America: maybe your excruciating endorsements were part of the problem | Marina Hyde

      by

      I wish celebrities would learn the art of the French exit. But they can’t, which is why Eva Longoria has announced she no longer lives in America. “I get to escape and go somewhere,” she explained. “Most Americans aren’t so lucky – they’re going to be stuck in this dystopian country.” What’s brought this on, apart from the obvious? “Whether it’s the homelessness or the taxes … it just feels like this chapter in my life is done now.” Great to learn that Eva dislikes both homelessness and taxes. America’s loss of this major political thinker is some other country’s gain – and this highly called-for intervention reminds us why celebrities should speak their brains even more often. If only into a pillow, or an abyss.As always in these moments of the silly voters making a silly mistake, many stars have pledged to follow her. We’ll see. Either way, celebrities seem totally unaware that these high-handed statements of first-class migration are not the admonishment to the lesser orders that they are meant to be, and may even encourage them.But then, stars have always been totally unaware of how very little they bring to this particular party. The last few days of the Harris campaign were an increasingly excruciating riot of celebrity bandwagonning. Did the Kamala campaign ask man-born-in-Pennsylvania Richard Gere to make his video for her – or did the actor freelance one out of fear of not having “used his platform”? It was certainly Richard’s most critically misunderstood electoral outing since his address to the Palestinians before their 2005 elections. “Hi, I’m Richard Gere,” that one began, “and I’m speaking for the entire world …”If anything good were to come out of the wreckage of the Harris campaign, let it be the final death of the idea that showbiz endorsements can help swing elections. They can’t. Not one bit. Not even if it’s Taylor Swift in the 2024 US presidential election, not even when it was Russell Brand in the 2015 British general election, and not even if they have tens of millions of followers. (It does move the dial, however, if you own the platform.) Election issues and politicians swing elections.The minuscule amount of positive data we have on celebrity endorsements suggests they might have some effect in getting their fans to register to vote and volunteer for campaigns. I suspect these days that is more than offset by the perception of elitism that actively harmed the Harris campaign and others before it. If anything could turn you hard Maga, it’s watching Lady Gaga sing Edge of Glory at Kamala’s eve-of-polling-day concert – the worst thing she’s been in since Joker II – and then discovering that Oprah, who also appeared, had billed the Harris campaign $1m via her company. This week, Winfrey insisted she wasn’t paid personally, with the Harris campaign simply required to pay for “production costs” on an earlier “townhall” featuring her, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ben Stiller, Chris Rock and Jennifer Lopez. Hmm. If only there was some billionaire – but the good kind! – or even just some mega-rich folk involved in said event, who could perhaps have picked up the wage bill herself/themselves, rather than siphon it off the campaign.Meanwhile, it is easier to leave Twitter than America, as I think Marcus Aurelius once remarked. In the week the Guardian exited X – though not in the French style – you couldn’t move for people informing you they were herding with almost impossible dignity over to Bluesky.And it does feel slightly hilarious that huge numbers of people who have spent the past decade-plus shrieking about the evils of social media – usually on social media – have been “liberated” from one platform, only to promptly rush and enslave themselves to another. Really? You can see it all stretching ahead of you – fun period, emergence of Blueskyocracy, the first Bluesky cancellation of someone, the exponentially intensifying purity spiral, followed by legacy titles or legacy humans announcing an exit from that one too. It’s all such a predictable timesuck. Bluesky might be the new email.Speaking of which, when people ask me for my email, I have to tell them very truthfully that I am so old-fashioned that I only have one – my Guardian one. I always used to follow this up by saying something along the lines of “I know, it’s ridiculous. If I ever stopped working there, no one would be able to contact me.” But now I keep thinking – oh my God! No one would be able to contact me via email! THE MODERN DREAM!This has felt particularly desirable since the election, when I’ve been drowning in emails from the multiple liberal publications I already subscribe to, stagily rending their garments and assuring me that “we do this for you”. It seems like every cloud has a silver lining – ideally a gold one, with all sorts of titles dreaming of the Trump subscription bump they got last time around. Again: we’ll see.My unfashionable view is that the world would benefit from less partisan media, not more. Over in the US for the election, I mistakenly kept turning on CNN for news, and was genuinely shocked at the offering since the last time I seriously paid attention to it (admittedly some years ago now). It didn’t really even have headlines on the hour, let alone coverage of “news”, and appeared to be a talking shop that saw itself purely as an active agent for the Harris campaign. To this outside observer, it didn’t seem to be doing anything different from Fox News, except that it was doing it for the other side.And it doesn’t even work. Retreating into ideas of “resistance” is a big part of how we got here. People hate on Trump for cashing in with his merchandise, but isn’t rather a lot of the current liberal media convulsion just another form of Trump merchandise? Off-brand, yes. But still Trump merchandise – and as tacky, intentionally commercial and likely to lead to regret in the end as the official stuff.

      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

      A Year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar. On Tuesday 3 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back at a political year like no other, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live More