11 Ways of Looking At An Election

Commentator

Dear Friends,

I have a piece out in

Persuasion

on Trump’s Rogan interview and a piece on Neil Young at Peter C. Baker’s lovely

Tracks on Tracks

Substack.

Best,

Sam

11 WAYS OF LOOKING AT AN ELECTION

1.This is the most consequential election of my lifetime. Everybody always thinks this, and it’s probably always true, but it’s especially true in this case.

2.The election has the aspect of some kind of physics thought-experiment where you look into two completely alternate realities. In one — where Harris ekes out a win — nothing changes. We have an almost-perfectly uninspired presidency, a continuation of the perfectly-uninspired and wholly-adequate presidential administration that we currently have. In the other alternate reality, all bets are off.

All Bets Are Off

3.There isn’t all that much point in talking about whether Donald Trump is a fascist or not. He’s probably not, really. But he really is out of his mind, and giving him the presidency is a bit like turning it over to an angry child — now even angrier than he was a few years ago. Maybe things turn out ok — just like things were sort of ok for the bulk of Trump’s first term — but the odds are perfectly good that the US social fabric never really recovers from whatever he does.

4.What’s hard to understand about such a consequential election is why it’s so often seemed so boring — why it’s felt like sleepwalking to November. Trump for his part sometimes seems to have trouble focusing on campaigning. The Democrats for two years had the brilliant idea of smuggling Biden and his reduced cortical capacities through to the finish line with 330 million Americans somehow not noticing, and that low-key election strategy seems more or less to have continued with Harris. She has avoided the most high-risk/high-return interviews, like with Rogan, has avoided unscripted questions from the public at her own town hall, and has nowhere close to Trump’s direct exposure to the public. I am convinced that that shyness, that lack of urgency, will cost the Democrats the election.

5.The question is if the Dems know something that I don’t. The Biden people were giving that impression all through the spring, but their Cheshire Cat act then turned out to be baseless. There’s a reiteration of the same idea with The New York Times’ piece this week that leading Democrats are “quietly bullish.” Their confidence is based on the fact that they’ve outspent Republicans on ads and have a better ground game. The notion is that they’re doing the Xs and Os of organization and voter turnout, while Trump is preoccupied by persuasion. And maybe there’s something to that, but I’m not seeing it. You have to have a winning narrative to win elections, and the Democrats just have none.

6.The Democrats’ complete absence of a compelling electoral narrative has bothered me more than anything else in this election cycle. An ‘opportunity economy’ is gobbledygook. It’s a reprise of Hillary Clinton’s much-mocked ‘I’m with her’ and ‘stronger together’ slogans. The reprise of this platitudinous political messaging makes me think that the Dems have kept around all the same media strategists and political consultants who were responsible for botching an almost-sure win in 2016 and who, for the sake of preserving their own careers, have somehow convinced themselves and the party that there is no particular need to adapt, that they can just play it safe as the party of ‘normalcy’ and ‘sanity’ and let Trump wreck himself.¹ It was dumb electioneering by Hillary then and it’s dumb now. The inability to communicate effectively to undecideds is directly downstream of the inability to come up with a dynamic, credible message about how the Dems, if elected, will improve people’s lives.

‘Member this electioneering?

7.Without advancing any kind of narrative, the Democrats have allowed the electoral terrain to be shaped by the other side. Biden handed the Republicans a gift with his lax immigration policies, and the progressive wing added another gift with proposals that enabled Trump to successfully depict the Dems as radicals. But the Dems’ greatest liability is inflation, and the Jedi mind trick of attempting to argue that there isn’t actually inflation doesn’t work when people see the cost of everyday goods continuing to rise.

Those aren’t the costs of household goods going up

8.The Democrats’ leading blunders this cycle have been the inability to offer a compelling positive message, then the unwillingness of party leaders (alongside a compliant press) to attempt to force Biden out in time for a competitive primary, then the decision (by whomever made it) to simply hand the nomination over to Harris as opposed to conducting a brokered convention. The last few months have shown us that there was plenty of time for a successor to establish themselves as the candidate. Harris, it turns out, wasn’t really the best candidate the Dems could have put forward, and as late as the summer they had the opportunity to have a kind of open call at the convention and to see who was able to win over delegates. Harris might well have won that, but she might not have — and the Democrats could have ended up with a candidate who was a more aggressive, more confident campaigner.

9.It’s become clearer to me recently what MAGA stands for. Basically, MAGA is libertarianism, although for some reason we don’t use that word with it. Trump let the cat out of the bag with his recent declaration that he would endeavor to get rid of the income tax — with those revenues purportedly made up by tariffs. As political communications, libertarianism certainly has its strengths — who doesn’t want lower taxes and less regulation? — but it also puts into focus the real existential stakes of the election. Basically, Trump is running on getting rid of as much government as he possibly can — and a second Trump administration may significantly affect the US’ ability to collect sufficient tax revenue — and the Democrats have to make the case, which they haven’t been making, on why government should matter to people at all.

10.The election has two critical key demographics, the median voters and the wingnuts. The Dems have actually done pretty well in courting the median voters. That was the secret in 2020 and 2022. They have depicted themselves as representing normalcy, and have made gains with seniors and suburbanites. Where they are totally losing is with the wingnuts, who are, I believe, a genuine electoral factor. This has been the first election where the ‘heterodox movement’ has played a role and it has swung to Trump. Robert Kennedy effectively served as a siphon, scooping up votes from the party’s fringes (the kinds of people who might have voted for Bernie Sanders) both through his own Trump endorsement and then through the Rogan interview, which probably represented the final conversion of some decent percentage of Kennedy voters. This is all a bit bitter for me — it’s difficult to see people like Rogan, The Free Press, Michael Shellenberger, Martin Gurri become for all intents and purposes Trumpies — and all I can say is that it wasn’t inevitable. The Democrats had to evince some concern with government overreach, and particularly with Big Tech censorship, but this iteration of the party just isn’t even capable of thinking that way.

11.The only substantive issue that the Dems have managed to focus on is abortion, and this is not to be underestimated. The Democrats’ gain with women is real, but it’s offset by the corresponding loss of support with men, which is another own goal. Barack Obama, for instance, had no trouble articulating a left-of-center message to a broad coalition of voters, largely including males. But the Dems aren’t even trying this cycle. I was briefly excited to see a headline in which Michelle Obama reached out to male voters — only to realize that the issue she focused on was trying to get males to care more about reproductive rights.

“Let’s talk about you. What do you think about my reproductive rights?”

With males falling significantly behind in educational and economic metrics, the Democrats had to offer something or other. They couldn’t do it, and couldn’t even think in these terms, and the result is that we have the first boys v. girls election, where Dems just have to hope against hope that their ground game and turnout somehow prevail over their long litany of campaigning missteps.

1. Although, in trying to fact check this assertion, I came across the less-than-encouraging bit of news that Harris’ campaign manager, Julia Chávez Rodriguez, has, uh, never run a campaign before and that, reportedly — although this has to be taken with a grain of salt — Harris recently told her, “you are horrible at your fucking job.”