WTF just happened? As the resident Radix American, I’m going to serve you up a hot take and a bucket of sick as a chaser.
Two different Americas went to the polls and there were more of ‘them’ than ‘us’. That is the first thing liberal/centrist ‘us’ gets wrong and if we want to avoid a British version feeding off the isolation of Brexit, we better get wise fast.
Democrats and the Harris messaging machine presented optimism and progress. We’re not going back! – to over half of the country that had already memory-holed the first Trump term and had thoroughly discounted the near extinction of political integrity.
Harris didn’t run a bad campaign. It even echoed Regan’s 1980 Morning In America imagery in cut-through ad buys like the Super Bowl and red state markets. It spoke to the hearts and minds of Americans who value progress (as they see it) and community (as they wish it to be).
How did Trump manage to speak to more than half of America with, as we see it, word-vomit, lies and threats of violence? How did he simultaneously insult minority voters AND get them to the polls for him?
Trump validated what they saw – or thought they saw.
It’s no good telling voters about the jobs that the Chips Act will bring if your audience doesn’t have one and doesn’t see how they will get one. An economy on an upward trajectory isn’t tangible yet. Four years wasn’t enough time to revive the post 2008 / post COVID slump.
Harris was running an incumbent race with no legitimacy banked to an electorate who were low information and low trust. Promising to drop the cost of groceries by stopping price-gouging as an economic offering to strapped families sounds nice, generous, and heartwarming. But, in many places – known as food deserts – there’s no comparison shopping. Those voters only see their receipt at the checkout at the only supermarket for miles.
Trump, meanwhile, spouts absurdity. Blue America listens to the whole sentence. Or, collections of non-sequitors, internet rumours and meme references, his voters are filtering as he does it. They’re picking out the detail that chimes with their experience and flushing the rest.
Immigrants eating pets? They heard immigrants taking jobs not fido. Taxpayer funded sex change operations in prisons? They recall YouTube videos of men in dresses wailing at being misgendered by a barista. The elites need to be stopped before they destroy our country? They watched Ivy League campuses supporting and celebrating a massacre with no legal consequences.
It’s not too hard to forget the seriousness of the January 6th riots if you’re shopping on a political comparison site that offers you tentifada and a fresh memory of the opportunistic destruction that followed in the wake of BLM as an alternative. And Trump just used less elegant language to achieve what Nixon did in the face of Vietnam protests. Lefty kids get fancy educations and blue collar MAGA supporters go to jail.
Democrats really thought that a nasty joke about Puerto Rico would bring back Latino voters. Trump’s bump in support from Hispanic men might just have two components – only some are from Puerto Rico. Also, those who left Puerto Rico (and Cuba and Mexico…) did so because America was a way out of poverty. They might have actually made that joke themselves, privately.
Democrats believed that the prospect of women dying without reproductive healthcare would galvanise women and the men who love and respect them. Roe hasn’t been gone long enough for the impact to be widely experienced. Trump’s voters haven’t seen it, yet.
The argument that Harris made simply relied on too many abstractions. Too many feels.
If there is another election – and I will need a good night’s sleep to drum up a shred of optimism – a candidate who empathizes with the discontent of the ignored and the rage of the hopeless would be a good bet. Most of all, the Democrats need to start seeing America for its faults instead of rainbow wishcasting. And three Supreme Court justices need to stay very, very healthy in the meantime.
I’m certainly not disregarding the geopolitical threat of four more Trump years. If we want to be a successful bulwark against a far-right insurgency modeled on Trump’s tactics, it’s time to see what the country really sees and not what we want them to feel.
