The ever-splenetic HL Mencken once wrote that “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard”. He was no liberal, but it’s a line many Democrats today would be taken with. On Tuesday, the first wave of election postmortems have lamented, the American people took the full measure of Donald Trump – oaf, cheat, bigot and fascist – and re-elected him under no illusions, in full cognizance of what another Trump term would mean for the country.
One can quibble with this just a bit: there’s a lot that emerged over the course of this campaign that most voters probably didn’t know much about, from a plan to invade Mexico that Trump may well have forgotten himself to late breaking news on the depth of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Still, frustrated Democrats are directionally correct here on the whole. Trump won this election fairly, squarely and soundly as a well-known quantity – a former president and the most widely discussed man in the world, who will return to the White House in his 10th year at the center of American life.
It remains alarmingly unclear how much worse the term we’re in for will be than Trump’s first, but those at the margins of American society may find out sooner than most. Mass deportations, he’s claimed, will begin on day one; according to Stephen Miller, Trump’s plan here includes the construction of “large-scale staging grounds” – internment camps – for immigrants along the southern border.
It’s plain to all now that the specter of a crackdown and all that Trump has said and done on immigration weren’t a dealbreaker for Hispanic voters, many of whom have drifted towards Trump and the right, polls show, out of a faith that Trump isn’t really talking about them – that his focus is and will remain on immigrants who are ill-behaved.
A tiny but unforgettable data point on this front was offered up on Wednesday by a reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who posted up outside an Ice field office and encountered undocumented immigrants who told him they would have voted for Trump themselves if they could. “They don’t believe Trump will deport them,” he posted on Twitter, “because they are here to work and are ‘not criminals’.”
These are the kind of anecdotes that turn people into Menckens – that curdle our faith in democracy and society’s possibilities with nagging doubts and stubborn prejudices, none greater than an overarching disdain for humanity itself. The explanation for Trump’s victory likeliest to prevail among those despairing today – when all the granular analyses are through, as diligently as analysts will peck through polls and precinct data for answers in the weeks, months and years ahead – is that many or most Americans are stupid or evil. Talk of a national divorce, an idea that gained a remarkable and embarrassing amount of traction in our discourse early in Trump’s first term, is sure to return.
Those of us more seriously committed to pulling this country off the road to hell, of course, can’t afford a retreat into nihilism or fantasy. Voters can be maddening, yes. They are motivated by competing and often contradictory thoughts and impulses. But the task of democratic politics, still today as always, is to engage and persuade them. That frustrating, difficult work isn’t for everyone; those not cut out for it should see themselves off of the political scene and leave it to others. Thinking through what to do now will be difficult enough without the interjections of those who’ve convinced themselves that there’s nothing to be done.
As far as Democratic professionals are always concerned, the way forward is clear. The party, we’re hearing already, needs to moderate. Never mind the fact, and it is a fact, that the Harris campaign hewed to the political middle with extraordinary discipline. One of the campaign’s most visible surrogates in the last weeks of the campaign was Liz Cheney, who appeared with Harris in an October event at the birthplace of the Republican party. At the lone vice-presidential debate, Tim Walz signaled his agreement with JD Vance so often that their friendliness was lampooned by Saturday Night Live.
The two most visible breaks the campaign made from the Biden record were a commitment to a lower capital gains tax hike than the one that Biden had proposed and a promise to name a Republican to the cabinet. On immigration, Harris castigated Trump repeatedly for torpedoing a restrictive immigration bill authored by the Republican senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. On foreign policy, she rebuffed demands from progressive activists on Gaza, reasserted Israel’s right to defend itself and committed to making our military the most lethal in the world. And the campaign also went out of its way to convince Americans that Harris herself would be willing to use deadly force if threatened – Americans heard much more from the campaign about her being a gun owner than about the possibility of her becoming our first female president.
And although much of the campaign was focused on abortion rights and the status of women under Trump, that’s an issue where Democrats have been in keeping with mainstream opinion, as most Americans opposed the overturning of Roe v Wade. Outside the Harris campaign proper, it’s been reported that Future Forward – America’s largest single-candidate SuperPac, having raised an estimated $700m – tested many of its ads through the research firm of David Shor, most well-known in political circles as a proponent of avoiding policies, ideas and language out of step with prevailing public opinion, advice most typically reduced to the idea that candidates should target the political center, as Harris did.
That advice is based mostly on the reasonable heuristic that candidates who are perceived as moderate tend to do better in competitive elections than candidates at the extremes, generally speaking. But politics is a complicated business. Harris’s best polls came early in the campaign, when all voters knew about her, if anything, was that she was a non-white woman from liberal California.
Even if one doesn’t believe she lost the election because she pivoted to the center – even if one grants for the sake of argument that she would have done worse had she not made it – that pivot obviously did not win her the race. In fact, as of Wednesday, there was not a single state in the country where Harris had managed to substantially outperform Biden’s 2020 campaign, which, it should be said, was the only Democratic general election campaign in recent memory to have been run substantially to the left of a candidate’s initial primary platform.
There are a few available excuses for this – it could be that Harris was a uniquely bad candidate or that she was unconvincing in her moderation given previous stances she’d taken. But Harris’s loss should be processed within the context of a checkered political record that Democratic moderates should, at some point, be asked to answer for. The path to the political center is not untried and untrodden.
Barack Obama came to the White House in 2009 with a governing majority that included moderate Democratic senators from states like Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and North Dakota. The simple answer to the question of why Democrats failed to codify abortion protections under him, a topic of some discussion in this election, is that 15 years ago, the Democratic party included many more pro-life centrists. In 2007, the House’s centrist Blue Dog caucus – not to be confused with the also centrist New Democrat Coalition – had so many potential candidates that it instituted a cap ensuring its ranks could comprise no more than 20% of Democrats in the chamber.
That wound up being wholly unnecessary: over the course of Obama’s presidency, the years immediately preceding Trump, moderate Democrats were obliterated in races across the country, both federally and at the state level, for reasons that the party and centrist pundits refuse to grapple with seriously to this day. However reliably tacking to the center might have worked as an electoral prescription in the Clinton era, it clearly offers diminishing returns now. The Democratic party is not being doomed by an unwillingness to run moderate presidential campaigns or because the party is putting forward aspiring Squad members as candidates in Kansas. A growing number of American voters, especially in the places where Trump has done best, are looking at moderate Democratic candidates and moderate Democratic campaigns and choosing to vote for the right.
That broad trend aside, the reasons why Trump won over so many voters, including voters who may not have liked his rhetoric or persona, in this particular election, may be comparatively simple to unpack. It’s obvious that Trump retained his appeal among Republicans and voters with deeply reactionary views, but it should also be plain now, given the gains he’s made, including among non-white voters, that he’s become a more broadly compelling figure – owing partially, it seems, to the perception that he was an alright president.
As much as we might fear that his second term will be much worse for more people than the first, the fact remains that most voters, until the coronavirus pandemic, experienced the Trump presidency as a television drama with little material impact on their lives. The attempt to steal the 2020 election ultimately failed, as did the legislative push that would have affected most Americans most seriously – the drive to repeal Obamacare. The single legislative accomplishment of the Trump administration was instead a large tax cut.
It seems reasonable now to think that Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis it triggered had more to do with Biden winning in 2020 than Biden’s appeals to American norms, but the lows of that year seem to have faded into memory in the time since and it seems likely that most Americans will go on to remember the pandemic as a rare act of God that was not especially anyone’s fault.
The inflation of Biden’s term, on the other hand, has been blamed on Democratic impotence or mismanagement, an impression Harris evidently could not shake. And her efforts to redirect attention to the existential consequences of another Trump term clearly ran into a daunting wall – the fact that as much as Americans at the margins may have been hurt by his administration, life simply went on for most and the economy, for most of his term, felt better as they remember it than it has under Biden, booming economic figures now notwithstanding.
Clearly, to many of the voters who mattered most in this election, Trump is eccentric, uncouth, but not an especially dangerous politician from a party they have long trusted more on the economy – the fully normalized standard-bearer of the only two real options Americans have when they go to the polls.
Other voters who also mattered clearly saw Trump just as Democrats do – a bomb-throwing threat to politics as usual – and decided to vote for him precisely on that basis. And it’s this constituency that Democrats, moving forward, will probably have the hardest time pulling into the fold. Decrying Trump’s threat to our norms and institutions was a message that resonated primarily with Americans who respect them in the first place – not disaffected voters convinced, justifiably, that the wealthy and well-connected really run the show in Washington or cynics who figure their politicians should at least be entertaining if they can’t actually do anything to help them.
There’s already been much discussion about the extent to which more and more young men, including young men of color, are falling into this category; we’ll have to wait for more reliable sources of data than notoriously bad exit polling for details on that. It should already be crystal clear, though, that the Democratic party has not demonstrated any capacity whatsoever to speak to voters who simply don’t believe in the politics of old and aren’t interested in returning to it.
None of this should be taken as a dismissal of the fact that incumbent parties around the world have faltered in this economy; it is again plausible that Harris or any Democrat would have been overwhelmingly likely to lose. But beyond the contours of this particular race, the Democratic party – having lost twice, under different conditions, to a candidate that has fundamentally and fatally confounded so many of the assumptions shaping their approach to politics – is at a point of crisis.
The long Obama era is over. The familiar homilies – about how there are no red states or blue states and Americans share a set of common values and working institutions novelly and externally threatened by agents of chaos like Trump – never described political reality. They now no longer work reliably even as political messaging. The hunt should be on for alternatives.
At the moment, much of the Democratic party is processing their loss in stunned silence. Harris’s concession speech didn’t come until 4.00pm ET on Wednesday. It was reported that neither a victory nor a concession speech had been fully prepared on Tuesday night – no one had expected things to end so quickly.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist
