LisaTrevor [she/her, they/them]

Immediately, I was taken in by the number. The number was wrong, it wasn’t finished being counted, but I was taken in by it nonetheless. Immediately, holy shit, 14 million, 15 million, at one point 20 million fewer votes than Biden was a pretty damning indictment of every strategy the Democratic party tried this election.

But the number was wrong. It went up. The gap is closer than it seemed at first, and in swing states the raw vote totals look nearly identical to 2020 with the colors flipped. The Average American voted how they usually do, but a few thousand each in a handful of states flipped (or some that abstained in 2020 voted in 2024 and vice versa). Groceries are expensive. There’s war in the middle east. Nobody can afford to buy a house. The more things don’t change, the more they stay the same.

So, a slightly premature post-mortem. A half-dead autopsy, if you will. There’s still more information to glean, more numbers to crunch and polls to run, but the general picture is there. It’s gonna be a bit of a winding road to get to the destination, but I think it’ll make sense when all’s said and done.

“That’s the spirit. Learn nothing.” -@wokeandwoofing

The discourse has begun, and it ain’t pretty. The myriad reactions range from willfully ignorant or deluded (Harris ran a great campaign! Everyone else is wrong and there’s absolutely nothing we can do, so there’s nothing we have to change! Fuck off), to plausible but ultimately misdirected (anything about signalling, or policy, or being too woke, or being too moderate, or courting too many right wingers, or caring too much what leftists think - not necessarily wrong, just more or less irrelevant), to projected cope (anyone who criticized the Democrats suppressed turnout! nonvoters don’t know anything and should have just believed everything I believe without having to be appealed to in any way! i’m a stupid baby!) to, I’d call it “getting there.” This last group will be my focus.

I hate to write an analysis based on the desperately firing synapses of random idiot libs on Reddit, but it seems like as good a place as any to start. There’s a bit of a debate on the more normie forums (i.e. any subreddit that regularly hits the front page, whose users spend a baffling amount of time posting the same Orange Man Bad image macros from the last 8 years) about whose fault this all really is. A lot of it is frustrating and stupid, but some of it has my brain turning. Here’s the general back and forth that seems to go unresolved: “Democrats should have listened to Bernie! He had populist rhetoric, which is how Trump keeps getting regular working class people to vote against their interests, but his policies wouldn’t be a dumpster fire once implemented.” “But the loony left aren’t popular! Socialists aren’t gonna win over your shitty dad in the rust belt. People don’t vote on policy anyway.” “And this centrist bullshit is? Clearly it isn’t getting people to vote, so they should try something different. Getting more racist isn’t going to work because the Republicans already have all the racists, and why would you vote for some diet-racist lib when the excited raving racist is right there? At least he’s funny.” “But they have tried something different! The CHIPS act! The infrastructure bill! It didn’t matter. Clearly, we just need to try getting more racist…” etc. etc., and so on forever.

And I have to say, they’re both kind of right (not about getting more racist! Just to make that extra clear). People vote based more on vibes than policy. Democrats should be more populist. But explicitly socialist rhetoric isn’t super popular with most people (yet, anyway - wishful thinking on my part), and it isn’t guaranteed that a Berniecrat campaign would have actually moved the needle much at this exact point in time, in the current context of national politics and economics. Biden, I think, mostly won on Trump’s COVID disaster; his strategy was kind of muddled. Build Back Better was smart, sort of left-wing populism, but not really. He had plenty of center-right messaging too, it didn’t seem to hurt him. He was an old white guy, I guess that kind of mattered, but I don’t think it’s really the deciding factor in all this. An exciting woman could win.

And it’s also true that what little Biden managed to do did objectively help. Inflation slowed down, joining a union got easier, unemployment dropped, and wage increases have outpaced inflation (at least, I think, on average they have). I’ve heard housing prices have stabilized, but I haven’t checked, because who cares, they’re too high as it is. And yes, Harris’ proposed policies would have made incremental progress as well. But that’s ultimately where my criticism lies. All of this is hedged incrementalism, already defanged before getting let off the leash. It’s like it’s scientifically designed to lose in a fight. Sure, people might not respond to “LEFTIST POLICY” as such, communicated in precisely defined, academic poli-sci language, but they’d definitely feel the benefits of more drastic reforms than this bullshit that only manages to help some of them barely get by. Yeah, THE ECONOMY is better. Sure. But better still fucking sucks for the vast majority of people. And the other guy is giving them someone to blame, and promising to give them the most perfect beautiful bullshit on earth to fix it, and fix it big, and fix it fast, and fix it forever. And yeah, it’s bullshit. But it’s much cooler bullshit than what the other side’s serving.

Until the big-ol lib-left opposition figures that out, or gets forcibly tossed out on their sorry asses by some young up-and-comer, we’re going to keep schizophrenically vacillating between flesh-eating psychos and weeping nerds until we all burn or drown. Or both. We could boil.

So, what could Kamala have done? Probably nothing. I would have preferred she tried literally anything different, but I’m not so arrogant as to think that everything I personally care about would have been the exact antidote to our collective apathy. I’m no longer convinced that more people explicitly saying “I won’t vote for you until you promise [insert pet political issue here]” would have mattered, and I’m not convinced her taking up those positions (popular as they might have been) would have resolved this contradiction, because in the end I’m not convinced that people withheld their vote in the hopes of anything changing, or making a statement, or teaching a lesson. I think they just didn’t like how things were going and didn’t think more of the same slightly-better-than-literal-dogshit was worth taking time out of their day to fill in some bubbles or wait in a line. And can you really blame them? Some certainly can. I just feel bad.

What would have worked? Being a better party 4, 8, 16, 24, etc. years ago. Not being spineless neoliberals since the 90s. Campaigning against Republicans with something big, fighting tooth and nail to get it done when you win, conceding on as little as you can manage, and hoping it works. Trying to change things, to make them drastically better, not just slightly less bad. Throwing Trump in jail and barring him from returning to office. Packing the court. Trying any crazy thing you think could work instead of hopelessly clinging to these traditional standards of civil conduct. Not wasting time bargaining with an arsonist as you watch him ignore you and set the whole fucking building on fire anyway.