I'm mostly team "incumbents lost everywhere" but there is context overlap going on. It's true that anti-incumbency was global, but Trump is a uniquely terrible candidate (very unpopular). It's true that in the future Dems won't have the same level of inflation sentiment, but they also won't be running against Trump.
Whether that makes the race lean towards Democrats or away from them, it's worth remembering that Trump, on the whole, drags the party down instead of up. It's been a persistent opinion of mine that if you Replace Trump with a standard Republican, all else equal, it would have been a landslide. The Democratic brand and global political background being as unfavorable as it is, makes Harris' -1.5 popular vote performance seem great all things considered.
I agree, though I think this only answers the "why did Democrats lose?" half of the question. They still need to figure out what to do moving forward, and the time is now for Democrats to lay the groundwork for a coalition that can succeed even after Trump mercifully shuffles off this mortal coil.
I came to a similar conclusion from a different direction. The concept addressed here as a difference between policy and elections (which I think is great and typically word myself as governance vs. politics), I framed as a persuasion problem.
Do you think Republicans are better at Persuasion than Democrats are? Or is the entire art of persuasion (convincing people that X policies are better than Y policies) just dwarfed by unthinking mood responses and confirmation bias at this point? I agree with you that Democrats are not very good at presenting their case to people who don't already share their values or level of education, but I also think they're kind of the only people who are even trying to persuade anyone, at least in the traditional sense.
First, none of these things are mutually exclusive.
I think Republicans have done a better job than Democrats of accepting the reality of what kinds of messages win elections. This is why I like the politics vs. governance formulation. Politics is about winning elections. To win an election, you do not necessarily need to convince more people that your policies are better than those of the other team, you simply need to get more votes. Those are not the same thing. Turns out, what gets votes easily is identifying some kind of problem (doesn't even have to be real), making people afraid of it, blaming that fear on some 'other' (doesn't have to be related to the actual problem or fear), and then telling them you'll eliminate the 'other'. In this, Republicans have done a far better job in recent decades. Which is a result and function of low information voters, unthinking mood responses, and confirmation bias.
I agree Democrats are the only ones trying to persuade voters based on their policy proposals but the problem with this is that: 1) most people don't really understand the policy stuff (inflation is hard); 2) Republicans don't care if their message aligns with their policy or not.
Democrats actually want to govern well and think they have better ideas to do so and therefor campaign by trying to sell those ideas. I would love for it to work this way but most people simply don't understand, care, pay attention enough for that to be effective. Republicans care less about governing than they do about limiting the effectiveness of government and they know that campaigning on "we're gonna make government even worse" is a terrible idea so they don't bother. Instead they blame high egg prices on immigrants, promise to deport millions of immigrants with no real plan or intention to do so, win, and then pass tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations b/c that's all they intended to to anyway.
This isn't a game plan that will work for Democrats. Look at at what happened this year. They tried to do a combo of "we have great ideas" and 'Donald Trump is awful" and it failed.
The point of my essay was just to highlight the fact that Democrats are failing to win new voters. They have focused on key demographics and consistently failed to increase their share among those groups. That's a persuasion problem plain and simple. Whichever product they are trying to sell, they're not doing it well. Delving into how and why they are so bad at this is a whole different essay built around some of what I've said here and addressing double standards and how voters actually respond to political messaging. The first step though is to get Democrats to accept that what they have been doing is not working. It doesn't matter if Democratic efforts at persuasion are more traditional than what Republicans have been doing. Whatever it is you want to do when in power, you can only do it if you win the elections first and Democrats have been showing a trend that leads towards continued failure to do this.
Andrew, first, nice piece in July about new Substacks. Mine is very knew. As i tried to comment when I re-stacked (but forgot to check the nearly invisible Also Share to Notes): Great thoughtful must read analysis. https://substack.com/home/post/p-153093210. I've put a number of your pieces in my bib at the below link and have commented on it.
I had to laugh at the end when you said: “This post has run long enough, so I’ll save my fuller theory of elections for a future one.” I’m busy writing my review of Wendy Brown’s Nihilistic Times and Jonathan Foile’s Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room, for my substack's Review section. The basic principles of these books will guide my own election analysis and my teaching next term.
But I too have my election analysis coming by first week in January, I promise! Andrew and all, feel free to use my 500+ items on my Election Analysis bibliography from Zotero linked to from here: https://michaelalandover.substack.com/p/2024-election-analysis
My analysis will share my original theory of conservative, moderate, liberal, progressive and left, with five different kinds of each (utopian, libertarian, pragmatic, authoritarian and individualist (hint, individualist includes monarchists, Huey Long and....Donald Trump). But not to worry, Vance, my senator, is on the authoritarian row and is a clear believer in extra-consitutional measures. Neoliberals? As individuals they are almost non-existent but as a system it is, I discovered, pragmatic, since it wants "minimum necessary social intervention", as do I, but in 2008 they wanted two trillion, not very minimum, to bail out big business, the pragmatic liberal Obama didn't even try to get two trillion, and settled for a jobs program/bailout of indivduals for 1 trillion, but no one new the money was there, thus Clinton's losss. But my original principle, "minimum necessary social intervention" is shared by all pragmatists from conservative (neo-liberals) to my version of needs-based democratic socialists.
Team Progressive constantly accuses people be being neoliberals. Neoliberalism is a system and my next book will be Wendy Brown's book on neoliberation, a subject I've been studying now for over 20 years, in an effort to develope a human-needs focused, pragmatic alternative to it. But like I say, I'm also a democratic socialist formally for 30 years, and looking back, always was in one way or another. But most of the socialist left is utopian without realizing it. I'm a constitutionalist, committed to major change.
I'm mostly team "incumbents lost everywhere" but there is context overlap going on. It's true that anti-incumbency was global, but Trump is a uniquely terrible candidate (very unpopular). It's true that in the future Dems won't have the same level of inflation sentiment, but they also won't be running against Trump.
Whether that makes the race lean towards Democrats or away from them, it's worth remembering that Trump, on the whole, drags the party down instead of up. It's been a persistent opinion of mine that if you Replace Trump with a standard Republican, all else equal, it would have been a landslide. The Democratic brand and global political background being as unfavorable as it is, makes Harris' -1.5 popular vote performance seem great all things considered.
I agree, though I think this only answers the "why did Democrats lose?" half of the question. They still need to figure out what to do moving forward, and the time is now for Democrats to lay the groundwork for a coalition that can succeed even after Trump mercifully shuffles off this mortal coil.
I came to a similar conclusion from a different direction. The concept addressed here as a difference between policy and elections (which I think is great and typically word myself as governance vs. politics), I framed as a persuasion problem.
https://bradleyroemer.substack.com/p/democrats-have-a-persuasion-problem?r=4sch02
Do you think Republicans are better at Persuasion than Democrats are? Or is the entire art of persuasion (convincing people that X policies are better than Y policies) just dwarfed by unthinking mood responses and confirmation bias at this point? I agree with you that Democrats are not very good at presenting their case to people who don't already share their values or level of education, but I also think they're kind of the only people who are even trying to persuade anyone, at least in the traditional sense.
First, none of these things are mutually exclusive.
I think Republicans have done a better job than Democrats of accepting the reality of what kinds of messages win elections. This is why I like the politics vs. governance formulation. Politics is about winning elections. To win an election, you do not necessarily need to convince more people that your policies are better than those of the other team, you simply need to get more votes. Those are not the same thing. Turns out, what gets votes easily is identifying some kind of problem (doesn't even have to be real), making people afraid of it, blaming that fear on some 'other' (doesn't have to be related to the actual problem or fear), and then telling them you'll eliminate the 'other'. In this, Republicans have done a far better job in recent decades. Which is a result and function of low information voters, unthinking mood responses, and confirmation bias.
I agree Democrats are the only ones trying to persuade voters based on their policy proposals but the problem with this is that: 1) most people don't really understand the policy stuff (inflation is hard); 2) Republicans don't care if their message aligns with their policy or not.
Democrats actually want to govern well and think they have better ideas to do so and therefor campaign by trying to sell those ideas. I would love for it to work this way but most people simply don't understand, care, pay attention enough for that to be effective. Republicans care less about governing than they do about limiting the effectiveness of government and they know that campaigning on "we're gonna make government even worse" is a terrible idea so they don't bother. Instead they blame high egg prices on immigrants, promise to deport millions of immigrants with no real plan or intention to do so, win, and then pass tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations b/c that's all they intended to to anyway.
This isn't a game plan that will work for Democrats. Look at at what happened this year. They tried to do a combo of "we have great ideas" and 'Donald Trump is awful" and it failed.
The point of my essay was just to highlight the fact that Democrats are failing to win new voters. They have focused on key demographics and consistently failed to increase their share among those groups. That's a persuasion problem plain and simple. Whichever product they are trying to sell, they're not doing it well. Delving into how and why they are so bad at this is a whole different essay built around some of what I've said here and addressing double standards and how voters actually respond to political messaging. The first step though is to get Democrats to accept that what they have been doing is not working. It doesn't matter if Democratic efforts at persuasion are more traditional than what Republicans have been doing. Whatever it is you want to do when in power, you can only do it if you win the elections first and Democrats have been showing a trend that leads towards continued failure to do this.
Andrew, first, nice piece in July about new Substacks. Mine is very knew. As i tried to comment when I re-stacked (but forgot to check the nearly invisible Also Share to Notes): Great thoughtful must read analysis. https://substack.com/home/post/p-153093210. I've put a number of your pieces in my bib at the below link and have commented on it.
I had to laugh at the end when you said: “This post has run long enough, so I’ll save my fuller theory of elections for a future one.” I’m busy writing my review of Wendy Brown’s Nihilistic Times and Jonathan Foile’s Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room, for my substack's Review section. The basic principles of these books will guide my own election analysis and my teaching next term.
But I too have my election analysis coming by first week in January, I promise! Andrew and all, feel free to use my 500+ items on my Election Analysis bibliography from Zotero linked to from here: https://michaelalandover.substack.com/p/2024-election-analysis
My analysis will share my original theory of conservative, moderate, liberal, progressive and left, with five different kinds of each (utopian, libertarian, pragmatic, authoritarian and individualist (hint, individualist includes monarchists, Huey Long and....Donald Trump). But not to worry, Vance, my senator, is on the authoritarian row and is a clear believer in extra-consitutional measures. Neoliberals? As individuals they are almost non-existent but as a system it is, I discovered, pragmatic, since it wants "minimum necessary social intervention", as do I, but in 2008 they wanted two trillion, not very minimum, to bail out big business, the pragmatic liberal Obama didn't even try to get two trillion, and settled for a jobs program/bailout of indivduals for 1 trillion, but no one new the money was there, thus Clinton's losss. But my original principle, "minimum necessary social intervention" is shared by all pragmatists from conservative (neo-liberals) to my version of needs-based democratic socialists.
Team Progressive constantly accuses people be being neoliberals. Neoliberalism is a system and my next book will be Wendy Brown's book on neoliberation, a subject I've been studying now for over 20 years, in an effort to develope a human-needs focused, pragmatic alternative to it. But like I say, I'm also a democratic socialist formally for 30 years, and looking back, always was in one way or another. But most of the socialist left is utopian without realizing it. I'm a constitutionalist, committed to major change.