VGC, ASSEMBLE!
Your favorite enemy from within here to finally give you my thoughts on this election.
This election was a bit of a journey for me. Traditionally I was a proud, card-carrying Democrat and voted for Biden easily back four years ago because, among other things, I figured my chances of surviving the Covid pandemic would at least double if he was president and, well, I preferred to be alive. But my interest in the Democratic brand began to wane some time ago (well before the 2020 election) and ultimately I left the party shortly after the we surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban and decided it was an accomplishment. I've had my opinions about many aspects of the Biden presidency really and was looking for someone other than Biden or Trump to support this time around from the start. The first candidate I considered voting for in this cycle was Robert Kennedy. This was whilst he was still running as a Democratic challenger to Biden, and my consideration of him was based on reading about his proposed program. Key to me there was his pro-choice position, his calls to break up the big banks, his critiques of Biden on border security, and (unusual for a Democrat) his preference that women's athletic teams should be defined in a sex-based way, as is just simply more practical and fair as far as I'm concerned. But the more I actually heard Kennedy talk, the more I realized he was very fixated on paranoid anti-vax fanaticism and a passionate desire to help Russia colonize Ukraine and it was off-putting. The last straw though came when he voiced openness to signing federal-level abortion restrictions into law, seeming to change his position toward support for forced motherhood, and blamed the Covid pandemic on the Jews. It was just a bit much for me and not better than what Biden was offering at that point from my point of view.
So after all that, I kinda fell into a state of despondency about goings on in the nation in general and disinterest in the election since it was shaping up to be what I figured it'd be all along: a Biden versus Trump rematch. Here's something I haven't shared with you before though: there actually was a very dark moment when I reached the low point of briefly considering voting for Trump myself. This was earlier this year when rich kids at Ivy League universities were making declarations like "We are all Hamas, pig!" and "October the 7th will be every day for you!" and carrying signs calling for a "final solution" and Biden was both sides-ing the issue and explaining how his uncle was eaten by cannibals while it was being reported that he could no longer use the big boy stairs on Air Force One. One looked at that picture of the Democratic Party orbit on the hand and then the images of Trump being cheered in bodegas and fire stations and people lining up in large numbers as he came by waving American, and occasionally Israeli, flags on the other and it was not only clear where the energy was in this campaign, but also just seemed like the Trump crowds were more normal, patriotic, working people, and it was tough not to get sucked into the excitement I saw because, especially on repetition, it had a way of being infectious. To be clear, I was not happy at this moment in the campaign, I was miserable and angry. I wasn't being motivated by optimism. I disliked both of my options a lot, but contrasts like these did briefly make me question who the lesser evil even was. It's in that sense that I can honestly understand the outcome we've just seen. But it was also just a moment in time. Then the verdict came down: guilty on all 34 felony counts. That snapped me back to reality real quick and I suddenly remembered like "Oh yeeeeeeaaah, it's that guy. Nope, not gonna happen!" And that was the end of my temporary insanity of considering Trump. But to be clear, had Biden remained in the race, I would not have voted at all in this election. That's where I was.
Biden's hour-and-a-half senior moment at the June debate was the first time in the whole cycle that I felt a tinge of actual optimism about this election. That wasn't because he did well (obviously 
), but because it immediately prompted a wave of calls for him to drop out of the race. Once I heard the New York Times had published an op-ed representing the unanimous opinion of their editorial staff that he should do so, I felt like something unprecedented just might be happening; that maybe there could be a different Democratic nominee somehow, possibly, though I felt the odds extremely remote. Still, any hope at all was everything to me at the time, so I latched onto it and immediately joined the ranks of the "bed-wetters" demanding he drop out in every political space that I went. The day he dropped out (July 21st, will never forget it) was the best day of the whole campaign season for me, and among the best of the whole year for me, in fact. I hadn't expected it at all. Although I had my preferred options, I was very open to just about any replacement for Biden in truth because I felt like very few could be worse. Kamala Harris wouldn't have been my first choice, but I will say that she quickly impressed me by ditching her woke past (the more far-left stances she'd superficially embraced in and around the time of her failed 2019 presidential run) in favor of a more balanced program that struck populist chords on the economy with bold calls for price limits on everything from groceries to prescription drugs to rent accompanied by a range of generous tax credits targeted at families raising children, workers, and aspiring home-buyers and small business owners, together with a tough stance on border policy that felt much more in tune with where the nation (and I) was than where Biden had been for most of his term, and she didn't overplay on identity politics either. People responded. Her rallies soon swelled to roughly Trump-scale and sometimes beyond, the internet was abuzz with fun stuff around her campaign (like the famed coconut memes and the whole brat summer thing 
) and it was just cute and fun and infectious. The joy of a new beginning was real and palpable. A couple of the most fun moments of all came during the Democratic National Convention (which, far from going down in flames over Gaza like some had predicted, was filled with more excitement than I'd seen at any party convention since at least Obama's original nomination in 2008!): one was when Harris addressed the convention virtually while attending a packed rally at the site of Donald Trump's nomination, implicitly flexing her ability to fully pack two events of his scale simultaneously. Masterful troll! 
The second was the roll call, which was turned into a dance fest set to songs from each state as they were called on to formally announce their votes. The total love-fest for the candidate just perfectly captured how happy the Democrats were. Next up was the Harris-Trump debate: another highlight of the campaign for me. As I documented earlier, she destroyed him and made him look like a petty, one-issue candidate obsessed with little more than just immigration paranoia and consolidating power around himself. *sighs* Those were the good days!
The second Trump assassination attempt I would characterize as the turning point in the campaign. It changed the tone of things. From there, life intervened to give the Biden Administration Hurricane Helene (one of the most devastating and deadly hurricanes in modern memory) and an Israeli expansion of the incursion in Lebanon to navigate, and in the meanwhile the October Trump ad blitz hit with a focus on showcasing Harris's statements of support back in 2019 and 2020 for things like the defund the police movement, decriminalizing illegal border crossings, banning fracking, and providing prison inmates with free gender transition surgeries, along with others tying her closely to the current, unpopular administration and its record on the cost of living and border policy. It all had a way of, for some (especially those just getting to know Harris as a candidate at that late point in the race), raising questions about the sincerity of the more moderate program she was running on and concerning how much change she might offer from the broadly unpopular status quo. It's my opinion that she did too little to answer those challenges. When asked about the more woke chapter of her political career, she invariably would dodge and pretend to have always held her current positions, lest she admit fault and evolution. Nobody bought it. Much worse though were a couple episodes wherein the campaign made the likely fatal mistake of running on Biden's record. The first of these was the Walz-Vance debate and the second was that now-infamous interview on The View wherein she claimed she "can't think of a thing" she'd have done differently from Biden had she been president instead. Once I heard the latter, I knew her campaign was doomed. Insiders hinted that Biden had been upset by Harris distancing herself from him during her successful debate with Trump, so apparently she couldn't do that anymore now. Baaaaaaaad call! She did make a bigger effort to more clearly carve out her own brand near the end, but you know, by that point it was a bit late to change the narrative. So those were the biggest tactical errors and issues that I saw with the Harris campaign. There also were some secondary policy areas on which I disagreed with her, like trade policy, for example. I'm not sure I'm really against Trump's proposed tariffs (or, as Harris cynically called them, "Trump's national sales tax"). I think they could be good for the Rust Belt in particular, and for the protection of union jobs. Also not a big fan of crypto (the whole thing seems to be one big scam as far as I can tell) and subsidizing the further development of A.I. technology that's so far seeing mostly malign and negative applications. This is me trying to be as critical and fair to her dissenters as I can right now.
To sum up the core flaws of the Harris candidacy as I see them, the real issue wasn't really her campaign. All in all, she ran a very impressive one, IMO. Good enough anyway that the election exit polling found that voters liked her better than Trump as a person even by that point, and also thought her the more moderate and balanced candidate, and good enough that she managed to narrow Trump's lead over her in popularity on key policy topics like the economy and immigration to single digits. She also won the empathy argument that liberals always think is at issue for them whenever they lose: more people said they believed Harris "cares about people like me" than said the same of Trump. Trump didn't win because the public writ large would rather have a beer with him than with Kamala. Most would not. It wasn't that people thought Trump cared about them more than Harris. It just wasn't enough to overcome the circumstances she faced. Caring wasn't enough. Being the better, more reasonable person wasn't enough. This is just simply a change election year all over practically the whole world and Harris was tasked with fighting against that tide. She did frankly just about the most admirable job of it I can possibly imagine, but, as the aforementioned Trump ad blitz clarified, she was simply the wrong candidate for the task. She had too much baggage of her own that she wasn't willing to address or explain. During the period when she was leading Trump in the polls back in August and September, it was very much tied to boosts in her personal favorability rating, i.e. owed to people coming to like her as a person. The character issue really worked to her advantage during that window of time and was what really propelled her to a polling advantage over Trump. But the Trump ad blitz in October drove up her negatives and ultimately brought her favorability rating down to nearly his level, practically erasing her biggest advantage over him. That's the real story of how he won. The Democrats needed to have a candidate without that baggage to exploit and the only way that was ever going to happen was if Biden had done what he should've done all along and opted against running for re-election at all, thus allowing an open Democratic primary to take place in the early months of this year. I have little doubt that, under those more scrutinizing circumstances, the Democrats would've chosen someone else; a more practical option. But that's not what happened and there's really not much point in re-litigating all this now.
But this election wasn't just about Kamala Harris. As one could gather by the accompanying Republican sweep of Congress that also happened, it was also a broader repudiation of the current Democratic brand of politics and that's where the real issue comes in. While initial press descriptions of Trump's victory as a "landslide" look comical now that his popular vote advantage over Harris stands at less than two points (50.1% to 48.3% at current tally, with more votes mostly from deep blue California yet to be counted), the details are what make the outcome truly significant. Namely, the GOP, led by Trump this time (unlike in 2016, Trump outperformed his party this time around), succeeded in its bid to secure the working class vote overall. It no longer matters whether you define the term "working class" by level of educational attainment or by more by income levels instead; by either definition, Trump and the Republican Party carried most of it this year, specifically by making major inroads with Latino voters and more minor inroads amongst Asian-Americans as well. The simple fact that working class people are voting increasingly along class lines more so than along racial lines now tears up the liberal narrative that the core of the modern right's appeal lies in the reactionary activation of white people against people of color and I think forces the Democrats to confront the reality that the working people of this country increasingly feel disrespected by them in ways that go beyond the financial realm. My prescription for their eventual recovery as a party is to start targeting their biggest weak spots, like rural America, by embracing more socially moderate candidates with proven appeal thereto. For the next presidential election cycle, it's my opinion at this early stage that that means nominating someone like Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear (the most popular Democratic governor in the country) or Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro next time; people from the Midwest rather than coastal states who have consistently supported an all-of-the-above energy policy, never supported outright gun bans, fix their focus on kitchen table issues, and routinely speak of the working class by name rather than by euphemism (e.g. "the middle class"). Assuming we still have contested elections by 2028, that is. I don't think that can be taken for granted. The party also needs to embrace border security more consistently than it has in the last decade and nix support for free trade or adjacent policies in favor of a more protectionist ethos. Or, in other words, the Democrats need to learn from the more successful left wing parties of today, like neighboring Mexico's National Regeneration Movement that got re-elected in a landslide earlier in this more largely change-oriented year, and contest the nationalist space rather than ceding it to the Republicans. That is my prescription.
Honestly though, all this talk about rebuilding the Democratic Party in such a way as to win back the working class feels so far removed from what I feel like doing right now that it's not even funny. I'm exhausted just thinking about it and honestly don't care that much about the Democratic Party's fate at this point anyway. I was struck by a YouGov poll conducted last week shortly after the election that found, among other things, that most Trump voters expect "mass protests in reaction to the election results" to happen next, similar to the aftermath of 2016, while by contrast only 37% of Harris voters expected that response. The latter group would obviously better know what they're planning to do and the discrepancy in expectations says that MAGA people are underestimating the current level of demoralization here on "the other side". As Politico writer Michael Schaffer has aptly put it, the resistance is not coming to save you. Not this time. Speaking for myself, I was very much part of the so-called anti-Trump resistance movement during the guy's first term. I was at the 2017 Women's March. I was also at the March for Science, the March for Truth, the March For Our Lives, and the Families Belong Together and George Floyd protests, in addition to voting in more than just the presidential election. I was there. I said my peace and did my part. No one can accuse me of less. This year I actively and enthusiastically championed and voted for Kamala Harris and have not a single regret about it. To have the outcome of all that time and effort be a complete Republican sweep and Trump emerging from it all more popular than ever today...you really have no idea how demoralizing that outcome is to me. It makes me wonder why I've wasted so much of my life. I can't save you from yourself, America, you have to cooperate! I feel exhausted. Completely exhausted and deeply, deeply discouraged. I feel like giving up and that's what I plan to do. I have to focus on my own mental health and well-being because it is deteriorating. For a long, long time. I'm tuning out. I won't be at the People's March that's planned for around the time of the second Trump inauguration in January (projected attendance: 50,000, a roughly 95% drop from the 2017 Women's March commemorating his first). The resistance movement was driven by events like the Comey intervention and Russian election interference and the fact that Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 that combined to give his victory a hollow ring; a sense of infuriating democratic illegitimacy. It felt to many of us more like a fluke more than a transformation of the American character. A very, very dangerous fluke. This time around, not so much. Trump got the most votes this time and the kinds of circumstances Clinton faced near the end of the 2016 election didn't define this year's cycle. There is a sense among us that it's not simply the system that is against us now, it's public opinion, and that's just a lot more disheartening. I won't be at the People's March, I intend to spend little time either following or discussing politics in the future, and currently have no plans to ever vote again. Maybe I'll eventually come out of this funk, but right now I can't see an end to it in sight.
That's the crux of my thinking anyway. I know you may be wondering about my thoughts on the much-discussed role of gender in this election as the forum's resident feminist voice, and I have thoughts about that (you won't be surprised to learn), but for right now I feel like being done typing. Maybe some other time I'll remark on that subject. Or not. *shrugs* We'll see.
