The Scene
Republicans ended election night confident that they would win the presidency, flip the Senate, and perhaps narrowly hold the House of Representatives. In Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s most famous supporters were talking about winning the popular vote, a mandate that MAGA couldn’t grab in two prior presidential campaigns.
The apparent result means the defeat of a strategy that nearly all Democrats embraced after the 2016 election: Delivering populist labor, tax, and healthcare policies that they thought could win back Obama-Trump voters and stop any more losses with non-white voters.
That was not enough for swing voters, who never stopped crediting Trump with pre-COVID economic growth while absolving him for his handling of the pandemic. And that angst cut across racial lines — along with anger at progressive crime and immigration policies that Vice President Kamala Harris abandoned before running.
“I’m so proud that we’re getting support from Latinos like never before,” Trump said at one of his final Pennsylvania rallies, in Allentown, a small city where both he and Harris campaigned. “We’re setting every record [with] Hispanics, Latinos.”
Trump did that, while improving with white voters in rural counties, and running stronger with Black men than he had in two races against white Democrats.
Democrats had rebuilt their traditional operations after the 2020 COVID election upended in-person canvassing, thinking that a year of direct contact with voters would reverse their losses. By and large, they didn’t. In some suburbs, Harris ran slightly ahead of the party’s 2020 margin — Waukesha County outside of Milwaukee, Cobb County outside of Atlanta, Hamilton County outside of Indianapolis. But in most of the country, she did worse, and she fatefully under-ran Biden in big cities and diverse suburbs.
David’s view
Democrats tumbled into recriminations even after winning the 2020 election. Tonight, they were pointing fingers for a likely loss tonight before any votes were counted.
Progressives said that Harris erred by campaigning with Liz Cheney, setting herself up as the protector of the D.C. establishment against angry outsiders.
Gaza protesters touted Arab American Institute polling that showed that Harris would benefit if she broke with the Biden administration and put an arms embargo on Israel — which she never did.
Center-left pundits had wanted her to put Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on the ticket, ignoring progressive activists who, by the end of the campaign, weren’t driving Harris’s message anyway.
They all lost. So did the theory of a new Democratic coalition that was born with Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, nearly died with Trump’s 2016 upset, and got buried on Tuesday night. So long as Donald Trump is leading the GOP – abandoning its old commitment to entitlement cuts, supporting tariffs and re-negotiated trade deals, saying things that anger the traditional media – Republicans have a broader appeal with non-college educated voters who used to be Democrats.
Would that have happened without inflation? Possibly. These trends were locked in four years ago, when Trump didn’t even list inflation as the crises that would unfold if Joe Biden won. (Trump predicted a new Great Depression, which he predicted again this year if he lost.)
Could Biden have done more to prevent them? I’m still thinking about a moment from Trump’s successful effort to get the International Association of Fire Fighters to stay neutral this year, after endorsing Biden in 2020. Key union leaders ruled out supporting Harris, not because of anything she’d done against labor, but because they blamed Biden’s border policies for letting fentanyl into the country and putting their members at risk.
But the Democratic coalition that won in 2020 was committed to those border policies, campaigning for gentler treatment of asylum-seekers that year and crediting Trump’s strong performance with Latinos to other issues, like COVID stimulus spending. It was committed to transgender rights – the “civil rights issue of our time,” according to Biden – and believed that Republicans sounded mean and semi-deranged when they campaigned against trans people.
What they hoped was a backlash to how Trump talked and behaved, that his calls for “mass deportation” would be so horrifying that voters would reject it, and for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election would alienate moderate voters.
It did alienate some of them, and another Democratic conversation over the next two years might be about the remnants of the mainstream media that has held less clout every four years. On Harris-friendly cable news, ex-Republicans broadcast their horror at who Trump was and what he’d done; in the new social media and podcasts favored by Republicans, all of that was whining disconnected from what voters really cared about.
Twelve years ago, the last time they didn’t run Trump for president, Republicans watched Mitt Romney fail to break a 20-year Democratic grip on the Midwest. His weakness with Latino voters convinced many Republicans, briefly, that they needed to pass immigration reform. Trump ditched Romney’s austerity policies, soft-pedaled his own very similar tax policies, and ran on closing the border to new arrivals to protect the country for the people already living here. And it broke the Democrats’ coalition.