You see the same numbers I do. We don’t know the results of the presidential election yet. It all comes down to the Blue Wall states. But the margins in critical areas do not look promising. I heard from one source about an hour ago that Harris still had a shot in each state. I don’t know where that stands. It doesn’t look promising from the reports I see currently. There’s no point in my speculating. We’ll know soon enough.
If Harris loses, that is obviously a crushing result. There’s no way around that. It’s different from 2016 in that it’s not a shock. We all knew or should have known this was a very possible result. The polls and models were about as close to 50-50 as you can get. A number were literally 50-50. But there’s another dimension of the story, assuming Trump does win. And that’s this: everyone knows who Donald Trump is. He was already President once. We know what that was like. Paradoxically Kamala Harris and he both did a pretty good job reminding us who he was over the last month. So it’s not like 2016 when you could say people didn’t know what they were getting. We know who he is. If he wins, which now looks probable though not certain, that’s a very sobering reality.
I wrote yesterday that I thought Harris ran a near flawless campaign. I still think that. And that removes one excuse. If she had run a mess of a campaign that would be one thing. She didn’t. I think she ran about as good a campaign as possible. I’m sure some people will blame her. I don’t think that will be fair. But big picture it doesn’t matter. Trump is the exception. Nobody gets a second chance to run for President. So blame her or not, it doesn’t matter. She won’t be running again.
The reality we need to keep in mind is that incumbent parties have been losing in basically every industrial democracy since the pandemic. From one perspective it’s no surprise that the U.S. appears to be following that pattern. But Trump, with his degenerate, autocratic ways was the option.
My own sense is that a majority of the country does not actually want what Donald Trump is offering. I think what happened here is that Joe Biden is deeply unpopular. People have strong memories of rising prices coming out of the pandemic and seemed to remember a lot of the pandemic as Joe Biden’s presidency. Harris ended up owning that unpopularity. If you look at the electoral map tonight in those illustrations that show a flurry of red and blue arrows …. well, they’re all red arrows. As TPM alum Benjy Sarlin put it tonight, this isn’t a matter of a couple set piece speeches or how the convention was run. This was more fundamental. The country tossed out the incumbent party. A lot of racial depolarization, which many including me were skeptical of, seems to have been real. If I am right about what it all means — throwing out the unpopular incumbent party more than embracing the program of the opposition — I think that portends a series of major public and political confrontations over the next four years, much as we had the first time Trump was president, only more intense. Probably much more intense.
That’s where we are.
Of course there is another option. This evening I talked to one person who asked: do people have the energy to keep doing this? Organizing, opposing, fundraising, voting. It’s been a lot. Anti-Trump America has been at this for a decade. Do people dust themselves off and go back to it in two years? I think we have to take that seriously as a question. Because people are truly exhausted. People can choose simply to withdraw back into their private worlds — their families, their hobbies, the private, insular world of non-involvement, civic passivity. I don’t think that will happen. But I think many people will be having that conversation with themselves. That is very much how autocracies take hold. People get tired of fighting. Mass withdrawal from the public sphere is the foundation of autocracy.
I certainly do not believe that is the right choice. And I don’t believe it will be the country’s choice, or Blue America’s choice. Not after some period of recovery and licking of wounds. But I don’t think we should deny the exhaustion. That’s foolish. You can’t overcome something simply by denying it.
