I am not going to pretend that I am a knowledgeable political pundit here. However, as Jon Stewart pointed out, being a knowledgeable political observer hasn’t exactly held any predictive value in recent decades, so I might as well compose my thoughts on the election, if only for palliative self-care. Culminating with yesterday’s in-person voting, 71,714,878 and counting people voted to return Donald J. Trump to the White House.
There are as many explanations for Trump’s victory as there are social media accounts, but the two themes I keep seeing knowledgeable people push are that voters were mad about inflation and illegal immigration. This argues strongly against any form of rational thought behind public voting. The Biden administration did an absolutely phenomenal job pulling the country out of a pandemic recession and getting inflation under control, even when most economists predicted a major recession. Inflation peaked in the summer of 2022 and then came way down while wages stayed steady.
“Maybe for rich people” you might say, but in fact the biggest gains in wage growth, starting in 2020, were for the lowest 10th percentile incomes.
As for illegal immigration, for all his bluster, Trump’s presidency saw no delta in the rate of illegal immigrants coming into this country, nor did Biden’s presidency lead to an influx in the rate. Trump also personally called in a hit to kill Biden’s performative border bill.
This is what makes this election in particular so frustrating for moderate left-wingers. There is no internal logic to support this outcome. 2016 was a shock to the system, but there were narratives we could lean on that at least made some sense. There was a sense that Hillary wasn’t a particularly popular candidate that was foisted on the public by internal Democrat fiat rather than a traditional electoral primary, backed up by the leaked emails from DNC leadership making it appear they were torpedoing Bernie’s campaign. Trump was the ultimate protest vote. As Jason Pargin wrote in perhaps the best post-2016-election explainer: “Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. ‘Are you assholes listening now?’” Maybe these weren’t good reasons to vote for the “grab them by the pussy” guy, but they were at least comprehensible.
This time around? Nothing adds up. Women continued to vote for the pussygrabber who has done more to erode women’s rights than anyone else in the last 50 years short of Rupert Murdoch. Latinos voted in droves for the guy who vowed to deport Latinos first and ask questions about their legal status later. Young people, traditionally reliable progressives, have moved right. Young men in particular have been captured by the 4chan-Andrew Tate-gamergate sphere.
We had a choice between two people in this election1. One of them was a convicted felon, who still claims his 2020 loss was stolen, who fomented an insurrection to attempt to overturn the results, who presided over one of the most insane presidential terms in US history, and every indicator pointed to his next term being even more insane. The other was a very normal, likeable (if somewhat bland) woman2 whose only real negative was her being part of an incumbent administration that did an excellent job in the face of massive challenges and a toxic opposition.
There is no shortage of Wednesday morning quarterbacking going on in leftist circles about how if only Kamala had simply centered her campaign around <insert specific left cause célèbre here> it would have changed the outcome. I am, to say the least, skeptical. If you are a single-issue voter for, say Gaza, there is no way you can come to the conclusion that Trump is a better candidate. Lots of people are pushing the notion that the Harris campaign’s failure was a result of over-prioritizing capture of GOP defectors, but as far as I can tell nothing in her platform serves as a NeverTrump GOP honeypot. Her campaign from the beginning - to her detriment in 2020 but to her benefit in 2024 thanks to the grand unwokening shift - has been a center-left platform that should have pandered to the median voter.
If I had been in charge of her campaign there are two specific things I would have done differently. I would have hammered home the point that the economy, specifically post 2022, was actually in great shape, and I would have spent more time extolling the virtues of immigration. To the first point, based on data from IMF, ILO, WHO, World Bank, and the World Economic Forum, the United States ranks 7th overall in post-pandemic economic recovery.
To the second point, economists have studied immigration extensively and the conclusion is very clear: immigration is a really good thing and we should be doing more to encourage it. If I were the chief strategist, every single day I would be discussing these things: the economy is actually doing well despite the constant (social) media doomerism, and immigrants are good. One thing is clear in the current media landscape is that it is not enough to simply do well. You have to constantly hammer that message home on every available channel, because expecting it to organically filter through to the voters is not happening3.
So where does this leave me, and by proxy, the millions of left-leaning Democrats who find Trump’s coalition of techbros, white supremacists, and low-information apolitical foot soldiers repugnant? I guess my main takeaway for the DNC is this: Stop worrying so much about historical political machinations. Stop focus-testing all your messaging. Start shooting from the hip. Start pushing ideology you believe in, rather than ideology you think will perform well. Trump just ran a campaign that can be most charitably described as “unconventional.” You think he spent time worrying about how his Hannibal Lector rants would play in swing states? He think he fretted over his inexplicable decision to sway to music for a half hour on stage? My guess is that Trump’s campaign has almost no coherent strategy behind it. He goes from place to place and just says whatever is on his mind, with no regard to how it might get perceived on the beltway. I think Democrats could pull a lesson from that strategy.
If nothing else, I think this election is the final nail in the coffin of 20th century style presidential electioneering. Winning a presidency in the 21st century is now a matter of authenticity4 of the candidate and wresting control of the combined narrative formed by both legacy and social media. If Democrats want to regain control of the political discussion, they need to internalize this shift in the information environment and adjust their strategy accordingly. I was very impressed with a number of aspects of the Harris campaign, especially the way they handled the Biden transition which was a 13/10 on degree of difficulty scale, but after that everything felt deliberate and staged. If I were running the DNC my strategy for 2028 would be to have my primary as early as possible and once the candidate is locked, hand them the keys and let ‘em cook.
One final tangential point: I think besides Trump, the biggest winner of this election was prediction markets like Polymarket. For those unfamiliar, prediction markets are like sports books only for real life events. People can wager on things like “Who will be president in 2025?” and “Will Iran launch a strike against Israel by November 8th?”. The grand idea behind this is that when you combine the wisdom of the crowd with tangible financial incentives you arrive at a far superior method of predicting the future than old-school heuristics like, say, Selzer polls.
As I was tracking the early voting leading up to the election, I saw a lot of posts by smart, knowledgeable people predicting a Kamala victory and even hinting at a potential landslide based on esoteric demographic analysis. The first sign that I had that things might be heading the other way was when I noticed that the prediction markets had Trump ahead by a comfortable margin. Journalists tried to downplay these predictions, arguing that a small number of whales (rich people throwing money around without worrying about the results) tipped the scales, but going forward I think you are going to see a lot more ink covering these markets as a source of truth.
One day the US will figure out a way to have a multi-party system, but this election was not it.
I’m not going to dive into the gender politics of this election, but I don’t blame any woman in America who is wondering what has to happen for a woman to be elected president.
Will Stancil, bless his heart, has been harping on this fact for a long time now.
One of the big lessons I learned working for Twitch putting on shows with big influencers is that audiences crave authenticity from streamers. Whatever you may think about Trump, I don’t think there is a sliver of a gap between his private thoughts and his public persona. He is, for better or worse, perhaps the most authentic president in American history.
So cogent. But still, I can't understand voting for the authenticity that Trump represented. An authentic racist, misogynist egomaniac. That's your guy?