One way to figure out a winning strategy is to start with an assumed successful outcome and work backward - what had to have happened to reach the desired result?
If we do this exercise looking at the 2024 election, we can see a few things the Democrats didn't do. The Democrats did not make social media a key communication platform. Democrats got beaten like the proverbial gong on social media. This is still true today. Democrats are getting beaten like gongs on social media. Another issue in 2024: the loss of the disaffected younger potential voters, who plagued on both parties and did not vote. And another issue: as a practical matter, Democrats could not promise jobs, housing, and more equality. Trump promised, but he lied. No president can dictate prices in a global market economy.
What I find most depressing in all this is the ridiculously asymmetric contest:
The Dems have to win a trifecta, reform the court, overthrow the filibuster in the Senate, and initiate economic reforms that substantially improve conditions for workers within 2 or 4 years.
And all the Repubs have to do is keep this from happening, which they do with a billionaire oligarchy and all the media platforms behind them. (Then blame gov't failures on the Dems and various scapegoats that best galvanize popular bigot anger at the moment: poor immigrants, Trans, Muslims, DEI, whoever.)
Getting rid of the filibuster is a deadly bad idea. Let's look at a little bit of the history of when the Senate has considered this move.
1. After decades of the filibuster being used by Southern senators to kill civil rights and anti-lynching legislation, the Senate reduced the threshold needed to invoke cloture from two-thirds of the chamber to three-fifths (60 votes). The era also birthed the "talking" filibuster's demise via the "two-track" system, which allowed the Senate to move past stalled legislation without the oratorical marathon.
2. Facing severe Republican blockades of President Barack Obama’s judicial and executive branch nominees, Senate Democrats utilized the "nuclear option"—a parliamentary maneuver that changes rules via a simple majority vote. They lowered the cloture threshold for all executive and lower-court judicial nominees to a simple majority (51 votes).
3. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell extended the nuclear option to Supreme Court nominees. This allowed the Senate to confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch, and subsequently other justices, by a simple majority vote instead of the traditional 60-vote requirement.
4. In an attempt to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, Senate Democrats made a significant push to create a legislative filibuster exception. The effort was defeated on a 52-48 vote, leaving the 60-vote threshold for legislation intact.
These aren't even arguments against abandoning the filibuster, other than to say that the republicans will also take advantage of the simple majority threshold. Of course they will and already are. The point is removing the minority rule block on Senate action.
Really important piece. (Side note, I personally was responsible for more than 159 votes in the 2004 Washington State Governor's race and was the reason the Democrat won that razor-close race.)
On the question of election autopsies, Michael Podhorzer's podcast yesterday made the point that the real deep election autopsies are never made public. Why give that information on your conclusions and future strategy to the opposition? He says the publicly released autopsies are sales pitches pushing a particular point of view, to get future consulting work and to undermine other approaches and consultants.
Amongst my contacts across the political spectrum, inflation was the leading issue, with most of us not distinguishing between “inflation” and “high prices” until after the votes were counted.
But a bigger problem, in my view, was the Dem Party’s lack of succession planning for their leadership.
I was shocked when Biden, in 2023, declared he was running for reelection. (My memory had him limiting himself to one term during his 2019-2020 campaign.)
Then came the devastating debate.
And that was followed by weeks of mumbo-jumbo that revealed a party in chaotic disarray, culminating with an obviously brokered convention and a poor choice for running mate.
It is tempting, if unproductive, to contemplate counter-factuals that have Biden declaring, in 2023, that he would NOT seek reelection.
As to 2028, pivoting toward the center?
That sounds like generic advice that applies to the losing party in any given Presidential election.
The economy will remain the decisive issue, but the economy as seen by the voter means jobs, prices of consumer goods, and a living wage.
Healthcare and security are runner-up issues, with security subject to definition by both parties.
The Strait of Hormuz spotlights a singular link between international security and the economy.
Plenty of those polled say "inflation" was their #1 or #2 reason for voting for Trump. Should this be taken at face value? For one thing, the electorate in general isn't savvy enough about economics to know what causes inflation or what the president has to do with it. For another, "inflation" is so much easier to say to a stranger than "I won't vote for a woman/person of color."
Strongly disagree with the premise of this article. When reviewing the film of a close game you lost, you don’t think “there are too many places where we made mistakes to determine which one caused us to lose”. You say “that is where we didn’t block out on the rebound, that’s where we made a poor shot selection, that’s where we missed a free throw…”. In the case of the 2024 election, Biden should have kept his promise not to run in 2024 ; after he did belatedly drop out, there should have been a truncated primary or convention to determine the strongest candidate, not the coronation of a candidate closely associated with the unpopular policies of the administration. Biden should have pivoted on immigration after the 2022 midterm by closing the border (not 8 months before the election); Dems could have (and should now IMHO) renounce transgender girls/women in female sports while affirming their right to non-discrimination in work, housing, military, etc. And Biden could have taken a more even-handed approach to Israel like that proposed by Bernie. Despite the worldwide anti-incumbent vibe , this was a winnable election as demonstrated by the narrow margin.
If I could give this 5 likes, I would. Thirty years working in politics has taught me exactly this: when a campaign goes really badly, there have been multiple failures and perhaps a few impossibilities -- and latching completely onto any one is misleading. When it's close, it could have been anything or nothing that you did. These things are complicated and a presidential is just more complicated.
Appreciate the sanity amidst all the sound and fury, signifying nothing (every so often that liberal education comes in handy!). Enjoy your leave, best wishes for your wife and new baby, and we want pictures!
People don't vote based on policies or recent legislation. They vote on emotional narratives about the parties and candidates. Republicans are very good at building those narratives and Democrats mostly suck at it.
As a long time marketing exec I have been driven crazy for many years by Democratic politicians and campaigns failing to learn even the basics of effective messaging and persuasion.
Not only do Dems struggle to produce effective messages/ads, they completely lack any long term persuasion or brand building. When all the money is focused on candidates and campaigns, no one has any incentive to focus on messaging outside of election season especially in a coordinated way about core Democratic values. We basically go dark in between major national elections.
Republicans understand this and hit us with messages every day, strategically developed to support key themes that define the political playing field on issues favoring them, and define the Democratic party in deeply unfavorable ways.. And Dems show up every four years for the general election and wonder why our party's brand is in the toilet?
Yes. The right baseline is not 50-50. The right question is why the Dems couldn't achieve a Reagan 1984 level landslide against a candidate as awful as Trump. And we need to get over the learned helplessness that says that nothing in our current polarized environment could ever produce such a result.
Agree. Elliott has pointed out lots of reason why folks vote anti-incumbent. But, it also seems like fighting and push back against basically anything is the current mind set that has replaced moving forward en masse for a common good.
A family member once voted for some yahoo representing the Constitutionalist Party. The yahoo was one of those constitutional sheriff people. She didn't support that belief, but she "believes in the Constitution," so that's why she picked his name. There's enough voters with this level of insight in any election to tip it one way or another.
Cogent analysis, and right on target. The real worth of the Democrats' postmortem is in the several causes they didn't consider. As you point out, inflation was only part of the problem, but certainly a major part. The total absence of the word "inflation" in the document is (I think) a sign of the increasing mental ossification of Democratic leadership.
It seems like the more meaningful question is, why was the election so close? Why don't we have a coalition that can win easily against a candidate who has never really been very popular?
I've been thinking that was pretty obvious: Biden didn't keep to his one-term promise, Harris-Walz got a very late start, and Harris is a woman of color. And oh yeah, Citizens United, even though that's old news (and helped us get Trump I). Given all that I'm astonished by how close it was.
The fundamentals were all bad for sure. But this year the fundamentals are in our favor, and yet there's a very good chance that the Republicans will hold the Senate. Why don't we have a coalition that can do better than a tossup to win the Senate in a very favorable year?
OK, here's a question for everyone who asks "Why hasn't the Democratic Party . . . ?" What do you think "the Democratic Party" is? What have you done to influence it at any level, from local on up?
A little backstory: In 2016 I was "unenrolled" (an option in my state of MA: you can vote in the primary of your choice, and of course I always took the Democratic ballot). I volunteered for candidates but kept my distance from the party itself. The Democratic Party in my state (MA) is pretty awful, but Democratic candidates are often great, and many of the mediocre ones (like my congressman) would look pretty good in other states. (My senators are Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey. Warren is awesome, and Markey is pretty damn good.)
After the 2016 I registered as a Democrat and became the secretary of my local Dem group. In my six years as secretary, I learned *a lot* about how "the party" worked, in my state and nationally. And about how some state Democratic parties are more effective than others -- my perception is that the most effective ones are in swing states like NC and WI, *not* in reliably blue states like mine.
Maybe you personally are involved in local or state organizing. If so, more power to you! But the "Why don't they . . ." complaint has grown very, very old. Instead let's share what we're involved in, and what we've learned, and what hints we can share with people in other places.
The Senate is rigged for conservatives, first in the deal with slave owning states in 1787, then in the great packing if the Senate in 1890 where six states were created out of nearly empty territory to add twelve conservative Senators. (Five of those states- ID, WY, MT, ND, SD have a lower population today than South Carolina or a couple of suburbs of Lus Angeles but have ten Senators)
It's absolutely true that the Senate gives conservatives an advantage. So the question becomes, why hasn't the Democratic Party run candidates who are--just barely--conservative enough to win in a state like IN or WV, but who aren't MAGA election deniers?
The issue is far more complex than the Poet seems to suggest. If tailoring a candidate for particular electorate is sensible, not one spectrum, but at least three spectra should be in play: social conservative vs. social libertarian, economic laissez faire gov. vs. safety net gov., and autocracy vs. democracy. And these need to be calibrated on emotional appeal to the particular electorate more than explicit policy stances. The national party platform needs to be written so that the particular candidate is immune to opposition-bashing Republicans invoking that platform to undermine the candidate. Nor should the "affordability" be minimized.
Sure, "conservative enough" is short for a whole lot of traits that are needed to win in currently-red states... the question, again, is why the Democrats don't successfully run candidates with the needed traits. Especially when the Republicans are barely even trying to run good candidates, and just throw up a slate of election deniers and transparent grifters.
People need to get creative. Like for example, after a less-nutty Republican incumbent gets primaried by MAGAs in a red state, maybe the Dems should run that person as our candidate next cycle, instead of sending some back-bench progressive on a suicide run.
This sounds rather theoretical, and too much in the passive voice. How about sharing your experience in working for candidates, getting involved with your state party, maybe running for office yourself?
I have asked before about what you generously call "low information" voters and what this finding implies about universal suffrage. It could imply that universal suffrage is a bad idea. That the founders were right in allowing only property (including slaves) owning, white males to vote as, unfortunately, was written in the Constitution. But I believe the Declaration of Independence gave the correct guidance: that "all men [and women] are created equal" and should control their destiny via the vote.
This is correct not just for the soft reasons of compassion, fairness and all that BUT because when all citizens feel the system is working for them, the society/culture is most productive. Allowing too much power/wealth in too few is simply unproductive.
Great analysis and important as the next presidential election looms.Kamala’s own autopsy in her book cannot be ignored, and your historical tipping point analysis reveals the one state that stood out: Pennsylvania.
One way to figure out a winning strategy is to start with an assumed successful outcome and work backward - what had to have happened to reach the desired result?
If we do this exercise looking at the 2024 election, we can see a few things the Democrats didn't do. The Democrats did not make social media a key communication platform. Democrats got beaten like the proverbial gong on social media. This is still true today. Democrats are getting beaten like gongs on social media. Another issue in 2024: the loss of the disaffected younger potential voters, who plagued on both parties and did not vote. And another issue: as a practical matter, Democrats could not promise jobs, housing, and more equality. Trump promised, but he lied. No president can dictate prices in a global market economy.
So what does this tell us for November?
What I find most depressing in all this is the ridiculously asymmetric contest:
The Dems have to win a trifecta, reform the court, overthrow the filibuster in the Senate, and initiate economic reforms that substantially improve conditions for workers within 2 or 4 years.
And all the Repubs have to do is keep this from happening, which they do with a billionaire oligarchy and all the media platforms behind them. (Then blame gov't failures on the Dems and various scapegoats that best galvanize popular bigot anger at the moment: poor immigrants, Trans, Muslims, DEI, whoever.)
Rinse and repeat.
Getting rid of the filibuster is a deadly bad idea. Let's look at a little bit of the history of when the Senate has considered this move.
1. After decades of the filibuster being used by Southern senators to kill civil rights and anti-lynching legislation, the Senate reduced the threshold needed to invoke cloture from two-thirds of the chamber to three-fifths (60 votes). The era also birthed the "talking" filibuster's demise via the "two-track" system, which allowed the Senate to move past stalled legislation without the oratorical marathon.
2. Facing severe Republican blockades of President Barack Obama’s judicial and executive branch nominees, Senate Democrats utilized the "nuclear option"—a parliamentary maneuver that changes rules via a simple majority vote. They lowered the cloture threshold for all executive and lower-court judicial nominees to a simple majority (51 votes).
3. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell extended the nuclear option to Supreme Court nominees. This allowed the Senate to confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch, and subsequently other justices, by a simple majority vote instead of the traditional 60-vote requirement.
4. In an attempt to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, Senate Democrats made a significant push to create a legislative filibuster exception. The effort was defeated on a 52-48 vote, leaving the 60-vote threshold for legislation intact.
So let's rethink, eh?
These aren't even arguments against abandoning the filibuster, other than to say that the republicans will also take advantage of the simple majority threshold. Of course they will and already are. The point is removing the minority rule block on Senate action.
I am reminded of Upton Sinclair.
"It Is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Really important piece. (Side note, I personally was responsible for more than 159 votes in the 2004 Washington State Governor's race and was the reason the Democrat won that razor-close race.)
On the question of election autopsies, Michael Podhorzer's podcast yesterday made the point that the real deep election autopsies are never made public. Why give that information on your conclusions and future strategy to the opposition? He says the publicly released autopsies are sales pitches pushing a particular point of view, to get future consulting work and to undermine other approaches and consultants.
Amongst my contacts across the political spectrum, inflation was the leading issue, with most of us not distinguishing between “inflation” and “high prices” until after the votes were counted.
But a bigger problem, in my view, was the Dem Party’s lack of succession planning for their leadership.
I was shocked when Biden, in 2023, declared he was running for reelection. (My memory had him limiting himself to one term during his 2019-2020 campaign.)
Then came the devastating debate.
And that was followed by weeks of mumbo-jumbo that revealed a party in chaotic disarray, culminating with an obviously brokered convention and a poor choice for running mate.
It is tempting, if unproductive, to contemplate counter-factuals that have Biden declaring, in 2023, that he would NOT seek reelection.
As to 2028, pivoting toward the center?
That sounds like generic advice that applies to the losing party in any given Presidential election.
The economy will remain the decisive issue, but the economy as seen by the voter means jobs, prices of consumer goods, and a living wage.
Healthcare and security are runner-up issues, with security subject to definition by both parties.
The Strait of Hormuz spotlights a singular link between international security and the economy.
The Dems should be running on Trump’s record.
That’s a target-rich environment.
Plenty of those polled say "inflation" was their #1 or #2 reason for voting for Trump. Should this be taken at face value? For one thing, the electorate in general isn't savvy enough about economics to know what causes inflation or what the president has to do with it. For another, "inflation" is so much easier to say to a stranger than "I won't vote for a woman/person of color."
Strongly disagree with the premise of this article. When reviewing the film of a close game you lost, you don’t think “there are too many places where we made mistakes to determine which one caused us to lose”. You say “that is where we didn’t block out on the rebound, that’s where we made a poor shot selection, that’s where we missed a free throw…”. In the case of the 2024 election, Biden should have kept his promise not to run in 2024 ; after he did belatedly drop out, there should have been a truncated primary or convention to determine the strongest candidate, not the coronation of a candidate closely associated with the unpopular policies of the administration. Biden should have pivoted on immigration after the 2022 midterm by closing the border (not 8 months before the election); Dems could have (and should now IMHO) renounce transgender girls/women in female sports while affirming their right to non-discrimination in work, housing, military, etc. And Biden could have taken a more even-handed approach to Israel like that proposed by Bernie. Despite the worldwide anti-incumbent vibe , this was a winnable election as demonstrated by the narrow margin.
If I could give this 5 likes, I would. Thirty years working in politics has taught me exactly this: when a campaign goes really badly, there have been multiple failures and perhaps a few impossibilities -- and latching completely onto any one is misleading. When it's close, it could have been anything or nothing that you did. These things are complicated and a presidential is just more complicated.
Appreciate the sanity amidst all the sound and fury, signifying nothing (every so often that liberal education comes in handy!). Enjoy your leave, best wishes for your wife and new baby, and we want pictures!
The outcome that needs an autopsy is why that many US citizens voted for that guy in the first place. Closeness was just a byproduct.
People don't vote based on policies or recent legislation. They vote on emotional narratives about the parties and candidates. Republicans are very good at building those narratives and Democrats mostly suck at it.
As a long time marketing exec I have been driven crazy for many years by Democratic politicians and campaigns failing to learn even the basics of effective messaging and persuasion.
Not only do Dems struggle to produce effective messages/ads, they completely lack any long term persuasion or brand building. When all the money is focused on candidates and campaigns, no one has any incentive to focus on messaging outside of election season especially in a coordinated way about core Democratic values. We basically go dark in between major national elections.
Republicans understand this and hit us with messages every day, strategically developed to support key themes that define the political playing field on issues favoring them, and define the Democratic party in deeply unfavorable ways.. And Dems show up every four years for the general election and wonder why our party's brand is in the toilet?
Yes. The right baseline is not 50-50. The right question is why the Dems couldn't achieve a Reagan 1984 level landslide against a candidate as awful as Trump. And we need to get over the learned helplessness that says that nothing in our current polarized environment could ever produce such a result.
Agree. Elliott has pointed out lots of reason why folks vote anti-incumbent. But, it also seems like fighting and push back against basically anything is the current mind set that has replaced moving forward en masse for a common good.
A family member once voted for some yahoo representing the Constitutionalist Party. The yahoo was one of those constitutional sheriff people. She didn't support that belief, but she "believes in the Constitution," so that's why she picked his name. There's enough voters with this level of insight in any election to tip it one way or another.
Cogent analysis, and right on target. The real worth of the Democrats' postmortem is in the several causes they didn't consider. As you point out, inflation was only part of the problem, but certainly a major part. The total absence of the word "inflation" in the document is (I think) a sign of the increasing mental ossification of Democratic leadership.
It seems like the more meaningful question is, why was the election so close? Why don't we have a coalition that can win easily against a candidate who has never really been very popular?
I've been thinking that was pretty obvious: Biden didn't keep to his one-term promise, Harris-Walz got a very late start, and Harris is a woman of color. And oh yeah, Citizens United, even though that's old news (and helped us get Trump I). Given all that I'm astonished by how close it was.
The fundamentals were all bad for sure. But this year the fundamentals are in our favor, and yet there's a very good chance that the Republicans will hold the Senate. Why don't we have a coalition that can do better than a tossup to win the Senate in a very favorable year?
OK, here's a question for everyone who asks "Why hasn't the Democratic Party . . . ?" What do you think "the Democratic Party" is? What have you done to influence it at any level, from local on up?
A little backstory: In 2016 I was "unenrolled" (an option in my state of MA: you can vote in the primary of your choice, and of course I always took the Democratic ballot). I volunteered for candidates but kept my distance from the party itself. The Democratic Party in my state (MA) is pretty awful, but Democratic candidates are often great, and many of the mediocre ones (like my congressman) would look pretty good in other states. (My senators are Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey. Warren is awesome, and Markey is pretty damn good.)
After the 2016 I registered as a Democrat and became the secretary of my local Dem group. In my six years as secretary, I learned *a lot* about how "the party" worked, in my state and nationally. And about how some state Democratic parties are more effective than others -- my perception is that the most effective ones are in swing states like NC and WI, *not* in reliably blue states like mine.
Maybe you personally are involved in local or state organizing. If so, more power to you! But the "Why don't they . . ." complaint has grown very, very old. Instead let's share what we're involved in, and what we've learned, and what hints we can share with people in other places.
The Senate is rigged for conservatives, first in the deal with slave owning states in 1787, then in the great packing if the Senate in 1890 where six states were created out of nearly empty territory to add twelve conservative Senators. (Five of those states- ID, WY, MT, ND, SD have a lower population today than South Carolina or a couple of suburbs of Lus Angeles but have ten Senators)
It's absolutely true that the Senate gives conservatives an advantage. So the question becomes, why hasn't the Democratic Party run candidates who are--just barely--conservative enough to win in a state like IN or WV, but who aren't MAGA election deniers?
The issue is far more complex than the Poet seems to suggest. If tailoring a candidate for particular electorate is sensible, not one spectrum, but at least three spectra should be in play: social conservative vs. social libertarian, economic laissez faire gov. vs. safety net gov., and autocracy vs. democracy. And these need to be calibrated on emotional appeal to the particular electorate more than explicit policy stances. The national party platform needs to be written so that the particular candidate is immune to opposition-bashing Republicans invoking that platform to undermine the candidate. Nor should the "affordability" be minimized.
Sure, "conservative enough" is short for a whole lot of traits that are needed to win in currently-red states... the question, again, is why the Democrats don't successfully run candidates with the needed traits. Especially when the Republicans are barely even trying to run good candidates, and just throw up a slate of election deniers and transparent grifters.
People need to get creative. Like for example, after a less-nutty Republican incumbent gets primaried by MAGAs in a red state, maybe the Dems should run that person as our candidate next cycle, instead of sending some back-bench progressive on a suicide run.
This sounds rather theoretical, and too much in the passive voice. How about sharing your experience in working for candidates, getting involved with your state party, maybe running for office yourself?
I have asked before about what you generously call "low information" voters and what this finding implies about universal suffrage. It could imply that universal suffrage is a bad idea. That the founders were right in allowing only property (including slaves) owning, white males to vote as, unfortunately, was written in the Constitution. But I believe the Declaration of Independence gave the correct guidance: that "all men [and women] are created equal" and should control their destiny via the vote.
This is correct not just for the soft reasons of compassion, fairness and all that BUT because when all citizens feel the system is working for them, the society/culture is most productive. Allowing too much power/wealth in too few is simply unproductive.
The lesson for the Democratic party and for all of us who care about democracy is that EVERYTHING matters.
Great analysis and important as the next presidential election looms.Kamala’s own autopsy in her book cannot be ignored, and your historical tipping point analysis reveals the one state that stood out: Pennsylvania.