Two Election Post-Mortems

Let the post-mortems begin. What are the lessons that good liberals will be drawing from their most recent electoral wipeout?

Such questions will define the future of one of our political parties. They ginned up boundless hatred of Donald Trump, but they could not beat him in a fair election. Because they were defending democracy. Well, democracy just bit them in the ass.

Among the more interesting analyses of what went wrong in the Harris campaign, we have Pamela Paul and Bret Stephens, both from the New York Times.

Paul addresses the campaign’s failure to appeal to women. Harris treated women as a caricature, defined by the existence of a uterus, and failed to address any of the other issues that concern women.

Apart from promising to safeguard abortion rights, the Harris campaign didn’t do nearly enough to address other issues important to women, including the “kitchen table” economy, education, gun control, health care, the environment and immigration. The long hangover of Covid was brushed aside like yesterday’s nightmare. If there’s one thing almost every woman can agree on, it’s that they do not like being taken for granted.

Harris’s biggest mistake was leaning hard on a single issue, making abortion rights a centerpiece of her campaign, which reflects a fairly reductive view of women’s lives as citizens. Women — even women who favor abortion rights — do not vote by uterus alone.

Nicely put-- women do not vote by uterus alone!!

She continues:

Nor is abortion a universal concern. After all, large swaths of women aren’t trying to or able to get pregnant. And some of the reddest states have passed measures to protect abortion rights, but voted overwhelmingly for Trump. The majority of women who seek abortions are already mothers who often terminate pregnancies for financial reasons. They worry about how to feed and educate the kids they already have.

Obviously, abortion relieves women of the responsibility for feeding and educating their children. The campaign forgot about the women who did not have abortions and who were trying to bring up their children. The issue touches the concerns of many, many women.

In particular, the American education system is a dismal failure. Children suffered learning loss from the pandemic school closures. And we know that the teachers’ unions that are intrinsic to democratic politics spearheaded the closures. The Biden administration could not address the education issue because it could not question or attack the teachers’ unions.

The most stunning hole in Harris’s campaign was education. Only 16 percent of Americans think K-12 education is moving in the right direction. Women (and men) are upset by the broad failure of basic education standards in this country, a sentiment that was only exacerbated during Covid. As Jonathan Chait wrote recently in New York magazine, education was long a defining issue for Democrats. But President Biden didn’t make K-12 education in any way a priority and Harris was nearly silent about it on the campaign trail. It was barely and only blandly mentioned on her website. “Parents’ rights” were dismissed as a right-wing concern or a code for hate or the province of conservative women. There was little acknowledgment that Democrats are parents too.

And, of course, there is the simple fact that Kamala was the ultimate diversity hire. She had no real qualifications and no achievements on her resume.

The bottom line here is that a woman or a man who is hired for diversity must still do the job. Putting a subliterate buffoon whose vocabulary ranges from giggles to cackles in high office, on the grounds that she is a minority woman, discredits the accomplishments of all women.

Biden did Harris the disservice of explicitly stating he only wanted a woman before appointing her as his running mate. For any woman, even an implied “We hired you because we needed a woman” doesn’t land nearly as well as “You’re the best person for the job.” While women never want to be denied a job on the basis of sex, nor do they want to get those jobs because of it.

No one damaged Harris as much as she damaged herself. As soon as she stepped out of the shadows and underwent interviews, she showed herself to be vapid and vacuous. There was no way she was going to represent the nation on the world stage without making a fool of herself and us. And there was no way that someone who scrupulous kept herself uninformed was going to make intelligent decisions:

As a presidential candidate, Harris once again floundered. Onstage and in interviews, she sounded alternately glib and mechanical. She spoke in the foamy blather of a corporate human resources manager. She pandered to low-information, single women voters by appearing on podcasts like “Call Her Daddy” and goofballing along to her “brat” label. She often came across as fake and scripted, in a way that called to mind the herky-jerky ventriloquism of Roxie Hart on the witness stand, seeming to parrot whatever her political consultants told her. The act wore thin.

As much as women may want a first female president, they equally want someone who will succeed in that role. Nobody wants to see the first female president to go down as a failure. Kamala Harris did little to persuade female voters she was right for the job. Democrats need to remember that a woman, just as much as any man, needs to earn women’s confidence.

Women, like men, need to earn their way. They cannot succeed merely by extorting favors or getting put into offices that they cannot fill. DEI is the enemy of earned success. It makes people believe that success involves being selected, not in doing the job.

And then there is Bret Stephens. As we hear a certain number of deranged commentators explain that the only reason Kamala lost was bigotry, he offers a rejoinder:

The broad inability of liberals to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback.

Many leftists suffered an intellectual deficiency. Like the man who only has a hammer and who thinks that everything is a nail, Democrats could not think their way outside of their bigotry narrative.

Democrats were not merely fighting Trump. They were fighting against reality, the reality of everyday experience. It was gaslighting on steroids:

First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe.

Yet when Americans saw and experienced things otherwise (as extensive survey data showed they did) the characteristic liberal response was to treat the complaints not only as baseless but also as immoral. The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues. 

And clearly, the Democratic Party has been taken over by various leftist causes, causes that were decidedly unpopular in the general public. And progressive Democrats did not debate the issues. They denounced and defamed anyone who disagreed with them. 

The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe.

Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.

And then there was the cultural tyranny.

It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think.

Democrats forgot how to govern. They could do nothing more than attack Trump for the horrors he was going to visit on the country. As Stephens notes, Trump had already been president and these horrors had not taken place. Again, the gaslighting did not work.

It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact.