Some Thoughts About Tuesday

Like probably a lot of you, I’m feeling pretty bewildered right now. This was not the result I was expecting, and I don’t quite know what to make of it. I think anyone who gives you a tidy, ready-made causal explanation for Trump’s reelection is probably kidding themselves. It’s going to be a little while before we can really make sense of all this.

But in the interest of grappling toward some kind of understanding, I wanted to put together some scattered reflections. If nothing else, it helps me a little to think out loud about what happened.

1.) First off, I was wrong about the polls—very wrong. In my last post, I argued there was good reason to suspect that the polls were underestimating Harris’s strength. I had a few reasons for thinking that:

• American politics are particularly chaotic and unpredictable right now, which made me suspicious of pollsters’ ability to model the electorate based on prior its behavior.

• I thought the movement of Black and Brown men toward Trump was being overhyped by the media, and believed the bigger story was women, justifiably angry over Dobbs, breaking in Democrats’ favor.

• Various non-polling indicators—the size and efficiency of the candidates' relative GOTV efforts and the general competence of their campaigns in particular—suggested that Harris was in a stronger position than Trump.

But it turned out the polls were more or less right after all. The non-polling indicators I was eyeing turned out to be not especially relevant.

2.) I think Harris ran a truly excellent campaign, and Trump ran a historically messy and incompetent one. That is not to say I personally agreed with all of the policy positions Harris staked out, but the electoral logic of everything she was doing made sense to me. That doesn’t mean a ton, because I’m not really a campaigns guy, but I heard much the same from people who are smarter about this stuff than I am.

So I don’t think the campaign screwed up. It seems more likely that certain structural factors were so locked in that campaigning and GOTV turned out not to matter very much. That helps to explain why the polls barely budged from the moment Harris entered the race.

3.) About those structural factors: Incumbent parties are getting thrown out of office across the developed world right now. In general, the industrial west seems to be going through a period of anomie, alienation and disaffection that cannot be wholly explained by local factors in any particular country. The fact that the United States did not escape this trend is especially startling because, by most measures, we had a far better economic recovery from COVID-19 than virtually all of our peer nations.

My hunch is that Biden never recovered politically from the bite of inflation. I think, sadly, that I also underestimated a large swath of the electorate’s persistent disdain for women, and especially nonwhite women.

4.) Biden has been the most progressive president since LBJ. Harris ran a little more to the center than him, but certainly was widely perceived to be carrying the Biden mantle forward. The fact that Biden’s progressive accomplishments—in particular a massive fiscal stimulus, strong wage growth, and the most significant climate legislation in American history—ultimately translated into low popularity and a popular vote loss carries some disturbing implications.

I don’t know what the Democratic Party is going to look like after this, but I’m afraid that there’s going to be a lot of pressure to shift to the right.

5.) I don’t have any settled views on whether and to what extent Gaza contributed to Harris’s loss. But I am certain that Trump’s victory is extremely bad news for the Palestinian people, for any prospect of a democratic Israel, and for the region in general. Needless to say, it’s also a disaster for Ukraine, and perhaps Taiwan also.

6.) One of the reasons for my undeserved confidence in a Harris win was, as previously mentioned, Dobbs. And the backlash against Dobbs did continue this year, just not in the way I thought. It looks like there was a lot of split-ticket voting in states where abortion was on the ballot, with people choosing to protect abortion at the state level and simultaneously reelect Trump. That’s a disconcerting result, to say the least.

7.) If conventional campaigns don’t matter, does anything? Probably the dire state of American media and the ubiquity of extremely effective right-wing slop farms. In other words, maybe Stancil thought is more right than I knew. It’s difficult for me to know what to do with that.

8.) 2024 Trump is different from 2016 Trump, or even 2020 Trump. He’s older, and he has visibly decompensated during his time in office. He is also more openly fascist, and operating under fewer constraints from the people around him. Indeed, his inner circle seems to be pushing him in an even more extreme direction. He will be a more dangerous president the second time around.

9.) If Democrats manage to flip the House, that will likely keep Trump from enacting his promised tariffs. It will also keep the Inflation Reduction Act relatively safe. From a policy perspective, what I’m most worried about are foreign policy and mass deportations.

I don’t think Trump will have the administrative capacity to actually deport 20 million people. But what he can do is effectively deputize his followers to carry out acts of violence against immigrants and suspected immigrants. I’m afraid we’re about to see a period of persistent, low-level, state-sanctioned terrorism that will rhyme with the lynchings of the Jim Crow era.

10.) As my friend Elias Isquith has suggested, people are about to get what they voted for, good and hard. The economic consequences of Trump’s mass deportation policy alone will likely be catastrophic. The question becomes whether Trump and his party will face electoral penalties for that in future cycles—and whether those penalties will come in time to prevent the GOP from locking in its power and, with the help of a corrupt Supreme Court, completing America’s transition from a flawed democracy to a hybrid authoritarian regime.

11.) Either way, I think this was the most important election of our lifetimes and we’ll be living in the wreckage of the second Trump term for decades. But I’m not counseling readers to surrender to despair. We can’t really afford that right now. As the line about repairing the world goes, you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.