Milestones
November 07, 2024 at 06:33PMSo much ink will be spilled about what happened in the 2024 election. (And much of it will be wasted.) If you start your reading with anything, make it this. Mark Krotov offers a cogent, succinct analysis of how the Democratic Party overestimated itself, underestimated Trumpism, and lost this crucial presidential race:
I don’t want to brush past the reality that for many Trump supporters, the vengeful fantasies, the violent misogyny, the lifelong racism, the primal loathing of immigrants, and the delight in saying the unsayable are nothing but upside. The cruelty is the draw. But it’s also clearly the case that voters were wildly dissatisfied with Biden’s presidency and with years of acute inflation felt disproportionately by the working and middle classes—the very groups who, in key states, swung to Trump in 2024. “Since the GWB administration,” Annie Lowrey tweeted last night, “it’s been clear that headline economy statistics have become less and less of a clear guide in terms of telling you what average families are feeling.” Over and over during the last two years, commentators pointed to the strength of the Biden economy—rebounding GDP growth, rising employment—and criticized voters who felt otherwise as victims of a “vibecession.” The Fed was on the case! Why all the whining? There are many explanations for Trump’s victory, most of them surely interrelated, but an unavoidable one is that this election was a referendum on an unpopular incumbent administration that failed to address the soaring cost of everyday life. Groceries are expensive, housing is expensive (nearly half of America’s renters spend upwards of a third of their household income on rent), my dentist is so expensive that I’m putting off important dental work until who knows when, the music classes I’d like to enroll my daughter in feel too expensive to even bother researching, and on and on. As self-interested and even solipsistic as this feeling may be, I suspect it was on a lot of minds last night—just as it has been all over the world in recent years. (“Virtually every party that was the incumbent at the time that inflation started to heat up around the world has lost,” David Dayen wrote earlier today in the American Prospect.)
Harris had been dealt a very weak hand, both by inflation and—most consequentially—by the life-sucking anti-charisma of her boss. Yet there were also unforced errors. I’m sure that in the coming days we’ll have plenty to read—maybe in this magazine—about the ways the Harris campaign fucked up. (It was grimly funny to see Joy Reid announce last night that Harris had run a “perfect” campaign, a few months after saying, following the Biden-Trump debate, that she would vote for Biden even if he was “in a coma.”) Front of mind, of course, is the repeated refusal to engage with activists—even friendly ones—on the question of the genocide in Gaza, a moral disaster and a major electoral liability, if not a decisive one. And what did the reunion tour with Liz Cheney and her evil father’s spectral presence accomplish, other than alienating everyone but a sliver of self-congratulatory consultants and pundits eager to flaunt their bipartisan commitments in the most obscene way possible?
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/07/milestones/
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