The global anti-incumbent backlash doomed Kamala Harris
Tragically, the beneficiary happened to be Donald Trump.
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Donald Trump’s triumph on Tuesday night is terrifying and traumatizing. It’s natural to look for someone to blame, and unavoidable that Kamala Harris’s campaign catches some of it.
No campaign is perfect, and you can always second guess any number of strategic decisions. But the reality is that there isn’t an easy answer to the question of what went wrong. A majority of voting Americans pulled the lever for a man who mishandled a pandemic and staged a violent coup attempt the last time he was in office. On the eve of Tuesday’s election he and his surrogates promised that his second term would be “nasty” and would lead to “temporary hardship” for Americans. You may have criticisms of Harris. But was her messaging really worse than that?
There’s a strong argument that the electorate was sour on the Democrats for reasons that didn’t necessarily have to do directly with either Harris or Trump. Throughout the democratic world, incumbents have struggled since the covid crisis in 2020 and its subsequent economic dislocations, including global high inflation.
The fact that Harris’s loss may be structural does not mitigate the coming horrors of an unfettered Trump administration. But it may help us think about how to focus resistance as we head towards a frightening future.
Jill Stein didn’t cost Dems the election. Neither did Tim Walz.
Inevitably, some mainstream Democrats blamed Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and argued that people on the left voting third party threw their vote away and helped Trump. On the other hand, some on the left argued that Harris lost progressive voters by refusing to come out in favor of ending military aid to Israel as it commits war crimes in Gaza, and by accepting endorsements from the warmongering likes of Dick Cheney.
Though they come from opposite ends of the political spectrum, these arguments (both all over social media) are essentially the same explanation — they blame the loss on splits in the Democratic coalition.
The problem here is that the coalition didn’t really split. Stein’s vote share plummeted. In 2016, she received about 1.1 percent of the vote; in 2024 that dropped to about 0.6 percent. She did win 18 percent of the vote in Dearborn, Michigan, which has a large Arab American community. But Trump would’ve still won Michigan even if all the Stein voters voted for Harris, and in any event he won the Electoral College with states to spare.
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Similarly, there’s little evidence that the Democrats would have done better had Harris picked a different running mate, or with a different candidate at the top of the ticket.
Many critics wanted Harris to choose Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro instead of Tim Walz, because Pennsylvania was thought to be a key swing state. But vice presidential candidates rarely move many votes, and Trump swept downballot races in Pennsylvania as well. If Sen. Bob Casey Jr. failed to defy partisan gravity (in a race that he trails but still hasn’t been called of this writing), it’s unlikely that Shapiro would have made much difference — much less across the rest of the upper Midwest, which Harris also needed to win.
As for Harris herself, her approval had weakened a little over the last month of campaigning, but she was still at only -4.9 percent approval according to 538 as opposed to Trump at -8.6 percent. People liked her better than Trump. They just didn’t vote for her. That suggests that the loss wasn’t a personal referendum and that other Democratic candidates would have struggled too, whatever their personal popularity.
Covid, inflation, and throwing the bums out
Trump’s victory doesn’t seem to have been caused by Democratic ideological divisions, nor by Democratic candidate quality. So what led to these nightmarish results?
In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Matthew Yglesias pointed out that this has been a brutal time for all incumbent parties across the world. Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party had one of its worst elections in its very long career on October 27. Austria’s People’s Party lost 20 of 71 seats in Parliament in late September. Over the summer, Britain’s Tories were crushed by Labour in an unprecedented landslide, while France’s centrist coalition scrambled as it lost a third of its seats. The Canadian incumbent Liberal party looks in serious trouble for elections next year, too.
As Yglesias says, there’s no one ideological throughline here; parties of the left, right, and center alike have struggled as voters blame them for the dislocations caused by covid. These included shutdowns and recession initially, but lingered with supply chain issues and a global spike in inflation.
Biden’s economic stewardship was among the best in the world; the US has had 27 consecutive months of inflation below four percent, and inflation is currently at its lowest in years. But the anger at inflation and economic dislocation post-covid lingers. In exit polls, 72 percent of respondents said they were angry or dissatisfied with the country’s direction.
Those are brutal numbers — so brutal that you’d usually expect them to result in a landslide victory for the out party. Instead, Democrats almost fought to a draw in the presidency, hung on to many close seats despite a brutal Senate map, and may even have picked up seats in the House.
Repeating an ugly history
It would obviously still be bad had the global anti-incumbency fervor cost Kamala Harris an election against normie Republicans like Mitt Romney or John McCain, but the stakes were higher this year. The beneficiary of this dynamic is Donald Trump, an aspiring strongman who just for starters has promised to deport 30 million people in a “bloody” and brutal fashion.
This is not the first time a fascist has risen to power thanks to nonpartisan anger at incumbents. In their classic 2016 study “Democracy for Realists,” Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels point out that during the Great Depression, sitting governments were tossed out not on the basis of ideology, but just because they were there and voters were enraged.
In the US, the conservative Hoover administration was replaced with FDR’s progressive New Deal; in Sweden, a liberal government booted the conservatives, and then, as the Depression persisted, was itself defeated by the Social Democrats. And of course, in Germany, the Weimar Democracy fell to Hitler’s psychopathic, genocidal dictatorship.
This isn’t to say that voters are blameless for electing a dangerous fascist, then or now. Cultivating bigotry and authoritarianism in the polity creates huge risks. German nationalism, with its hostility to democracy and its embrace of conspiratorial antisemitism, was a ticking bomb, waiting for the right moment to go off.
Similarly, America’s long term, festering reactionary racism and white supremacy has threatened democracy throughout US history. It gutted attempts at multiracial democracy in Reconstruction, leading to the century-long racist nightmare of Jim Crow. That same institutionalized and intransigent bigotry has now metastasized into MAGA, an openly vindictive authoritarian movement that has seized power for a terrifying second time.
Not a mandate
Voting for Trump is immoral, and the people who did so cast ballots knowing, and hoping, that Trump would harm people. As writer Robert Jones Jr. points out, the majority of white people (55 percent) voted for Trump.
They “knew that a vote for Trump would be a vote against Black people, Brown people, Asian people, queer people, trans people, disabled people, poor people, Black and Brown immigrants, Palestinians, children, the rights of women, unions, literature, art, the environment, and democracy,” he writes.
It’s also true, though, that anti-incumbent sentiment is fickle. People who lean into their hatred one day don’t always do so the next, and people who voted for Trump are not necessarily, or permanently, enthusiastic about the entire MAGA agenda.
This was clear from election night results. Even in a Republican year, abortion rights initiatives won in seven states, including purple and red ones like Arizona and Montana. Florida’s amendment to protect abortion rights received 57 percent of the vote — an overwhelming majority, but not enough to meet the needed 60 percent threshold.
Deep red Missouri became the first state to in which voters managed to overturn a total abortion ban. Its voters also passed ballot measures providing important labor protections. Political scientist Scott Lemieux underlined the essential contradictions here.
“Missouri voters voting for abortion rights, an increase in the minimum wage, and paid sick leave, and a senator [Josh Hawley] and a president who strongly oppose these things is where we are in a nutshell,” he wrote.
Lemieux added that “the challenge going forward is to translate support for core Democratic policies into support for Democratic candidates.” Lemieux presents that as a difficult conversion. But the fact is that Democrats did in fact win elections running on Democratic policies in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and (following backlash to Dobbs) 2022 and 2023.
Democrats don’t have trouble winning elections. The problem is that MAGA’s program is so destructive, and their structural advantage on the Supreme Court so sweeping, that they can win only the occasional election and still manage to destroy our democratic institutions and inflict horrible pain and suffering on marginalized people.
Democrats hoped to stave off fascism in the Trump era by never losing elections. That was never feasible, and now that it has failed, we are all facing the miserable consequences of not prosecuting Trump immediately, and vigorously, after January 6.
Those consequences will be real, devastating, and long lasting. But it’s important to realize that the Republicans have not established a permanent or even solid mandate for all of Trump’s ugly orange dreams. As they won, so they can lose — which is why one of MAGA’s core goals going forward will be to subvert free and fair elections. Fighting for democracy, as well as helping each other survive the coming fascist assault, will be key in the years ahead.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Dear Noah, I cant thank you enough for this article, that puts a great perspective on what the world/US is facing now as a result of the election bringing Trump and his acolytes into power. You bring up extremely important points that I hope all your readers take to heart. I dont live in US, nor am I an American, but the consequences of this election will be felt everywhere. Public Notice is by far the very best, unbiased newsletter I am reading.🤗🤗🤗.
OK, all of the above, and a few more things: Many, many, probably most, USians don't know how "government" works, even in theory. Civics classes died out in most places decades ago. Without that big picture, it's very hard to interpret day-to-day news coverage, even if you have access to decent day-to-day news coverage, which many of us don't.
Even more important -- most of us have no idea how "the economy" works or what forces affect it. Since at least the late 19th century, talking about economic justice of any kind has been trashed as socialist, communist, anarchist, etc. (Robber barons, oligarchs, and wannabe plutocrats encouraged this. Eventually we got stuck with Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.) Through the 20th century and up to the present day, the Democratic Party has been cowed all along, pretending that the New Deal and the Great Society had nothing in common with socialism. So-called moderates still keep labeling, e.g., Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the "far left." A few short decades ago, *Josef Stalin* was the "far left."
Trump didn't come out of nowhere. The U.S. has been headed in this direction since at least the Reagan administration, with a strong assist from Nixon's "southern strategy." There's serious work to be done, and I doubt that the Democratic Party as currently constituted is capable of leading the way.