Yet Another Election 2024 Postmortem

Since I felt the need to write a post on the 2028 election prematurely, the next obvious thing to write is a way-too-late postmortem on the 2024 election.

In 2024, we were facing an uphill battle. Prices were high, people were pissed about COVID (still), and memories were short about Trump, especially since the Biden DoJ had failed in what 20/20 hindsight was their most important mission: prosecuting the upper level of the 1/6 coup. Our main spokesman, Joe Biden, was making few appearances, and when he appeared, he looked diminished.

We all know this. Let’s drill into a couple of things that I think are worth mentioning:

Swing Voters. The Ezra Kleins of the world have coined a new term for low-information swing voters: “thermostatic”. I think it’s the wrong term because it implies passivity on the part of voters — the temperature changes and it causes them to do something. I prefer my metaphor of a voter who grabs the wheel and runs the car from a ditch on one side of the road to the other. I think this better captures the way these people think: what we have today isn’t working so let’s make a big change. Voters view themselves as participants, as actors. And you need to keep them from grabbing the wheel.

Brand. The Democrats’ brand is in bad shape. On big issues like defense, immigration, and the economy, Republicans have a perceived advantage. When they have power, they start wars, wreck the economy, and are no “tougher” on immigrants than Democrats, but that’s a discussion for another day. What the Democrats should have had an advantage on is competence, on the expectation of regularity. If we could remind voters that Trump 1.0 was a rollicking shitshow that nobody really enjoyed, we might be able to win.

Unfortunately, the chaos around Biden’s replacement destroyed maybe the biggest brand advantage we had. We were more chaotic than the Trump campaign. The first debate was a clear loss to Trump, the VP debate was a disaster, and the Trump campaign was smart enough to only have one debate where Harris wiped the floor with him.

Caution. So one of the key positives of our brand was destroyed. The “right” thing to do when you’ve fucked your brand is to do something, anything, to regain voters’ attention. Unfortunately, the campaign apparatus that Harris inherited was set up to do as little as possible, to run a classic incumbent campaign. The train was on the tracks, and nobody was going to throw a switch to make it go anywhere else but Dullsville. So the Walsh debate, the use of Liz Cheney on the campaign trail, and whatever else people pick out as “the thing” or “one of the things” that caused Harris’ loss were just symptoms. The disease was a campaign apparatus that was ready to run another boring inevitability campaign. The disease, put simply, was caution and, really, fear that saying anything off script was going to derail the campaign.

But sticking to the boring script was exactly the opposite of what a campaign that broke trust with the voters should have done. They needed a new script.

We still need a new script today. The same people who ran the campaign in 2024 are lining up to do it again.

If you’ve watched the Talarico interview with Colbert, you heard a new script, or at least someone who wasn’t afraid to talk about what fear-based Democrats consider their weaknesses, like immigration and trans rights. Fear killed us in 2024. Hopefully we’ll have more candidates like Talarico who aren’t quite as scared in 2026 and 2028.

Here’s my favorite Colbert video, btw: