36 Thoughts On The 2024 Campaign
An assessment of how we did, and what may await us.
In one respect, the final word on this election is easy. Each of Trump’s three campaigns has boiled down to a manichaean contest between good and evil, but this one has a real air of finality to it. Either he’ll be finished, or we’ll become a very different kind of country.
At the same time, it defies easy summary. It’s daunting to simply look back on everything we’ve witnessed (a presidential retirement under duress, an assassination attempt, a juggernaut campaign to save American democracy) along with what we should have witnessed but didn’t (Trump sentenced for his felony convictions, a criminal trial for his effort to overturn the 2020 election). Squeezing it all into one story becomes impracticable.
So instead, I’ve collected some thoughts on what’s transpired, and what we can expect, depending on what happens in the coming hours and days.
For those looking for some camaraderie once returns are in, I’ll be trying something new tonight: Once we know who’s won (or once we know that we won’t know the winner tonight), I’ll livecast on the Substack app with my podcast cohost, Matt. For those attempting to sleep or unplug, I’ll publish the video of our conversation here (and in the Politix feed) once it’s processed.
Thank you as always for riding alongside me through unsettling times.
Ok, the list:
This time we can’t say we weren’t warned. Unlike in 2016, Trump wasn’t able to coast on complacency and demagogic platitudes (I alone can fix it). It’s not that everyone in the arena did everything right, but that if Trump wins the election outright it’ll be more a testament to the size and determination and geographic distribution of the country’s fascist plurality, than to errors and bad luck.
The mainstream information environment in the closing weeks of the campaign was about as good and clear-cut as I could have hoped for, thanks in part to Republicans engaging in admissions against interest: They admitted they’d go after the Affordable Care Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act; they promised to put RFK Jr. in charge of public health in America, and free him to ban vaccines.
Likewise, late in the game, corporate actors went on the record to warn that if Trump wins, they’d have to raise prices to be able to afford the tariffs he’s promised.
But the people who really insured that the election closed on the most critical themes were the retired four-star generals who served as senior Trump administration officials and broke their silence in October to warn the country that Trump is “fascist to the core.”
When the critic
coined the phrase “not the odds, but the stakes” early this cycle, he meant it as a test for the national press corps, working on behalf of the electorate, not a call for activists or voters to take the election seriously.I don’t believe the elite corps of journalists who comprise the mainstream political media passed the test, but as the race came to an end, voters were finally confronted with a stark choice. Journalists deserve some credit for this (Bob Woodward ignited the fascism conversation; the New York Times looped in Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, who made the argument on tape.)
But it was ultimately a passel of engaged liberals—from the Harris campaign and the Obamas to lowly Substackers—who dragged political discourse back to where it belonged. Together we refused to let nihilistic horserace reporters dictate the central themes of the election through their obsession with trivia. They plastered the front pages of our most important newspapers with days’ worth of stories about a Joe Biden gaffe, but nevertheless failed to reorient the whole race around distraction and nonsense. Late-deciding voters broke for Kamala Harris, perhaps by double digits.
Nevertheless, Trump could still win the election outright, with both Electoral College and national popular vote majorities.
If he once again wins the presidency despite losing the popular vote, people in the pro-democracy majority should prepare to be highly disruptive—both to check Trump’s efforts to oppress majorities, and to insist on a transition to popular sovereignty.
If Harris wins, the pro-democracy majority must demand that she embrace accountability politics. The liberal plan for defeating the fascist threat in America simply can not be to win all presidential elections in perpetuity. Because soon enough we’ll find ourselves back in the throes of an election like this one and too many of us will become exhausted by the demands of constant vigilance.
Democrats, thus, mustn’t fear further conflict with defeated Republicans. People who committed crimes should go to prison; the business leaders who supported Trump’s candidacy, or went out of their way to appease him, should be named and shamed for engaging in greedy, civically degenerate conduct. And for failing to understand the peril they tempted: After all, the steady functioning and growth of the American private sector, which they claim to love and nurture, depends on the durability of the rule-of-law, which Trump has sought to destroy.
I wish Trump supporters, or anti-anti-Trump people, would be more honest about the value calculation that drives them to support him. Nobody’s obligated to believe that democracy supersedes policy; people who want the U.S. government to ban most or all abortions, and/or to funnel more and more money to the rich—even if it means ignoring popular majorities—are free to believe that. But they should make the case!
The case they make instead is to caricature Democrats, or blame them for the consequences of Republican maladministration.
But for Donald Trump’s failures and abuses, there likely would have been no surge in violent crime, nor such steep inflation; his supporters then cite these inherited trends to attack Democrats, who basically fixed them.
Another case in point: It was Donald Trump who sent a clear message to global authoritarians that the U.S. government no longer speaks with a unified voice on matters of foreign affairs. If a Democratic president strikes an international accord, a Republican president will withdraw from it; if a Democratic president says American national security interests require supporting resistance to Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine, Republicans will communicate to Vladimir Putin that they’ll let him have his way if he holds out for a second Trump term. If Joe Biden sees both domestic and international value in negotiating a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, Republicans suspect there will be no consequences for encouraging Israel to prolong the war. Their media defenders will then cite the erosion of Pax Americana and the difficulty western democracies have had defending the international order as evidence of liberal weakness, when in fact the true culprit is right-wing sabotage.
I never wrote a Harris endorsement piece because, well, where would the suspense in that have been?! (I’m running a business here!) If I had, though, I would’ve written a short version and a long one, and they would’ve gone something like this: