Democrats, Let’s Get Real About Why Harris Lost

 

Frank Bruni

Opinion

Democrats, Let’s Get Real About Why Harris Lost

Nov. 7, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/opinion/trump-harris-joy-anger.html

Frank Bruni

By Frank Bruni

 

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

 

As Election Day neared, Democrats’ hopes soared. I know because I saw it and heard it all around me — the widening smiles, the brightening voices. Vice President Kamala Harris was ascendant. Donald Trump was done. People could just feel it.

 

They were reacting to polls, though they were picking and choosing: To listen to them, that outlier survey in Iowa, which augured a Harris victory in a red state that she ended up losing by about 13 percentage points, was some amalgam of the burning bush and the Rosetta stone.

 

They were reacting to momentum, which is a word as squishy as a wet paper towel and a concept beloved by dreamers whose yearning outstrips actual evidence.

 

But they were reacting above all to Trump. To how epically awful he was being. In his increasingly saturnine and serpentine remarks, he imagined Liz Cheney facing a fusillade of bullets, he called Democrats “demonic,” he said that he should never have left the White House after the 2020 election. All of this was characterized by many observers as the most self-destructive, disastrous conclusion to a presidential campaign that they’d ever beheld. And all of it was identified by the optimistic Democrats around me as the last straw.

 

Americans — at least the ones whose minds weren’t firmly made up — would surely abandon Trump now. There was a limit to the cruelness and craziness they’d abide.

 

That judgment, of course, was terribly wrong. And I want to name and dwell on a few of the reasons for its wrongness, because they’re stubborn misapprehensions, enduring blind spots. They’re costing Democrats — no, they’re costing America — dearly.

 

For starters, many voters don’t know about or didn’t really pay attention to all of Trump’s florid ugliness in the final hours. Many voters aren’t plugged in like that. Politics, even presidential campaigns, aren’t in the center of their vision but in its periphery — and irregularly, at that. Those of us who get hourly updates, have nightly freak-outs and can hold forth on Trump and the shark, Trump and Hannibal Lecter, Trump and windmills aren’t normal, but we’re arrogant: We assume our experience is everyone’s and our knowledge ambient.

 

No. People are busy. People are distracted. People are cynical. They tune out much if not most of this political drama because they regard it, indeed, as theater, as performance, whether it’s Trump’s conniptions or Harris’s “Kumbaya.”

 

So what, then, forms their impressions and drives their decisions? They’re responding in significant measure to the state of the world around them, whether it’s to their liking and whom they hold responsible for it. That was Harris’s affliction — the price of food, the elusiveness of homeownership and the fact that she’d been the No. 2 figure in the administration in charge of the country for the past four years. The obvious, boring nature of the diagnosis didn’t make it any less fatal.

 

Another blind spot: the belief that seemingly key moments matter more than ongoing conditions. Sure, Democrats had an expertly choreographed convention. Yes, Harris had a great debate. No doubt, Trump had a miserable one. And then came his Madison Square Garden debacle.

 

But while treating each of those news stories as potential turning points spiced up the narrative, it smudged the big picture, which is about satisfaction with and confidence in the country’s direction. Survey after survey showed that Americans were deeply fearful and intensely pessimistic. Not even the most star-studded rally could change that. Not even an endorsement by Taylor Swift could make it go away.

 

As for joy, well, we got that wrong, too. (That’s a deliberate “we” — I’m including myself.) The Reagan-era adage that sunniness wins more votes than gloominess has been repudiated repeatedly over the decades since he left office, and while I root for its return, I recognize its current quaintness.

 

We all must if we want to understand the political playing field better than we did in 2016 and again this year. If we want to compete effectively against the MAGA movement. If we want to contain its excesses and make certain that America has a viable political alternative to it. Trump sells terror, and he has found a robust market for it. That’s because it’s a durable ware.

 

Would a Democrat other than Harris have been able to beat Trump? That question now haunts not only Democrats but also all Americans who view Trump’s return to the White House as a rejection of the country’s core values and a portal to disaster. The answer is more complicated than many of the arguments already jousting with one another.

 

But before I say more about that, I want to say thank you to Vice President Harris. Yes, thank you. I’ve no doubt that she gave it her all, in a manner that showed more grace and grit than many Americans previously attributed to her. She had her serious shortcomings, as all of us do, and there were challenges she handled much less dexterously than she might have. But what we asked of her was titanic in the context of American presidential campaigns: to win over a critical mass of voters who had not expected her to be the Democratic nominee — and hadn’t had any say in that — in the span of 15 weeks.

 

That anomaly defined her candidacy like nothing else. And it was enmeshed in other dynamics that worked against her: most Americans’ intense dissatisfaction with how the country was faring under the leadership of President Biden, with whom she was inextricably linked; a sense among some Americans that they’d been lied to about his physical and cognitive fitness; the pall that cast over the entire Democratic Party.

 

Given when and how Biden abandoned his re-election bid in late July, Harris was bound to pick up the pieces and carry the torch. But her partnership with him made it much, much trickier — not just politically but also on a human level — to do what was necessary and distance herself from an unpopular incumbent. If another nominee would have been better, that’s largely because another nominee could have better established separation from him.

 

As we puzzle over any false steps she made, any concerns she failed to address and any ways in which her past or current political identity turned some voters off, we shouldn’t lose sight of larger circumstances.

 

This was a dismal year for Democrats through and through: Look at the results of Senate races, including the defeat of a politician as talented and admired as Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio.

 

This is a bad time for ruling parties and a boom time for the likes of Trump, as Nate Cohn observed in his Times newsletter, The Tilt. Harris’s defeat “occurred against the backdrop of political upheaval across the industrial world,” he wrote. “In the wake of the pandemic and surging prices, voters in country after country in election after election have voted against the party in power. More broadly, the past two decades have featured the rise of right-wing populist parties and a corresponding decline in the strength of the center-left among working-class voters.”

 

Harris’s pluses and minuses perhaps mattered less than those ups and downs.

 

I’m elated by and relieved about the victory of Attorney General Josh Stein over Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson in the North Carolina governor’s race. As I explained in a long examination of the contest in September, Stein, a moderate Democrat, has the experience and temperament to lead the state. Robinson, a right-wing Republican, has a loud voice, extremist positions, bizarre behavior and viciously bigoted statements.

 

His defeat — by, apparently, nearly 15 percentage points — suggests limits to the tolerance for undiluted MAGA madness.

 

It encourages me for an additional reason: The margin of Robinson’s loss diverged hugely from Trump’s advantage over Harris in North Carolina of more than three percentage points. That’s a remarkable magnitude of ticket splitting even for this state, which has a long history of it. It shows that political tribalism goes only so far.

 

I’ve written extensively over the years about the intensification of partisanship in American politics; a big chunk of my most recent book, “The Age of Grievance,” explores that. Unchecked, partisanship often blinds us to truth and leaches all nuance from our judgments and humility from our behavior. It also has us voting for people in accordance with our (and their) labels and nothing more.

 

But in North Carolina, where a third of the electorate is officially unaffiliated with either of the country’s two big political parties, Stein prevailed even as Trump prospered. Voters here elected another Democrat to succeed Stein as attorney general while they voted for Republicans in several other statewide races. Democrats here also appeared to break the Republican supermajority in the state House of Representatives.

 

“So we are still a divided, bipolar, competitive state,” Michael Bitzer, a professor of history and political science at Catawba College in North Carolina, wrote to me in a text message early Wednesday morning. I’d prefer us a little bluer. But I like that the color of a given race on a given year isn’t a foregone conclusion.

 

In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis illuminated a view of America from the opposite side of the Atlantic: “In Western Europe, many see America’s presidential election this year not as a battle between left and right, liberal and conservative, high and low taxes, but something more like a soccer game between a midranking team and a herd of stampeding buffalo. Sure, the buffalo might win — but not by playing soccer.” (Thanks to Barbara Jusiak of Irvine, Calif., and Darcy Fryer of Manhattan, among others, for nominating this.)

 

In The Financial Times, Alan Beattie appraised the president-elect’s economic talk: “Some people think it’s a category mistake even to address Donald Trump’s trade policy as an actual thing rather than a mess of prejudices and contradictions, and that for other governments to employ logic and game theory in engaging with it is like trying to play chess with an angry rhino.” (Daniel Olson, Temù, Italy, and Dan Stone, Centerport, N.Y.)

 

In The Rutland Herald of Vermont, Walt Amses performed a post-mortem on Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally: “Who could have predicted a candidate known for crude, racist, sexist, vulgar speeches would draw crude, racist, sexist, vulgar speakers to the stage — prompting Bad Bunny to throw caution to the wind and endorse Harris despite the obvious risk of being marinated into hasenpfeffer by the usual suspects.” (Ric Reardon, Rutland, Vt.)

 

In Slate, Alexander Sammon described watching TV at night during a reporting trip to Montana, where a fiercely contested Senate race meant ads creeping into every hour. “I was back in the hotel room for Sunday Night Football,” he wrote. “The Pittsburgh Steelers scored a late touchdown and drew to 15-13 at the half and Jon Tester helped a Republican woman get Social Security benefits and Spectrum offered internet and Arby’s has the meats.” (Ellen Patterson, Indianapolis)

 

In The Washington Post on the eve of Election Day, Monica Hesse imagined Harris winning in spite of many American men’s desires and on the strength of the gender gap: “Their sense of world order is about to be undone by the women in their lives grabbing democracy by the ballot box. (When you’re a registered voter, they let you do it.)” (Douglas Steffes, Madison, Wis., and Stephanie Logan, Centennial, Colo., among others)

 

In The Times, Jess Bidgood observed that Trump’s riff on Liz Cheney’s violent death “seemed like yet another gift from Trump and his allies to Democrats — making the final countdown to the election feel like an Advent calendar with a sexist, violent or otherwise politically dubious remark behind each door.” (Joanna Valentine, San Antonio, and Bob Jacobson, Mt. Juliet, Tenn., among many others)

 

Also in The Times, Carlos Lozada mulled the memoir of a model turned first lady: “The cover of ‘Melania’ is all black, save for the one-word title in white, resembling a perfume package. Along with the aroma of indifference, the book gives off an unmistakable scent of grift.” (Carol Field, Villas, N.J., and Judi McDowell, Tallahassee, Fla., along with many others)

 

And Jean-Luc Bouchard panned a new feature of Microsoft Paint that’s powered by artificial intelligence and promises to “unleash your creativity”: “I prompted it to generate ‘a map of a city on a river,’ and received back the sort of technically proficient but utterly generic graphic that you might find hanging on the wall of a Days Inn. It unleashed my creativity about as much as buying a Twix bar from a vending machine would make me a pastry chef.” (Jeff Bauer, Madison, Wis., and Jim Bellis, Kfar Vradim, Israel, among others)

 

In The New Yorker, Bruce Handy detailed the stylist Michelle Côté’s ministrations to give Sebastian Stan, the star of the new movie “The Apprentice,” the Trump coiffure: “Stan’s real hair was covered in part by a fake scalp, which was covered in turn by a wig — a tonsorial turducken.” (Betsy Frank, Mattituck, N.Y., and Ann Madonia Casey, Fairview, Texas)

 

Also in The New Yorker (and also on the subject of trademark tresses), Andrew Marantz beheld Tucker Carlson onstage in a Kansas City, Mo., arena: “His hair was elegantly rumpled, as if he’d just been awakened from a nap on a friend’s yacht.” (Robin Allen, San Francisco)

 

And in a less hairy New Yorker essay, Sloane Crosley revisited Dorothy Parker’s book reviews and remarked on how much less efficient critics’ pans are today. “It takes us four times as long to kill our prey,” Crosley wrote, adding: “Our literary criticism features a great deal of ‘I,’ the pronoun most likely to overstay its welcome. In the right hands, this conflation of narrative and critique can have dazzling results. But on the whole? Imagine waiting 20 minutes for a medical diagnosis while your doctor walks you through her commute.” (Nancy Chek, Silver Spring, Md.)

 

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Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter.  Instagram  Threads  @FrankBruni • Facebook