Even before Election Day, there were harbingers that some weird shit was coming our way. You had progressive Van Jones (rightly, it turned out) bemoaning the string of celebrity-laden Harris rallies: “I don’t think people understand, working people sometimes have to choose. ‘Am I going to go to the big, cool concert and pay for babysitting for that or am I going to figure out a way to get to the polls?’” he said. “I don’t want people going to concerts. I want people out there knocking on doors. I want people out there fighting for this thing.”
Then the fighting inside the Pennsylvania Harris operation went public, with labor leader Ryan Boyer, the mayor’s staff and Philly party boss Bob Brady pointing fingers at campaign operatives, with Brady calling them “elitist.” (I’m told there were factions upon factions: The Biden team in Delaware, Harris’ folks, and then the Obama loyalists once former advisor David Plouffe came aboard. Under a candidate with a poor reputation as a manager, it was a recipe for discord.)
Harris’ closing message in a campaign that was going to come down to a sliver of swing voters focused on what had already been quite publicly litigated: Trump as fascist. For his part, Trump was seeming to play Leo Bloom in a political version of The Producers — mock fellating his microphone, reveling in fantasies of journalists getting shot, waxing nostalgic about a dead golfer’s genitals. In the end, the crazy prevailed and what Trump pulled off was truly historic.
Remember, Trump left office with historically low poll numbers after botching Covid and trying to mastermind a coup. Still, after Tuesday, there is no doubt that Trump has completely remade our politics. His project since gliding down that golden escalator is complete: Call it the Great Realignment. The Republican and Democratic parties of old are no longer, as large swaths of multi-racial working-class voters have now migrated to the red team. Maps don’t lie.
I’ve been saying for months that the election in battleground states was going to come down to the two-thirds of voters — White and Black — who hold high school degrees. Props to Ruy Texeira over at The Liberal Patriot for laying out just how seismic a shift we’ve seen this week. Consider this, using AP VoteCast data:
Among all working-class voters, Trump dramatically widened his advantage, tripling his margin from 4 points in 2020 to 12 points in this election. That included moving from 25 to 29 points among White working-class voters and radically compressing his deficit among nonwhite working-class voters from 48 points in 2020 to 33 points this election. Compare that margin to what Obama had in 2012: according to Catalist, he carried the nonwhite working class by 67 points in that election. That indicates that Democrats have had their margin among this core constituency more than cut in half over the last 12 years. Ouch. So much for the “rising American electorate.”
And it’s time to face the fact that the GOP has become the party of America’s working class… Harris lost voters under $50,000 in household income as well as voters from $50,000 to $100,000 in income. But she did carry voters with over $100,000 in household by 8 points, one place where Harris did improve over Biden in 2020. This is not, as they say, your father’s Democratic Party.
Since 2016, Democrats have chosen denial over introspection. The party has doubled down on resistance and ideology, embracing intolerance in the name of furthering tolerance. Who was held accountable for Trump’s 2016 upset? Not the liberal San Francisco Speaker of the House or the liberal New York Senate Majority Leader at the time. Tuesday just may have been Flyover Country’s middle finger response. Let’s run through some of the winners and losers, and inspect some ideas as to how we move forward.
Progressivism hits a wall
Prior to Election Day, the usually thoughtful progressive State Rep. Chris Rabb unwittingly aired the blinders of team colorism when he criticized candidate Harris for trying to forge an ideologically big tent coalition with room for urbanites, suburbanites and — critically — rural voters. “She’s out here courting Dick Cheney and Joe Rogan,” he told The Inquirer. “Then she’ll get on a social media platform to address Black men. That’s not a proven way to get the votes she needs to secure victory in Pennsylvania.”
Uh, yes it is, as evidenced most recently by the Shapiro model for how to win, Commonwealth-wide — proven over three elections. (Let’s just note, but not revisit, what might have been had Shapiro been Harris’ VP choice, except to note that Harris’ momentum seemed to stall right after Walz’s subpar debate performance.) It’s a roadmap for winning double-digit Trump mainstays like Luzerne and Cumberland counties. Turns out, guest hits on MSNBC do not translate into votes in Berks County — another of those Shapiro-to-Trump destinations. Looking at you Malcolm Kenyatta, the talented progressive who has now run two losing statewide races.
“I don’t want people going to concerts. I want people out there knocking on doors. I want people out there fighting for this thing.” — Van Jones
Instead of blaming the voters, maybe be open to the possibility that you weren’t selling what they were interested in buying? Yes, the Trump ads citing Harris’ loyalty to “they / them” can be denounced as divisive, but they did speak to a larger cultural truth: Dems are widely viewed as the party of land acknowledgments, pronouns and open borders — is it so hard to say, as Sen. John Fetterman has, that a country needs borders and can be humane at the same time? — rather than the party that’s on your side when you’re trying to pay your bills at the end of the month.
Which gets us to:
Whatever happened to “It’s the economy, stupid!”?
As Third Way’s Matt Bennett told The New York Times, “The only way to beat a right-wing populist is through the center. You must become the party that is more pragmatic, reasonable and more sane.” That’s how Bill Clinton reversed over a decade of Reaganism — a movement led by a far more likable character than MAGA’s.
Clinton, in keeping with the discipline alluded to in his consultant James Carville’s famous slogan, published an entire book of policies aimed to help you at your bill-laden kitchen table. It was called Putting People First and it was a manifesto that people actually bought and read.
Now, a book might not be the way to go in 2024, but can you summon Harris’ plan for remaking the economy? Oh, she heralded an “Opportunity Economy” — a great phrase — but did she ever put meat on those talking points? To be fair, she hinted at it; there was her $25,000 home down payment assistance, the child care tax credit, the populist nods to taking on price gouging, the lip service paid to spurring the housing supply — all needed. But there was no overarching thematic argument made.
Sure, The Economist is right; the American comeback under Biden is the envy of the world. Inflation is down, wages are up, and the stock market is through the roof. But most folks still can’t afford what they used to. If you’re making $75,000 a year in Michigan’s working-class Macomb County (which Trump took by 13 percent), your wages have long stagnated while the cost of health care and tuition and seemingly everything else has skyrocketed. Why not declare war on the affordability crisis with a far-reaching pro-growth agenda?
How about a middle-class jobs guarantee program modeled after the one about to be piloted in Cleveland (which we’ll be hearing about at next week’s Ideas We Should Steal Festival), or a plan for national service that provides a pipeline to college, or really backstopping CDFIs so inner-city and rural entrepreneurs can access capital instead of cutting such investments, or using the tax code to further incentivize ESOPs — Employee Stock Ownership Plans — a success story of which we saw right in our own backyard last year?
“Joining a club — even a trivial pinochle club or whatever — does help democracy. It’s only by connecting with other people that we generalize from our experience.” — Robert Putnam
Way back when, as reported in Richard Reeves’ stellar biography, John F. Kennedy, upon assuming the presidency, had a note placed on every West Wing desk. “What Have You Done to Grow the Economy Today?” it read. Voters ranked the economy as one of their chief concerns this week, but was there any indication in the campaign that either candidate would respond with JFK-like urgency once in office?
This is not to suggest that the economy is in free fall, as Trump would erroneously claim. Given that inflation and interest rates are down, wages are up, and the stock market is through the roof, why would Harris not have told us that … by showing her work? In fact, Shanin Specter — son of the late, great Senator Arlen — and former Democratic Treasurer Joe Torsella took it upon themselves to raise money and run radio ads in each county that told folks just how, say, that fixed bridge on their route to the job every morning got that way — thanks to the Biden/Harris Infrastructure Act. The ads, done by veteran messaging guru “Doc” Sweitzer, were a page out of the long-ago playbook of Arlen, who was famous for visiting all of the Commonwealth’s 67 counties every year.
Given the results, the ads may not have moved the needle, but what does it say that two super-engaged citizens had to embark upon the project in the first place? Imagine if, instead, that had been part of Harris’ closing argument all along? Like your quicker commute in the morning, Northampton County? I did that. If Trump’s presidency showed anything, it was that, behind the bombast, he couldn’t actually get stuff done. Why wasn’t that counter-argument front and center?
Which gets us to:
This ain’t your father’s campaign
All the post-mortem finger-pointing between Brady and the Harris team revealed just how antiquated are the tactics of so-called campaign experts. Harris campaign Pennsylvania senior advisor Brendan McPhillips’ statement, heralding that his campaign team “knocked more than two million doors in the weekend leading up to Election Day, which is two million more doors than Bob Brady’s organization can claim to have knocked during his entire tenure as party chairman” was not just sophomoric; it also subscribed to a ground game tactic that no longer really applies in presidential races, as evidenced by the fact that Trump outsourced the function to, of all people, Elon Musk — and won.
McPhillips went on, though: “If there’s any immediate takeaway from Philadelphia’s turnout this cycle, it is that Chairman Brady’s decades-long practice of fleecing campaigns for money to make up for his own lack of fundraising ability or leadership is a worthless endeavor that no future campaign should ever be forced to entertain again.”
Okay, then. I’m no apologist for antiquated machine politics, but doesn’t this debate have the stench of death all over it — from both sides?
To that point, the brilliant Republican media consultant-turned-Independent pundit Tim Miller got it right when he said on MSNBC that Harris ran a great campaign — “for 2004.”
“There’s a big cash transfer going from regular people and rich donors to political consultants who have done really well … [while] the last three winning campaigns had essentially no grassroots ground game, and the ads that everybody is putting all this money into?” he said. “Nobody sees them.”
Trump, by way of contrast, communicated differently — and less fearfully. “In his victory speech, literally Adin Ross, the Milkboys, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan were name-checked,” Miller observed. “I’m guessing most of the people watching this only know who one of those people are. But they have huge audiences and Donald Trump was going and speaking to them.”
Now, it’s tempting to dismiss the Rogan-led podcastosphere as retro bro culture, and some of these dudes do sound like lunkheads, but some can be quite nuanced when it comes to generational issues of race, class and politics. Take Von, for instance, a working-class standup comedian who is not afraid to tackle issues, like the ironies that attend White privilege when applied to poor Whites:
That’s who Trump was speaking to — sometimes for hours on end. He spent three hours on-air with Rogan. Harris’ campaign negotiated with Rogan’s staff before declining to grace his mostly male 14.5 million followers with her presence, when she was hemorrhaging male support in the polls. You say you’re going to be tougher than Trump on Putin but Joe Rogan is an interlocutor too far? Instead, Harris’ braintrust thought that appearing at rallies with (billionaires) Springsteen and Beyoncé would translate into votes beyond her base, when it just might have prompted populist resentment, as Van Jones fretted about.
So we are where we are. What now?
Well, one of the conversations I’m most looking forward to at our Ideas We Should Steal Festival presented by Comcast NBCUniversal next week is with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi and historian (and Philly native) Jon Grinspan, author of The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915. His gripping narrative — starring an amazing Philly reformer, William “Pig Iron” Kelley — reminds us that we’ve been here before. In the decades following the Civil War, the nation was embroiled in hateful partisan rhetoric, political assassinations, and immigration wars. Then, as now, the political system was being used to litigate ferocious culture wars — something for which it was, and is, not equipped. A group of reformers, led by Kelley, set out to quiet the nation.
That quieting had its significant costs, as we’ll hear, but the 20th century did ultimately become known for its civility and progress. “When people are isolated, they gravitate toward partisanship,” Grinspan told me earlier this week. The advent of social clubs, of church socials, of PTAs, of lobbying groups, of magazines and muckraking journalism — what we now think of as the embattled tenets of citizenship —all of it brought down the temperature. Ways were found — perhaps stumbled upon — to get around political demonization and obstruction. Might there be a roadmap in our past to reverse the Great Unraveling we’re in, this partisan uncivil war? It’s comforting, at least, that we’ve been here before, no?
John F. Kennedy, upon assuming the presidency, had a note placed on every West Wing desk. “What Have You Done to Grow the Economy Today?” it read.
You might remember Robert Putnam, author nearly 25 years ago of the seminal Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, which sort of forewarned this very moment — the collapse of our institutions and the not-unrelated derailment of common cause. He gave an interview to The New York Times this past summer in which he stood by this simple advice: Join Something. Anything. Commonality becomes its own societal reward.
“Joining a club — even a trivial pinochle club or whatever — does help democracy,” Putnam says. “That’s what my work is designed to show. It’s only by connecting with other people that we generalize from our experience. In the running club, you learn that you can trust other people, and learn in a way what you need to do to maintain that trust … the causal sequence is you begin with trusting other people, and the trusting in other people produces a government that’s trustworthy.”
That all sounds very highfalutin, I know, at a time when the majority of the country just elected a man who, quite objectively, lacks the character to lead anyone — let alone a nation — in matters of moral code. The thing I worry about most these next four years? Not any specific political issue, but the further erosion of what we once agreed upon as right and wrong. We need us some ethicists-in-chief.
Meantime, we’re just going to have to Marcus Aurelius this thing, each of us. Resist the urge for nastiness in kind, political or otherwise. The great Stoic philosopher’s whole gig was all about divorcing oneself from outcome; what we do after the thing happens to us is what really matters, he’d argue.
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment,” he wrote. It’s a lovely prescription for how to be. Reframe how you think, and … you can change the world.
Another conversation at our Festival next week — the closing one — will feature a discussion between the inimitable Dr. Michael Eric Dyson and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jonathan Eig, titled, “What Would Martin Say?” King, remember, told us that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Alas, he forgot to tell us how long. That’s up to us, and our thinking.
