Enough with the post-mortems

Hey, remember that time the RNC did a big post-mortem after losing what they thought was a very winnable race? The polls turned out to be off by a bit, overstating their strength, and they had also managed to convince themselves that the polls were significantly understating their strength, which was very embarrassing, so they did a big review of what went wrong and concluded they’d been too openly racist, xenophobic, and narrow-minded to win national elections anymore, and would have to moderate their positions if they wanted a hope of ever winning again.

Then their voters ignored them completely and squeaked out a victory with the most openly racist, xenophobic, bigoted and narrow-minded campaign anyone had ever seen.

Four years later, at the height of a pandemic and with the economy cratering around them, they ran even harder on those themes and lost, again pretty embarrassingly. Four years after that, with an unpopular Democratic incumbent and an economy that feels worse than it looks on paper, they ran even harder on their favorite but extremely unpopular grievances, and won again. 

Now everybody is demanding the Democrats soul-search, self-flagellate, and move rightward on [insert commentator’s pet issue here]. Never mind that under Biden they did move rightward on immigration, they utterly ignored trans rights in their campaign, while their opponents have been passing law after law to make trans life impossible in this country, and that there was no daylight between their “get back to work” COVID policy and the GOP’s. Surely what’s needed is a Democratic Party that’s more tolerant of bigotry and xenophobia or whatever else some commentator thinks they ought to change about their policy platform.

Folks, if swing voters cared about policy platforms, they wouldn’t have repeatedly swung for a candidate whose policy positions range from meaninglessly vague to utterly deranged, then swung away, and then swung back. If they cared about candidate quality, they would never have swung for a candidate who utterly failed to control the campaign narrative, was trounced in every debate except that one where his own hilariously bad performance was overshadowed by his octogenarian opponent’s even worse one, and spent the last week of his campaign insulting a vital up-for-grabs voting bloc. And if swing voters just really, really loved racism and xenophobia? They’d have swung for Romney too!

I think we need to finally admit to ourselves that swing voters are the kinds of people who pay next to no attention to politics, don’t see their votes as reflections of their moral or ethical values, and vote based almost entirely on how they feel their lives are going, and who’s been in charge while their lives have gone that way. This means Democrats also have to reassess the elections Democrats have won, such as 2008, 2012, and 2020, and recognize that Obama didn’t win his first election by a landslide because he was a generationally great politician, or because racism in this country is over, he won it by a landslide because he managed to become the Democratic nominee in a year when the incumbent president was a Republican with a cratering economy. He won reelection not because he did a good job framing Romney as a rich bastard out to take your job but because the economy had significantly improved on his watch. Biden didn’t win in 2020 because the country was done with Trump and his shenanigans, he won because people were losing jobs to the pandemic and Trump was the guy in the oval office at the time.

This might sound like I’m saying LOL nothing matters, structural forces will determine all election results, and, well…almost. There is no question that the Harris campaign’s ad buys and turnout operation was phenomenal and made a difference—the election just didn’t turn out to be close enough for it to make the difference. The vote in most of the country seems to have swung by about 6.7 percentage points toward Republicans from 2020 to 2024, but in the seven swing states it swung by an average of only 3.1. That’s ads, rallies, and “ground game” yielding a massive 3.6 percentage point difference! It would be a mistake to look at that and say, “guess all our individual contributions of money and time didn’t do jack.” They did have an effect, and that’s why candidate quality (and Harris was a great and energetic candidate, and Trump was an unfocused and incoherent one) does matter at the margins.

The trouble is, it’s only at the margins. What matters the rest of the time is mostly outside a party’s control.

It’s hard for very political people—and all commentators are very political people—to acknowledge or even believe that most of the things politicians do, swing voters won’t notice, care, or give them credit for. But it’s just unquestionably true. The kinds of people who decide national elections by drifting back and forth between Democrats and Republicans cycle after cycle, when the parties and what they stand for are so dramatically different, are the kinds of people who just don’t notice or pay much attention to whether the government just made gay marriage legal or abortion illegal, increased the military budget or slashed it, ended wars abroad or started them. They care whether their lives feel like they’re getting better or worse, and then they give the incumbent party credit or blame accordingly.

Republicans ignored their 2012 post-mortem, and it doesn’t seem to have done them any harm whatsoever. Democrats should do the same: ignore any post-mortem that says they’d be more popular if they changed their policy positions. Swing voters don’t care. If our disintegrating republic weathers the next few years well enough that Democrats ever return to power, they need to take this lesson to heart and pursue every one of their goals as if nobody’s watching and the *only* question is “will this make people’s lives better or worse?” Don’t ask whether it’s popular or will win or lose you an election, ask whether it’s the right thing to do and then wrangle the votes to get it done. Yes, even if it’s guns. Yes, even if it’s trans rights. Yes, even if it’s truly radical environmental policy. Yes, even if it’s finally finally taking a leftward turn on immigration. And while you’re at it, take a page out of Republicans’ books and seize as much power for your constituents as you can get. Voting rights, DC statehood, court reform, the whole nine yards. If people are criticizing you for losing political power, maybe do some work to make your power more durable, ya know?

It’s not that voters will reward you for it. It’s that they won’t fucking care.