When I returned to Little League, I thought I was a pretty good baseball player. I hit a lot of home runs, so I thought I could play in the majors until about seventh grade. At that time, I stood at bat against a pitcher from Warren Junior High School who could throw a curveball.
His first pitch seemed to go straight to my head. I hit the dart and looked up just in time to see the ball go perfectly over the plate. Humble! The referees called it a strike, Warren’s players laughed at me, and I soon became one of those writers who uses sports analogies a lot.
As embarrassing as it was, my decisive defeat quickly put an end to my delusional diamond dreams. I never learned to hit curveballs, but I learned a neat lesson from the experience. Once your life is clear, accept the gift.
Democrats should accept that gift.
At the very least, the party’s electoral pummeling last week should provide Democrats with the clarity they have clearly lacked thus far. They were shocked by the results. I certainly knew a number of people who were predicting a loss, but it was Kamala Harris who decided to lose. “This could be a great thing,” a Democratic operative friend told me over the weekend after a now infamous Des Moines Register poll showed Harris leading Trump by 3 points in deep red Iowa. After the results were announced, he said to me: Trump ultimately won the state by 13 points.
At the very least, the general feeling was that the election would be very close. The consensus of critics seemed to place this race at the intersection of the clichés of “razor-thin” and “wafer-thin” (personally, I thought it would be “paper-thin”). But then I was an outlier). Many expected the contest to take many days to hold. Election lawyers flocked to battleground states. I don’t recall speaking with one or two Democrats in the last few weeks who foresaw the ultimate disaster for the party.
Then came the knee-bending curve balls that voters know how to throw.
“There’s at least some accuracy to this result,” Michigan Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell told me. “At least at the presidential level, there is no ambiguity in what voters say.” This saves time and focuses the collective mind on the larger issues facing Democrats.
No one is debating whether Bad Bunny, for example, would have been saved if he had endorsed Harris sooner. In other words, last week’s turmoil didn’t help us rethink the details. There is no point dwelling on the margins when the evidence is in fact so conclusive.
That wasn’t the case after the Democratic Party suffered defeat at the hands of President Trump eight years ago. The election got even closer. There are strategic arguments (“If only Hillary Clinton had spent more time in Wisconsin.”), numerical hypotheses (“What if X number of states had voted the other way?”); And it was good for organized lamentation (damn the electorate). college). All of this is politically equivalent to a home run in any other ballpark.
And it distracts from, even confuses, the lessons that loss should have taught.
Partly as a result, Democrats did not engage in any practical calculations after 2016. Essentially, they have become a party that defines itself as opposed to Trump, just as the Republican Party has been defined as following Trump. Perhaps this makes sense for Democrats in the short term. Trump’s presidency, his post-presidency, and the lame imitations he inspired have given Democrats plenty of material to work with. They enjoyed good midterm results (2018, 2022) and chose Joe Biden as their interim winning candidate in 2020.
Unfortunately for Democrats, Biden did not get a “stopgap” memo. The stubborn octogenarian insisted on running again until it was too late for someone else to step in, leaving Harris and her party in a terrible position.
Embarrassed Democrats are pointing fingers, and Biden appears to be most responsible. But the blame will soon subside, and the sooner Democrats can embrace the clarity of this moment, the better.
“This feels more like a clean slate,” Democratic campaign strategist Pete Giangreco told me. “Sure, you could debate whether Vice Presidential candidate Josh Shapiro could have helped Pennsylvania, but who cares? It wouldn’t have mattered. It wouldn’t have mattered. It makes it easier to concentrate.”
Dingell says the most important thing, and what the 2024 results reveal, is that working-class voters are disliking Democrats across racial lines. This will be evident from last Tuesday’s defeat as well as success. She mentioned two Democratic House colleagues who won and were re-elected in dangerous battleground districts. Jared Golden of Maine holds a slight advantage (about 700 votes) in one of the few districts in the country that has yet to be called. Rep. Marie Grusenkamp Perez appears to have narrowly held onto her rural district in Washington state and has criticized national Democratic leaders for being indifferent to the concerns of working-class voters.
“I think you need to go out and learn for a while and listen,” Dingell told me.
Please listen to the results first. It was a close second. Trump won all seven battleground states and the popular vote. He greatly expanded his support among black and Hispanic voters, as well as young people. They also polled 52 percent of white women. Republicans controlled the Senate and retained the House of Representatives.
As it turns out, Democrats were much closer to delusion than the reality imposed on them by voters. So please read the postmortems, theorize, and engage in the various “necessary conversations” that Democrats and experts continue to dictate. Even better, just skip them.
“Here’s what we know: We don’t know anything,” Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show on election night. “We’re going to make all kinds of declarations about what this country is about, what this world is about, but the truth is, we’re never really going to know anything.”
There’s a simple humility there, something that makes you sit back in the dugout.
