WHAT WENT WRONG PART 2

Packed-to-the-rafters rallies. A record $1 billion of money raised. Massive early-voting numbers. Real, serious enthusiasm everywhere.

And then, this past Tuesday, Election Day, a three percent loss EVERYWHERE - the places she won, the places she lost. EVERYWHERE. Fifteen million Democrats who voted in 2020 didn’t show up to vote. The vote margin in Philadelphia wasn’t large enough to cover the losses in northeast Pennsylvania.

What. The. Actual. Fuck???

Kamala Harris ran the best campaign I was ever around after Obama’s. Every step was right. Every move was right. There wasn’t one thing my experience of politics raised as a warning sign, unlike the Obama campaign, which had a lot of warning signs toward the end that went on to play out badly in 2009-2010. (As it’s turning out, that I thought that is my fault. Again.)

And she lost by three percent EVERYWHERE. All of the Blue Wall, gone. All seven battleground states, lost.

Why did that three percent of voters who supported Biden - and her, as VP - in 2020, not want to vote for her as president in 2024?

Wednesday nigh on Stephanie Ruhle’s show (which if you missed it you should look it up on YouTube because there’s a lot of good stuff) Michael Steele said that the thing he learned from working for Marion Berry when he was mayor of Washington D.C. was that if you don’t know WHY the voters you want to reach want to vote, you will never reach them. And you will lose.

Tim Ryan observed that Democrats “failed to read the room” this year.

Those two statements, taken together - that Democrats failed to read the room and thus didn’t know why that three percent of voters who voted for them in 2020 didn’t want to vote for them in 2024 - are why we are reeling from the most thorough defeat a political party has ever experienced in American history.

Democrats in 2024 were the equivalent of the French generals in 1940 who couldn’t figure out how Rommel’s panzers got through the “impassable’ Ardennes Forest to show up at Sedan and cross the Meuse nearly unopposed, to commence their “race for the Channel” that would result in the disaster at Dunkirk (As Churchill said to people who wanted to call the evacuation a miracle, “A few more miracles like that and we will truly be undone.”), and ultimately the Fall of France three weeks later. Those generals couldn’t understand that what they were seeing was their defeat.

A commenter from North Carolina posted at another site the other day that a bunch of well-dressed doorknockers from California knocking on doors in poor communities in North Carolina didn’t exactly strike the voters they talked to in those communities as really being interested in them and their needs past election day. Given that I know several Californians who did that, and have absolutely no doubt about their sincerity and dedication to the cause, it pains me to realize that poster is right.

Brian Klaas posted this in his morning email yesterday:

The late Chinua Achebe, the great Nigerian poet, once remarked that “a functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy, educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.” The United States appears dangerously close to exhibiting none of the above.

The sentiment many Americans are expressing —on the Trumpian right and the Democratic left—is: “I truly don’t understand how you could vote for that.”

I find myself in complete agreement with Senator Bernie Sanders’ analysis of the central problem: “A Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Sanders noted that major economic factors likely influenced the working class vote on Tuesday, including stagnant wages due to inflation, the threat of automation from AI and robotics, and high healthcare and prescription drug costs.

Yes, yes - it’s true! - wages are at all-time highs, but that doesn’t mean all wages. And given the way things have gone downhill for middle and working class Americans over the past 40 years since Reagan came along and broke unions, the “high wages” of today don’t buy what the “normal wages” of 40 years ago bought. $20/hour? That’s $3,200/month (for 160 full-time hours - which most people don’t get anymore). Before taxes. After taxes, around $2,800.month. In Los Angeles, in Pacoima - a working class Latino suburb here in the San Fernando Valley - that might get you (but probably won’t) a very modest, old, two-bedroom home for you and your family. But will take all of the $2,800. So what happens to food, health care, and anything else?

When I first came here, I got a minimum-wage job for $1.25/hour, working at the LA Free Press. That allowed me to rent a (small) one-bedroom apartment in West Hollyood, put food on the table, pay for using my car, let me go out on a movie date every weekend. And have money available for unforseen expenses. You cannot do that on a minimum wage job, and have not been able to do any of that on a minimum wage job for the past 50 years. It got worse every one of those 50 years. Five years ago, by chance, I was in West Hollywood and happened to drive past that apartment building I lived in. There was a “for rent” sign. I checked it out, from curiosity. It was the apartment next door to the apartment I had rented, for $50/month back then.

The rent in 2019 was $2,500/month.

According to a CNBC poll published earlier this year, over 65 percent of respondents said they lived paycheck-to-paycheck in 2023. Research published by the Bank of America Institute last month indicated at least 25 percent of American households were spending most of their paychecks each month.

Here’s a fact that really matters: In January 1981, when Reagan took office, the households of the Middle 40—that’s the 50th to 90th wealth percentiles—held a collective 31.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. Fast-forward to January 2022: Their share of the pie had dwindled to 25.7 percent, even as the combined wealth of the richest 0.01 percent of households soared from less than 3 percent of the total to 11 percent. The upward flow of wealth over the past 40 years is why the economy can be “booming” by all measures, while 65% of Americans are going nowhere but further down. Democrats have certainly done nothing about this, and there is a solid argument that when Obama supported the bankers and let homeowners lose their homes in 2008, that he made the situation worse.

And for the bottom 50 percent, when Reagan came in, their average household wealth was a paltry $944. (All figures in 2023 dollars.) Today they have just $659 on average. Those 92.2 million households now hold less than 0.05 percent of the nation’s wealth

I submit that the majority of you reading this (and me writing it) have no fucking clue what that 65 percent of Americans think about - what they want, the life they’d like to live, the way they’d like to live it. I will also bet that if I knocked on their door and talked to them about “the issues” as I see them that we face, they would think I was from Mars. You have to have time to be able to think about something besides “do we get to stay here next month?” to be able to see saving democracy that hasn’t helped your family and demanding action be taken on climate change. Or you need to know that the job opportunity you just found in the solar panel factory is the result of what Democrats did, not the Republican congressman who voted against Chips and Science who’s standing out front of the place claiming the credit for it being there. But Democrats didn’t do that.

The reason WHY that three percent didn’t want to vote for Kamala Harris on Tuesday was - as that North Carolina poster I quoted above pointed out - the the people in those poor communities there in North Carolina whose doorbells were rung by those well-dressed canvassers from California didn’t see them as really being interested in their concerns and needs, past asking for their vote. Where have the Democrats been for them about fixing what Reagan fucked up?

David Rothkopf, writing about how he could have been so wrong about his expectations in the election, said: “Further, in the 24 hours since the defeat, I have learned more about real flaws in the Harris campaign, gaps in their attention, failure to heed warnings of things that ultimately came true. That included paying inadequate attention to key groups like Latino voters and perhaps paying too much to Republican cross-over voters who did not materialize as expected.”

Again, this points to a failure to ask why the people they wanted to reach wanted to vote. Rothkopf points out, “Had Kamala Harris won a fraction of the 16 million more people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 that did not vote for her this week, she would have won this race handily. So, better understanding of the needs and aspirations of our own base is where we must begin.”

Looking at this, there are a number of facts now coming out that point up this failure.

Harris barely won majority support among Latinos, according to exit polls. Harris appears to have underperformed with Latino women, too. CNN’s exit polling shows that Harris lost 16 percentage points with Latino men and 9 percentage points with Latino women compared to Biden’s 2020 performance. Trump did 16 points better with Hispanic voters than in 2020

White college-educated voters were the other apparent bedrock of Harris’ coalition. But Trump made gains with them, according to exit polls, improving his margins by 3 points. He still lost them by 10 points, but he improved on 2020, which was all he needed to do, given his strength elsewhere. He also gained with white non-college-educated voters, winning them by 31 points over Harris

This is counterintuitive but the exit polls support the fact that Trump narrowly won voters who decided in the last few days, by 2 points; he won voters who decided in the past week by 8. Harris won narrowly among voters who decided earlier.

Only 44 per cent of the 2024 electorate had a favorable view of Trump, while 54 per cent did not. Yet Trump won 9 per cent of this 54 per cent bloc. They didn’t like him, but they chose him over Harris. This, perhaps more than any other, is the number that should haunt Democrats.

And could someone tell me which bank accounts of the over-educated, under-intelligent otherwise-unemployables known as “Democratic Consultants” the $25 million the Harris campaign tells me I need to donate to in order to “cover expenses” went to - after they raised a billion frickin’ dollars!

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