The real reason Democrats lost in 2024

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https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/the-dnc-autopsy-omits-the-biggest

«The autopsy’s diagnoses — Democrats didn’t define Trump, didn’t go negative enough, didn’t engage male voters, didn’t show up in rural areas, didn’t invest enough in digital ads, didn’t have a “permanent campaign” strategy — could all be simultaneously true and roughly irrelevant to the 2024 outcome. They might matter at the margins in a future election where the fundamentals are neutral. But they probably didn’t matter much in 2024 because the fundamentals weren’t neutral.

Worse, by attributing the loss to strategic failures, the autopsy invites the party to learn the wrong lessons. If you decide Harris lost because she didn’t run negative enough ads against Trump, you’ll spend 2028 running more negative ads. If you decide she lost because the campaign didn’t have a clear definition of the candidate, you’ll spend 2028 obsessing over the candidate definition. Neither will help if the next Democratic nominee [when Democrats are the incumbent party] inherits another period of high inflation or low presidential approval. And neither will be necessary if they inherit a recovering economy and a popular incumbent.

The deeper problem with the autopsy is that it imagines a voter who doesn’t exist. The kind of voter the report’s recommendations would persuade — someone weighing Harris’s issue positions against Trump’s, watching campaign ads carefully, updating their beliefs in response to messaging frames — is essentially a Washington consultant, not your grandma who can’t afford to pay her bills because gas is up 50% and electricity subsidies just ended. One of the problems with autopsies is that voter psychology takes a lot of work to understand well, but the people who have that skillset largely aren’t the type of person the DNC is hiring to audit their choices.

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And then there is the low-information voter, who decided 2024 more than any other group. The voters who broke hardest for Trump in 2024 were the ones who paid the least attention to politics. These are voters who, in our surveys, cannot name the party in control of Congress, don’t follow the news regularly if at all, and make decisions mostly based on vibes and what their social groups are saying. The DNC autopsy spends pages on messaging strategy aimed at engaged voters and almost no time on the people who actually moved.

…

By letting the party nominate Biden without a primary or convention, party bosses closed themselves off to those paths to November that ended in victory. The party had years, not weeks, to coordinate a graceful handoff to a successor who could have built a real campaign around economic reform, distanced her/himself from the Biden era, and had a fair shot at competing against an incredibly flawed opponent.

…

(I might argue that the soul searching about 2024 — the notion of an “autopsy” in general — to explain a 1.5-point defeat is all a bit dramatic anyway, but your mileage may vary.)

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If the trends we’ve seen in general and special elections in 2025 and 2026 hold, we are looking at a substantial Republican defeat in the midterms and a genuinely favorable environment in 2028.

But here’s the catch, and it’s a big one. Those very same fundamentals that will create positive conditions for Democratic wins in 2026 and 2028 will also start working against them the moment they take power. Anti-incumbency in the post-pandemic era has been unusually durable — voters across the developed world have been throwing out whoever is in charge, regardless of ideology, for five straight years now. If Democrats win the House in 2026 and the White House in 2028 on the back of Trump’s economic mismanagement, they will inherit the same trap that swallowed Harris: a public that is structurally pissed off about the cost of living and willing to punish whoever happens to be in charge when the next election rolls around.

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The only way to escape the gravity of anti-incumbent sentiment is to do something big enough that voters actually feel it, or signal that you’re trying. You don’t need a 12-point plan and to rattle off macroeconomic indicators from the Oval Office; Biden tried that. The next Democratic candidate will need something on the scale of the New Deal or the Great Society — a generational project that reorders the relationship between the American economy and the American worker, and that voters can point to and say “My life is better because of this party.”

Democrats need a president who, in 2029 — like Zohran Mamdani in New York City — says the cost of housing, healthcare, childcare, and energy is the central political question of our time, and who proposes to do something on the scale of that problem. There are lots of options on the table for a party that wants to go big. Build millions of new homes. Cap the price of insulin and expand negotiation to every essential drug. Subsidize childcare or make it a public good. Build out clean energy infrastructure fast enough to combat rising costs from AI infrastructure and climate change. Tax the people who have captured most of the economic gains over the last 20 years and use the money to fund the policies ordinary people actually buy. Pick fights with the industries that profit from scarcity and dysfunction — and win them.

This, of course, will be hard; defying gravity always is. It requires governing the way Roosevelt and Johnson governed, with the assumption that bold action creates its own political coalition. And it also requires you to look back on your failures with a holistic view of what causes certain outcomes.

I have not yet seen anything close to this from the party, from the think tanks, or from the leading 2028 contenders. There are gestures toward the “abundance” agenda, populism, and “radical centrism,” but these mostly read like positioning exercises, not serious agendas for a people that are really hurting. The 2024 autopsy was a chance to start that conversation by being honest about why Harris lost. It failed to do that.

This matters because the fundamentals giveth and the fundamentals taketh away. A Democratic win in 2028 built on Trump backlash, without a generational economic vision behind it, is a Democratic loss in 2032 waiting to happen. The only durable answer to anti-incumbent sentiment is to actually earn re-election. The party has roughly two and a half years to decide whether it wants to think that big — and that creatively.

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I would have liked to see a DNC autopsy with more data, more research, and more attention to the real hard work on voter psychology, economic anxiety, and the path forward. The 2024 autopsy was the party’s chance to confront the thing it actually got wrong. Harris lost because prices were high, Biden was unpopular, and voters across the world were in a mood to punish whoever was in charge. It is surprising to read a hundred pages about messaging discipline and rural organizing and still miss that fundamental fact. And yet.

Democrats are about to be handed a win in 2026–28 by voters who are angry at the party currently in power. If they mistake that for vindication of a new strategy that fiddles around the margins — instead of the same structural anti-incumbency that buried Harris — they will spend the 2030s out of power and wishing they had thought bigger when time was still on their side.

Oops, by the time I got done pasting the good parts, it was a big chunk of the article. 🙂

Chop Wood, Carry Water 5/8 – by Jess Craven

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https://chopwoodcarrywaterdailyactions.substack.com/p/chop-wood-carry-water-58-f47?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=362618&post_id=196817040&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2tv2o&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

It occurs to me, as I read this, that this is why attitude and framing and permission structures matter: the field is slanted against Dems. Rural states slant the Senate (and the Presidency). Gerrymandering slants the House (always has, not just recently). Republicans have been working very hard to suppress Democratic voters, and in elections where the margins are a fraction of a percentage point (or a couple of hundred actual votes), a fraction of a percentage point suppressed matters.

Looking backwards (a. k. a. “conservatism”) is always easier than looking forwards. There’s only one past, but there are many futures. Which one do we pick? That’s why liberals are always so chaotic and fragmented.

So, the field is slanted. Which is why I can say that a vote for a third-party candidate or a decision not to vote is a vote for Republicans.

Which is why the statement that “I won’t vote for any party that supports genocide” or “a pox on both their houses” or “I don’t care about the general; I’m going to vote for a far-left candidate in the primary, even if they can’t win” is such bullshit. All of that is a vote for the direction of the slant. There is no neutral.

Duh. But also: your talk that influences somebody else in that direction is also problematic. Stop it.

I don’t know why I didn’t come to this realization and start making this argument a few decades ago.

«I’ll go a step further and say that telling people “we’re f*cked,” or “the House is gone,” or “what’s the point?” right now is abetting the enemy. That is exactly what they want you to do! MAGA has always been excellent at depressing turnout via sowing division, killing morale, and using skewed polls. They love that Democrats are throwing their hands up right now. They are counting on it. Because they are still likely to lose in November, but if we give up, then maybe, just maybe they’ll have a chance!»

The ‘America First’ Corporate Graveyard

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https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-america-first-corporate-graveyard-trump-economy

The stupidity of Trump and American voters, frankly:

«Throughout each of his presidential campaigns, Trump promised a manufacturing renaissance. This was never likely to happen, despite bipartisan nostalgia for a bygone U.S. manufacturing era. That’s largely because we are now a services-based economy. But a resurgence was especially unlikely given Trump’s specific brand of America First policies, which includes raising costs of the inputs that U.S. manufacturers buy while also closing off export markets where these same U.S. manufacturers hope to sell their products.

The result: There are approximately 80,000 fewer manufacturing jobs today than there were when Trump took office last year. Not coincidentally, steel prices here in the United States are about 40 percent higher than those in Western Europe. The increase in corporate bankruptcies last year was driven largely by industrial firms grappling with tariffs.

The sweeping Trump tariffs have been painful enough. But lately, they have been coupled with new stressors resulting from his war with Iran.

For example, aluminum prices are nearly double what they were a year ago, thanks to a combination of Trump’s tariffs; a shutdown at a U.S. aluminum supplier; and the closure of one of the world’s largest aluminum smelters, located near Abu Dhabi, which was struck by an Iranian missile.

This has hit auto companies especially hard. In an earnings call last week, Ford said it expected its commodity costs this year to reach $2 billion, twice its previous projection, primarily because of rising aluminum prices.

Other manufacturers are feeling the pinch, too: In its own earnings filing today, Whirlpool warned that the Iran war had “resulted in recession-level industry decline in the U.S.” As trade nerds may recall: Whirlpool was one of the very first beneficiaries of Trump’s trade wars in his first term, through his global washing-machine tariffs. The company and its workers initially celebrated—but then they were beset by a series of other “America First” policies (including those metal tariffs).»

Opinion | Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All. – The New York Times

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/opinion/birthrate-kids-parents-demographics-future.html?unlocked_article_code=1.glA.uBB-.T6wllX4TJM3D&smid=url-share (gift)

So many reasons. Everyone has a theory. Demographer types have a new theory: massive uncertainty about the future. It seems obvious, but it’s starting to get official, along with people thinking about how to tackle it.