2024 Presidential Election Thoughts
I spent my election night on stream with my friend and co-host, to a moderately-sized crowd spanning the UC Berkeley Debate Team to Vanderbilt frat houses. Thanks for all the support, especially to all the kind people who liked my commentary! You can access the VOD here; we had no microphone setup so it was pretty tough until I got a headset. I basically called the election at 10:47pm, much faster than everyone else, because I’m the supreme electoral analyst. With that out of the way, thoughts (these will be more condensed and simpler because I have many):
1. On Pragmatic Optimism
Lots of people are going to urge you to be optimistic. I think that this is basically the correct idea, but not for reasons people are saying, or compelling you to do so.
It seems slightly tone-deaf for some to just assert that everything “will be fine.” Even if that were the case, the day after the election is not really the time or place for that. Some people cope in different ways; It’s bizarre to tell people that feel as though their rights are on the line that “it might actually be fine.” Regardless, things are almost certainly not going to be fine:
a) Republicans will solidify their control of the Supreme Court. In wake of odd decisions, such as Trump and Loper Bright, this should be particularly worrisome. Thomas and Alito will almost certainly retire, setting up the following matrix of judges:
Thomas, Conservative, retiring (new judge ~53 years old).
Alito, Conservative, retiring (new judge ~53 years old).
Gorsuch, Conservative, 57 years old.
Kavanagh, Conservative, 59 years old.
ACB, Conservative, 52 years old.
Roberts, “Centrist,” 69 years old.
Sotomayor, Liberal, 70 years old.
Kagan, Liberal, 64 years old.
KBJ, Liberal, 54 years old.
The older judges are all more likely to be liberal, meaning that Sotomayor has to… not pass away in office. If Republicans win again in 2024, it’s a cooked, 7-2 majority with a young crop of justices.
b) Trump policy 1: “Mass deportation.”
Mass deportation is bad. It is bad in an ethical sense: Kicking out people that have lived here for years is, in my view, fundamentally unjust. It is also economically unsound, as undocumented labor is the crucial, unspoken key to a variety of industries: agriculture, construction, hospitality, and food services.
c) Trump policy 2: Tariffs.
20% tariff on most goods, with a rising tariff on Chinese labor, is a tax on consumers. Producers like tariffs, since they make their industries more cost-competitive. But it’s a really bad idea if you’re concerned about inflation. Inflation is more devastating when its effects are not universal, meaning that if a consumer has to pay higher prices, but supply-side inflation stagnates, income inequality is destined to increase.
d) Trump policy 3: Project 2025
Most people rode this off as an electoral trick by Harris. But as the Harris campaign noted, many people close to Trump were the builders of this plan. This article is kinda shitty, but it’s ok preliminary evidence that it was Trump’s plan the entire time: Steve Bannon, for example, was delighted to cynically inform the American public that P2025 is on the docket. Project 2025 is bad for a tremendous amount of reasons:
(1) Agency authority. I think it’s on the net good. There are perhaps some cases where agencies overstretch their authority, but if you’re a believer in the government working with am moderate degree of efficiency, agencies are pretty good. They have more experts than the idiots that run Congress, and they regulate important aspects of the country, including environmental regulations, taxing systems, social security, etc. The plan suggests gutting the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, and if you agree with my initial premise that agencies are on the net good, then hurting education and environmental standards is bad. Global warming is real, Trump doesn’t care, and the effects will get increasingly pronounced. We are going to miss a critical window to decarbonize without drastic, independent market correction, which seems quite implausible.
(2) Civil rights. I had a conversation with a Trump voter, who said that the primary reason he voted for him was free speech. This is a laughable premise. Project 2025 wants to ban teaching critical race theory — a dogwhistle that covers, for them, basically any discussion on lasting racial inequality in the U.S. Any discussion of LGBTQ issues will also be removed in classroom, denying the necessary teaching opportunity afforded to teachers in an early, formative setting. Phobias are learned behaviors, if a student presumes gay people are “weird” because they have no early experience, that dramatically increases the risk that LGBTQ issues will regress. This will be particularly pronounced for trans people, who will find it even harder to find the resources they need in adolescence.
(3) Overhauling the Federal Workforce. If you disagree with me about agencies, that’s fine. But Trump wants to reclassify federal employees to replace them with partisans. This is bad for intuitive reasons — Trumpism is a personality cult, meaning that traditional “checks” in the government won’t apply. Partisans, especially Trump partisans, are idiots, and you shouldn’t trust them to do pretty much anything that goes against what Trump wants. Look here to learn more about Schedule F.
(4) Abortion Rights. Some might think restricting abortion is good; if that’s the case, then you are increasingly in the minority. Trump might attempt to ban abortion nationwide, or limit access to birth control. I think these are bad, but will probably face some resistance in Congress, and might be too divisive for even the most opportunistic Republicans to touch.
e) Trump policy 4: Lab-grown meat. Animal welfare matters, and if you’re a principled utilitarian, you should view the Republican Party’s gradual regulation of law-grown meat to be (at least on par with) a moral catastrophe. DeSantis did it in Florida, Republicans might try to do it nationally!
f) Trump’s cabinet. RFK bet on Trump to win opportunistically, and is vying a position in health regulation. This is catastrophically bad and stupid, since RFK has written an entire book on anti-vax. Matt Kroenig has yearned to nuke Iran every day since 2011, and he’s hedging for a nice seat at the table. I think striking Iran is bad, and I also think Trump is quite obviously going to massively increase support for Israel, continuing their genocidal rampage in Palestine.
g) Personalism is bad, and Trumpism will continue until it’s defeated. Republicans haven’t won the popular vote in a while, and their party (in actuality) goes against the material interests of Americans. Romney-esque “classical conservatives” are completely on the out. Trump is a populist, who has given Republicans the edge they’ve desperately craved for decades. Until this advantage erodes, there’s no reason to suspect Trumpism will die after Trump. Clearly, Republicans love his family and son, Baron. But even still, this sort of authoritarian, have the entire government be subservient to me, every person who is against me is #FakeNews and bad, will continue. Eventually, this will be catastrophic, even if Trump isn’t himself.
Given these factors, and Trump’s margins in Congress, a second-term, more unhinged Trump that doesn’t care about re-election might go crazy. Some of these are so obviously bad even one of them would be a disaster for vast swaths of the population. So it’s not “just okay,” and saying that Bush “didn’t do everything Democrats prophesized” is not a reasonable response.
My belief is that optimism should arise contingently, in specific contexts. Optimism or pessimism tend to be universalized in a way that belies nuance. I think we should reject the vaguest notions of “keep going guys! We can still do this! Maybe it’s not too bad!” because, in reality, it is quite bad. Still, though, I want to urge against the liberal cope-esque ideas like “maybe he’ll die” or “we’ll just move to Canada.” This allows Trumpism — an ideology that has gained popularity because of particular historical circumstance — to dominate in a way that it never could if we understood the actual details. I don’t think every American who voted for Trump is stupid. They rejected Harris for specific reasons, which we should analyze.
2. Why Did Harris Lose?
Elegant answers are typically the best answers. The truth of the matter is that people felt bad, particularly about two issues: the economy, and immigration. These are essentially material issues, and exist (basically) outside of the culture war. Some people might say either is a cultural issue, which is, of course, true. But people cared little about some idealist notion of “values” in this Election. Their votes were mostly a reflection on what they perceived their self-interest to be.
There is, perhaps, some elegance in the “stupid, racist, misogynistic voter” theory. But I reject this theory on several bases:
a) Young’s Wager. Politics may be “doomed,” but it’s better to try to reach out and sympathize with the millions of voters who voted for Biden in 2020, and didn’t for Harris in 2024. It’s better to attempt to create a better world than to give up, since, probabilistically, it will lead to the best outcomes.
b) Paternalism. The reason so many people reject the Democratic party is its elite vibe. The fact that elections analysts view the white working class as if they were anthropologists. They don’t like being talked down to, and honestly, I understand that. These people might be racist, sexist, etc., but if we — as in, materialists — are right in understanding racist and sexist ideology as contingent, manifesting in particular historical circumstance, then there is nothing solid about these ideologies.
c) Empirics. Other candidates — some non-white, some women, some both — outperformed Harris. So, it might be a disadvantage to have a non-white woman as your candidate, but it doesn’t mean you must necessarily lose an election.
So, what to do? Here’s my list:
a) Democrats should offer a coherent, viable alternative economic vision to tax breaks for billionaires. Unregulated capitalism fucks over the electoral base universally. Democrats need to get a spine and give the electorate a person who they think actually cares about their day-to-day life. Yes to more healthcare, yes to more Social Security, yes to more help for unions.
Some people have mistaken assumed that Harris attempted this. This take is straightforwardly wrong. Harris was playing defense on the economy the entire campaign cycle, and had to defend (what voters thought as) Biden’s failed response to inflation. This put Harris in a very, very difficult position as (basically) an incumbent. Even though the U.S. responded quite well to COVID under Biden’s leadership, that didn’t matter, the economic deck was stacked too high against Biden-Harris. Inflation’s tricky, people still clearly thought it was an issue, and Trump said he’d fix it. Trump’s lack of a (good, clear) economic plan allowed him to run on what was essentially an anti-Harris economic ticket, and voters don’t really care enough about the nuances of tariffs to really care about their effects. Harris did support unions, which didn’t help not because unions are essentially bad for electoral chances, but because unions aren’t powerful enough to represent the entire voting base.
b) Democrats need to contest the disinformation environment. The economy didn’t matter in 2024, the perception of inflation did. All economic indicators were good, and this is what led Lichtman to be wrong. Trump has inadvertently capitalized on the wave of micro-news: TikTok, Twitch, and the like, because voters had the general vibe the economy was bad, pessimism was rampant, and Biden didn’t offer a persuasive response. Everyone got the slice of Trump and anti-Biden they personally wanted. It’s hard to tell voters that they’re wrong without antagonizing them, so there has to be more on-the-ground work in monitoring and offering counter-narratives in the future.
c) Democrats might have to pragmatically change their position on immigration. This is tough to navigate, but it will be interesting to see how a more populist, “America-first” esque Democratic candidate does in the future Election cycles. It’s clearly a losing issue for Democrats, and whoever takes Trump’s throne will know that and leverage it in 2024.
3. Care for Each Other
Of course, I am incredibly in “analyst mode” right now. But I’m a white guy who goes to a privileged university. I am, quite literally, the person least effected by this Election. For a bit, I think it’s important to give everyone some space, hear what they have to say, and fundamentally, care for each other.
We can resist and help each other in several ways. When they demand you not talk about LGBTQ issues, talk about them. When they demand you hate each other, love each other anyways.
This is not a naive liberalism, I am not ruthlessly optimistic. But historical analysis — fuck it, dialectical materialism — allows us to understand capitalism relies on our idea of an “essential difference.” This idea that the voter base is irredeemably fucked, that we can’t do anything about it, is a liberalism that inscribes an essential taxonomy of difference. Racist ideology emerged in the 18th and 19th Century to make white people feel included in the emergence of capitalism. People want to believe in this “America” where there’s no crime, no undocumented immigration, no difference. But that difference is instructed, coercively forced down our throats. This is why I’m not analyzing “demographic” groups, since, for the most part, Harris underperformed everywhere. Sure, we can blame some demographics groups, but that implicitly implies there ought be a difference. I think that’s an invalid assumption.
Not a huge fan of this “If you voted for Trump, fuck you” Instagram story, because yes, they might have voted against your rights; and again, I’m a white guy who’s not really threatened here. But it’s far more radical to hear what they said, understand that we’re all far more similar than dissimilar. The average Trump and Harris supporter has far more in common than the average Trump supporter and Trump. Once that idea is spread, once we attempt to establish a different consciousness in the voter base, I think good things must come out of it. Again: capitalism’s tendrils are contingent. We are compelled to view difference as essential. Ignore that conceptualization.
Seriously, look at these fuckers.
None of these old, decrepit, institutionalized, elite husks care about you. They simply don’t! Trump’s an opportunist, and he relies on lying to you for victory. That’s a simple enough message. Stop the finger-pointing bullshit, it’s not helping anybody. The years to come are a messianic horizon, one that we must seize, or let our worst fears manifest.