Election Dispatch: Death of a Democrat narrative
So yeah. That was somethin', eh?
Hello, Line readers. Your sleep-deprived editors had a quick editorial meeting this afternoon and decided that this will be our plan of attack: we're going to hold all the big, thinky "What It All Means" analysis until the weekend dispatch. By then we'll have had more time to reflect, and frankly, to snooze. (Election nights are long and lonely, but the pizza hit the spot.)
But there are some quick takeaways that we wanted to share with you right away. We hope it helps it all make sense.
First, we are not surprised that Mr. Trump won. We had no real expectation of how this would go. We know people think we're just being cagey when we say that, but it's true. When a person lives and works and breathes in a place, they develop a sense of the "vibe," and that vibe can be a useful corrective to news coverage or polling that is, frankly, just wrong. Your Line editors are regular visitors to the U.S. and have many friends and family there, but we don't spend enough time down south to have a good sense of the vibe. All we had was polls. And the polls were little help; we saw viable paths for both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump to win. So in that sense, Mr. Trump's victory is no surprise to us. We were fully aware of the possibility.
We are surprised how fast the results were clear. And this brings us to our second point: maybe the most important takeaway at this early date that we could impress upon our readers is that Mr. Trump didn't just win. He won decisively. And, on the flip side, the Democrats didn't just lose. They got crushed. Mr. Trump's 2016 win was, we're confident in saying, a bit flukey. It was cobbled together by a tiny number of voters in a tiny number of places. It was a lucky roll of the dice in 2016 for the Republicans — a legitimate election, but a weird one. Mr. Trump then lost the 2018 midterms and lost a tight race in 2020 against Joe Biden. Up until yesterday, Mr. Trump's legacy was therefore a quirky win and two losses.
No longer. Today, Mr. Trump can say that he decisively won a basically free and fair election — we are aware of the reports of hoaxes and Russian tampering and the usual technical problems, but we see no signs, even in aggregate, that these issues in any way threatened the integrity of the vote. A few states have yet to file final returns and remain officially uncalled, but the majority of the map is settled. The Democrats haven’t just lost an election — they lost the narrative of 2016 being a fluke that would fade, if they could just hold on long enough.
No such luck, guys. Mr. Trump won the popular vote, and it wasn’t close. Among the declared states, Mr. Trump won everywhere he won in 2020. He added Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, absolutely shattering the "blue wall." Even some "deep blue" states that went for Vice President Harris did so with dramatically reduced Democratic margins of victory. Harris underperformed Joe Biden among women, men, black voters (barely), Hispanic voters (by a lot!) and Asian voters.
We don't want to get too sidetracked by looking at these numbers — as more votes come in, they are subject to change. But there is one utterly narrative-busting quirk that we absolutely must mention: as of this time, the only racial group that increased its support for the Democrats this presidential cycle was .... whites. We suspect that that is something the Democrats are going to spend some time thinking about. Trump absolutely mopped the floor with them, basically everywhere. Like, gosh. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out this fantastic piece of data visualization put together by the Washington Post. It shows county level data for the entire United States, indicating whether that county moved left or right, and by how much, relative to 2020. (Click the image below to visit the Washington Post’s page — it’s interactive and, frankly, pretty cool.)
Notice anything about that map?!
Our last point on how bad this was for the Democrats: consider the state of the party's leadership. Mr. Biden is set to soon leave public life, and we wish him a long and happy retirement. Vice President Harris has been politically obliterated. "She's dead, Jim," as an old country doctor might note. The remaining senior-most Democrat with recent experience, Nancy Pelosi, is an octogenarian now settling into retirement. Who's left? Is Chuck Schumer now the de facto leader of the Democratic Party? Bernie Sanders? We dare not even mention Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — preliminary numbers indicate that the congresswoman, though victorious, has seen her district take one of the biggest swings from blue toward red. The Democratic Party isn't dead. It still has a ton of elected members, a functional party apparatus and lots and lots of money. They'll be back. But they have huge succession questions to figure out. And we have no idea which way they'll go. We doubt they do, either.
Our third day-after takeaway solidifies a trend we've been trying to put our finger on in elections across the Western world. The most obvious, and the point has been made elsewhere, is that there is a clear anti-incumbency bias afoot. A rise of populism — which has both nefarious strains, and can be a potent force for creative destruction — is indicative that a clear plurality of the electorate in the West feels as if the existing structures of power and order are not working in their interest. This bias can't be strictly grafted to left or right politics; it played out with the election of a Labour government in the U.K., and closer to home, the collapse of the Blaine Higgs' conservative government in New Brunswick.
However, we would suggest that when the incumbent is progressive, the bias is deepened and made more particularly acute by another trend — the collapse of the moral authority of the institutional left.
The institutions that comprise any society are complicated, of course, and we don't mean to imply that every single one in this country is "woke" or reliably left wing. Some conservative outposts notwithstanding, however, we don't think we're blowing any minds when we point out that the bulk of legacy media, academia, think tanks, the courts, and the like tend to lean left for a whole host of demographic and historical reasons.
And we're not making any radical claims to similarly note that these institutions are suffering not only from collapsing economics and popular support, but also a parallel decline in an ephemeral concept we'll call "mindshare." Moral authority — the ability to dictate and enforce cultural norms and expectations of behaviour, thought, and conduct — is another way to put it. Whatever term you want to use, it’s clear to us that it’s not working.
And a collapse of this kind doesn't have to be absolute for it to be significant. A significant reduction in mindshare may be all that it takes to effect significant cultural changes.
The reasons for this, we think, are manifold and will probably be the subject of future academic papers, though we don't put bets on what kinds of academics will be writing them, or for which institutions. In short, we think the "institutional left" over the past decade put a lot of their moral weight behind increasingly niche social issues that were at odds with the fundamental values of the general population, or at least of no particular interest to them. Nobody on the left or the right came out of COVID looking great, for example. Anti-racism and DEI are not winning institutional pillars; a general ambivalence toward quality of life, and the consequences of crime, do not find favour outside nice urban enclaves.
Carbon taxes. "Gender affirming care" for children. Need we go on?
We would also refer back to this controversial column by Line editor Jen Gerson, who a year ago wrote that the increasingly anti-Semitic protests over Israel and Palestine laid bare the underlying hypocrisy of much of what was deemed "woke" politics at its peak in 2020-21. That column, we think, holds up pretty well in hindsight.
All of this has led to a decay of institutional duty and — if you'll forgive our use of this term — a lack of moral clarity that has fatally undermined the broader left's collective capacity to sound the alarm on existential and democratic threats.
And — this is most important for us to note — this collapse has been so profound that they've lost this ability even when there are clear and manifest existential and democratic threats, as there unquestionably are where Donald Trump is concerned.
Mr. Trump is a convicted felon who tried, albeit clumsily and pitifully, to foment an insurrection after he lost the last election. He engaged in a protracted disinformation campaign to lie and deceive the American people about the outcome of the election. He's a corrupt grifter who really isn't fit for any high office. He prefers the company, and craves the approval, of the world’s worst autocrats, and displays open contempt for his nominal democratic allies. His list of personal moral failures and disgusting comments is too long to even contemplate, let alone recap.
Yet the collapse of moral authority was so profound that a plurality of Americans — again, he won the popular vote! — simply decided to stop taking those condemnations seriously, or to prioritize them below other, more pressing and immediate concerns.
When a plurality of the electorate likes you less than Donald Trump, it's time to start asking some hard questions. We don't think that any of the institutional left will take that hint, but there it is.
Our final point is about Canada. Your Line editors have already been asked what we think this means for Canada. We're going to mostly keep our powder dry on that. It's a huge, fantastically complicated question and we want to save that for the weekend dispatch. But there is one point we feel confident we can make now: this is not going to help the federal Liberals, and we hope to the good Lord that they don't make the mistake of thinking it will. Because that would be a disaster for Canada.
The fundamental problem for the Liberals is one we've articulated before. We know that they want to link Pierre Poilievre to Donald Trump, and essentially run against MAGA by proxy in our next election. This makes a kind of basic intuitive sense, as Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular here. But if you think about it for a moment longer, you realize that that is exactly the problem. Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular here because he is, in many ways, a deeply unlikeable and detestable person, with personal and political foibles that boggle the mind (as per our point above). That is, to put it mildly, not Mr. Poilievre. And the more the Liberals try to link the two men in the minds of the voters, the more normal and sane the Canadian Conservative leader will look by comparison. Every time Mr. Trump has some rally where he talks about grabbing someone by the pussy or shooting his rivals, Mr. Poilievre can just scrum the next day and make some comment about housing policy or the emissions cap. Liberal efforts to link Messrs. Trump and Poilievre is, to our reckoning, an enormous gift to Mr. Poilievre.
But there is another problem the Liberals have. This is a government that is already clearly a spent force. It is exhausted and unable to get much done in Parliament. In recent months it has been consumed by internal drama. The NDP has dumped them. The Bloc is now pledged to bring them down. The PM and the PMO both seem adrift. And all of their problems just got much worse. Seriously. As bad as it was to be the Liberals on Monday, it's much worse today. All of their problems just got bigger and more complicated around 1:30 Eastern on Tuesday morning. All of their attention must, once again, shift down to Washington.
Like, we're sorry, guys, but any Liberal who sees advantage in a second Trump presidency is whistling past the graveyard. Though their tone has been cautious so far today, we are extremely worried that unless their poll numbers turn around, they’ll play this card hard anyway, drawing Mr. Trump’s ire not just onto the Liberals, but Canada as a whole.
We’d like to think that the PM and his party wouldn’t put the country at risk for their own gain.
But we don’t think that. Not for a moment.
Okay, guys. Those are our fast takes. We'll have longer, more considered takes to follow. Buckle up.
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End of the Obama era and of the incessant WOKE era hopefully. Time for the manderin class to have a look at themselves in the USA and certainly here and become civil servants again instead of bureaucratic pontificators. Also time for the main stream news media, on all sides, to have a look at themselves and wonder if fair balanced reporting as the fifth estate was once, ought to be what they aspire to instead of bloviators of their own narrow thoughts.
Keep up the great journalism folks
Great article and as noted a trifle early to pontificate on too deeply - give it a bit of time.
However, I wasn't surprised at the outcome either as my news feed, Apple, had breathless article after breathless article claiming 'Trump ahead', 'Harris ahead', often adjacent to each other. Guessing who was right or wrong really was a coin flip. I am, however, grateful that the result was decisive. The worst outcome that I feared was "Harris 274, Trump 266" - that would have been a ghastly scene, no question.
I also think, in common with many, that the progressive side of the aisle needs to think very hard as to why their policies are not finding favour with electorates. Note even in the UK a notionally progressive Labour Party fought an election on 'vibes' and said very little as to what they would actually do in power. Now they're floundering as the financial resources are rather thin and there simply isn't much they can do without arousing the ire of the IMF - a humiliation visited on the UK back in the 1970s (and might be our future unless we get a grip on our spending, I digress). Many of the progressive talking points from the past century and more are in place. Not much to do except administer same competently. Difficult to make pamphlets extolling such virtues and so you get half-baked child care, dental care and pharma care programmes that fool few. Why are they half-baked? No money to complete the job. And, oh yeah, one of the fundamentals of a sovereign state is defence of one's territory. The bill for which is about to double. There will be even less to spend on half-baked social programmes.
The progressive soul searching over coming years is going to be very interesting to watch.
Meantime, buckle up Canada as we have an American government that just doesn't care about our point of view or our little problems. Ouch.