Obviously there’s a lot to discuss about the 2024 election results. I’ll offer just the following.
None of this is about the merits of either candidate; it’s about the broad dynamics that shaped the outcome. You don’t have to like those dynamics any more than you like any other aspect of reality. But as the saying goes, denial has no survival value, so it’s best to try to be accurate and unsentimental in our understanding of events.
I think it was a terrible mistake for Harris to fuse her campaign with the Cheneys, other neocons, and various state security apparatchiks. But I also think the prevailing Democratic take on this fusion—some version of “Harris’s campaign is a big tent, the fusion demonstrates even Republican loathing of Trump, etc”—is missing a far more important dynamic that has to do with the dramatically diminished influence of establishment institutions.
Whatever you might think about Trump, he is fundamentally a people-powered candidate. He won two bruising Republican primaries and survived everything the former GOP establishment and the Democratic establishment could throw at him—Russiagate, two impeachments, numerous lawsuits, attempts at ballot removal, a never-ending media blitz, and more. He swings Republican primaries with endorsements, even with tweets. He fills stadiums with enthusiastic audiences. What Trump did in 2016 was functionally a hostile takeover of the GOP, and he has dominated the GOP ever since. We can quibble over these observations, but I think they are broadly accurate.
By contrast, I don’t think Harris can be fairly described as a people-powered candidate. She had to drop out of the 2020 primaries before the first contest—a contest the Democratic establishment engineered to produce a Biden victory (the closest comparison to Trump on the Democratic side was Sanders, who the Democratic establishment twice managed to thwart). That same Democratic establishment and its media allies gaslighted the country for four years about how Biden was “sharp as a tack” and how “age is a superpower” and all that—right up until Biden failed to uphold his end of the bargain and undeniably revealed his condition in the July 2024 presidential debate. At that point, the Democratic establishment swapped him out for Harris.
Again, we can quibble about the foregoing, but my main point is that relatively speaking, Trump’s position derives from bottom-up voter enthusiasm, while relatively speaking, Harris’s position derived from top-down party dictates.
To counter Trump’s relatively people-powered position, Harris relentlessly sought (and received) establishment backing (various Harris supporters also pleaded for a George Bush Jr. endorsement, but Bush endorsed no one). It was less that she needed Republican support; the real need was to bolster her base, which was the establishment (ironically her merger with elements of the Republican establishment seems to have translated into no additional support from Republican voters).
So if there’s a lesson to be learned from this election, it isn’t—or isn’t just—that Democrats don’t benefit from merging with Republicans. It’s more that seeking additional support from an increasingly infirm establishment—political, bureaucratic, media, celebrity, whatever—is a losing proposition.
The foregoing tracks with something I’ve long observed about the humans: they have more trouble changing the frequency than they do the volume. That is, when a tactic isn’t working, humans tend to do it harder rather than changing to a different tactic. To use just one example from the election context, when the media’s eight-year-and-running efforts to brand Trump a fascist proved a failure, did they try a different tactic? Or did they just screech “Fascist!” even louder?
(In fairness, the Harris campaign did briefly experiment with what I guess was a different messaging tactic—“Republicans are weird.” That was such a dud, and so inherently contradictory of the previous messaging, that they immediately reverted to the familiar and comfortable “Fascist!” theme. Please note that this isn’t an argument about whether or not Trump is a fascist. It’s an argument that for eight years, the messaging has proven fruitless, and yet Democrats stayed with it, but louder.)
Worse, when the music you’re playing is unappealing to your audience, playing it louder not only won’t solve the problem—it will irritate the people you’re trying to please. That Harris outspent Trump three-to-one would be an example of playing the music louder when the right move was to change the station.
Combine: (1) the human tendency to blame the volume rather than the frequency, with (2) the human tendency to avoid responsibility, and with (3) the human tendency to focus on power within an institution rather than the power of the institution (The Iron Law of Institutions), and even after 2016 and 2024, it’s difficult to see how the claws of the Clintons, the Obamas, the Pelosis, the Clooneys, the Schumers, and whoever else selected Biden and then swapped him for Harris can be removed from the levers of influence.
One more lesson here: it seems bruising primaries produce strong general election candidates—Obama in 2008; Trump in 2016 and 2024. Managed affairs seem to produce weak candidates: Clinton in 2016; Harris in 2024 (I think Biden won in 2020 largely because of Covid, but unfortunately the panjandrums who installed him think he prevailed because of their wisdom, not despite).
Obviously there’s a ton more to be said on the topic of establishment decline, enough to fill a book:
