Might take this down later…

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It gives me no pleasure to have (exclusively in private) accurately “predicted” the outcome of this election. Nor do I take it as an indicator of any special prescience. Elections — especially national elections — are complex, highly contingent things. Nevertheless, I think my basic heuristic has been confirmed:

1. There are (at bottom) two types of elections, and similarly two types of candidates: turnout and persuasion. The type of election is dynamically determined by the candidates running, general background factors, etc., in ways too complicated to get into here; but a clear narrative emerges relatively early about which sort it is.
2. To be a successful persuasion candidate, a candidate must be remarkably gifted in rhetorically positioning him or herself to draw a margin of victory from voters who might otherwise vote for their opponent.
3. To be a successful turnout candidate, a candidate must possess a deep personal connection to his or her base of support, such that the margin of victory is secured by turning out a greater proportion of their supporters than their opponent.
4. Regardless of his or her persuasive gifts, a persuasion candidate is quite unlikely to win a genuine turnout election — it actually depresses energy among one’s existing supporters, because they won’t feel as important. This is the electoral equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight.
5. Donald Trump, especially at this point in his political career, is a turnout candidate par excellence.
6. The Democrats, to face him, chose… Kamala Harris, a profoundly unpersuasive, remarkably impersonal politician: in other words, neither an effective persuasion candidate nor an effective turnout candidate.
7. A Trump victory was not inevitable against “Generic Democrat,” or even against a relatively extreme Democrat — indeed I continue to suspect that Bernie Sanders could have won against Trump in any of the last three general elections.
8. But with the specific Democrat who is Kamala Harris, whom voters consistently said they “didn’t know enough about” and found impersonal, artificial, and distant — a Democratic win in that scenario was almost always next to impossible.

The fundamentally unserious approach to politics which the Democratic Party has taken for the last eight years has now been given (what should be) its decisive rebuke. In that period Democrats have insisted, wall-to-wall, that Trump was a fascist; that he represented a unique threat to democracy; that their opposition to him was specifically about him and not about their distaste for his constituents’ values (this last was always far and away the hardest to believe and the least persuasively presented). At almost no points have they actually behaved as though they believed any of this.

Consider some counterfactuals. If Democrats really thought that Donald Trump were, say, America’s Mussolini, what differing decisions would they have taken?

• They would have sought grounds to impeach him early in his first term, when their public ability to hold the moral high ground was far stronger and his hold on American voters — as well as his own personal attachment to the presidency — was far weaker, rather than waiting nearly three years to build an exceptionally complicated and laughably unpersuasive case that was rightly shot down in the Senate;
• They would have taken serious account of the economic and political concerns of Trump’s voters, rather than dismissing those voters variously as “a basket of deplorables,” “garbage,” “flyover country,” etc. — the kind of multigenerational condescension that had primed many of these voters to embrace Trump in the first place;
• They would have refused to allow Joe Biden to choose, for nakedly ideological reasons, so inept and untested a vice-presidential candidate as Harris, given that Biden was clearly only ever going to be — and ran in 2020 as — a one-term president restoring normalcy and setting up a succession plan;
• They would have moved quickly to impeach and convict Trump immediately following the débâcle of January 6, 2021, when there was serious urgency and near-universal agreement that he had committed high crimes and misdemeanors — rather than waiting until he was nearly out of office, once there was not time to complete the process before he left office, raising legitimate constitutional questions about whether a no-longer sitting President could be impeached at all;
• They would have taken seriously the Trumpward shift of ethnic minorities, especially among non-white Hispanic and African-American men, that was already on display in the 2020 results and has just cooked their goose in 2024;
• They would not have [checks notes] lavishly funded Trumpier candidates in Republican primaries in 2022, on the theory that such extreme candidates would be easier to defeat in general elections (yes — I still can’t quite believe this actually happened);
• They would have refused to permit Biden to run for a second term when his cognitive decline was already on display and would obviously be mercilessly exploited by Trump (who could almost hardly believe his good fortune);
• They would have taken voters’ concerns about inflation seriously and sought to communicate sympathetically (not to mention listening to the economists who warned in 2021 that inflation was on its way and was being exacerbated by federal policies), rather than dismissing it with the (lamentably accurate but immensely condescending) message that “uneducated voters don’t understand the difference between price level and inflation;”
• And so on and so forth.

Americans — and many men and women around the world — are about to pay, I think, a serious price for the Democrats’ unseriousness. Not that I wish Harris had won the election, exactly. I did not vote for her, could not have done so in good conscience, and do not wish her to be president. I would be deeply disturbed by many of the policies which a Harris administration would enact (just as I expect to be under a second Trump administration). In either case, I would and do fear for the peace of the world. Republicans’ unseriousness as well deserves now, and has deserved for nearly a decade, a profound rebuke which it has not received — or perhaps which, in the complete desiccation of public conservatism and the total remaking of the Party of Lincoln according to the image of Trump, it has received in full. If at any point I thought the Republican Party qua party ought to be saved, I do not think so now and have not thought so for several years. Nevertheless it is the Democrats whom I consider responsible for where we are now, more even in a way than Trump himself, who possesses fearsome political showman instincts but clearly did not expect to win in 2016 and even seemed surprised last night to be winning again in 2024. The Democrats, faced with Candidate, then President, then Candidate Trump again, had and should have taken opportunity after opportunity to demonstrate they really were the party of the people, the party in touch with reality, the party of national unity: the party willing to pitch a big tent and pursue a broadly constructive vision together. Instead they have been persistently reactive, elitist, divisive, ideologically purist, and deconstructive.

Eight years ago, I woke up the morning after the election and wrote a private journal entry expressing my deep sense of shame that so many people like me — white, male, theologically conservative Christian — had voted for Donald Trump to be president of the United States. I do not repudiate that now. I still feel ashamed, for both my “tribe” and the whole nation, that Trump has been and most likely will again hold the highest office: that is a deeply shameful state of affairs. I similarly am deeply dismayed at the ongoing rationalization by (mostly white and male) Christians that Trump is (e.g.) a contemporary King David, or Cyrus, or what have you, though such rationalizations have faded in force and frequency as Trump has shown increasingly less and less interest in maintaining a pretense of sympathy to evangelical Christianity or even pro-life positions. (As far as I can tell, Trump understands that with the fall of Roe his “beautiful Christians” have now received their reward in full, and are thus permanently beholden to him; it mystifies me that so many of my fellow Christians apparently cannot see how nakedly transactional Trump’s commitment to the pro-life cause always was, despite the remarkable degree to which he was willing to deliver on that transaction.) Nevertheless, shame is no longer my dominant sensation. Think of the business axiom: “Your system is perfectly designed to produce the results it is producing.” America’s Democrats are an essential part of that system. They may not like the outputs, but they have spent the last eight years and more oiling the machinery to perfection. Now comes their reckoning: Donald Trump (and J.D. Vance) in the White House, a Republican-controlled Senate, most probably a Republican House as well, and a remarkably youthful six-seat conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Will they learn? Will they bear fruits in keeping with repentance?

Addendum: I am not an anarchist, nor a leftist (neither of which, furthermore, are coextensive). Nevertheless the two reactions which have seemed most effectively to put their finger on the matter at hand are those of the anarchist-ish Justin Smith-Ruiu (though you’ll have to pardon the somewhat self-consciously erudite prose) and of the leftist-ish Tyler Austin Harper. Somewhere in the overlap of these two takes, I think, is the heart of the matter.

Addendum secundo: Jake Meador, as usual, is bang on as well.