The Fumble

Attention Conservation Notice: This isn’t an attempt at a holistic explanation of the election so much as it is an attempt to store my current mental state for future reference, and as such, it may be even less coherent than normal. If you want to read an actually coherent holistic explanation from somebody who knows what they’re talking about, the best one I read was: The Deeper Reasons Democrats Lost. Also, this is best read if you imagine me talking in a calm, normal, reasoned sort of voice for the first thousand or so words, and then every thousand after that getting increasingly agitated and loud with a sort of “I don’t care if they kick out out of the restaurant!” borderline hysteria by the end.

It’s been a month or so now since the election, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to articulate the way I feel about how things went down, especially in the wake of a million “this confirms my priors” postmortems. I’m disappointed and irritated, to put it mildly, but it’s also a very specific disappointed and irritated that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And then it hit me: I feel the exact same way about the Harris/Walz campaign as I do about the 1990 San Francisco 49ers.

For those of you that don’t have 30+ year old sports failures memorized, let me recap. As the 1990 season started, the 49ers had won two Superbowls back to back, Joe Montana was at his peak, Jerry Rice could catch anything, their win in the previous Superbowl still holds the record for “most points scored by a team” and “widest margin of victory.” They’re blatantly the best team in the league, and in contention for “best team of all time.” This is the team people mean when they talk about "The 49ers". People start murmuring about “A three-peat”; at the time, no team had ever won three Superbowls in a row, and the Niners looked like they were about to make it look easy.

This was the era where the NFC was totally dominant, so the other “best team in the league” were the New York Giants. As was becoming tradition at the time, the “real” superbowl was going to be the NFC championship game. Coming into that game, the Niners looked unstoppable, they’d already beat the Giants once that year, there was this mounting excitement that this really might happen. Lots of “you’re only saying it’s impossible because no one ever has” vibes.

Wikipedia has a surprisingly compelling summary of the game, but the short version is: game turned into a grueling defensive slugfest, with both teams staggering down the field and mostly kicking field goals. The Niners stayed ahead, but barely. Then, in the fourth quarter, Montana took a hit so hard not only was he out for the rest of the game, but he wouldn’t play again for almost two years. Steve Young did his best, but then with under three minutes to go, the normally infallible Roger Craig fumbled the ball, the Giants recovered, and at the last second kicked a field goal. Game was over, Giants won 15–13. And that was it. Giants went on to win the Superbowl. Whoops.

I’m not saying the Niners “deserved” to win, because that’s not how this works. I’m also not saying that the Giants only won because they got lucky with two unexpected disasters. What I am saying is that I watched that whole season, and I know the Niners could have won that game, but when it really mattered they couldn’t get it done. There is a very specific kind of irritation watching someone who should have been doing well enough that those disasters didn’t matter.

And that’s how I feel, a month out from Harris/Walz blowing the big game, is that bone-deep frustration that this was winnable.

A lot of that is fueled by finding out just exactly how close it was. It was a broad rinsing, but shallow; the last numbers I saw showed that something like 200,000 votes in the right three or four cities would have swung this the other way. Still a loss, but that’s not a mandate, or a landslide. There wasn’t One Cool Trick that would have done the job, but you get the sense that any number of combinations of Little Cool Tricks might have. Heck, this could have gone either way based on how nice the weather was in the midewest that Tuesday.

Like all Presidential elections, this was all vibes, and the vibes went bad. The winning vote was “bleah, who even cares anymore.” Because the specific big difference between this year and 2020 was the group that showed up to vote against Trump in 2020 didn’t show up this time.

I will say this though: I will go to my grave convinced that if they’d let Walz continue to call people weird and leaned even harder into “do you really want more of these assholes?” and “not going back” that Harris would have won. “Weird” was working. Not going back was working. Turn the Page was working.

Instead, I guess that was “too negative”, Walz vanished, and Harris started campaigning with the daughter of an infamous war criminal who came to national attention right when the voters you’re trying to court got old enough to be politically informed. To be clear, I don’t think Liz Cheney cost any votes, but she sure didn’t get us any. That was all wasted effort.

So now we’re in the middle of the Democrat’s most despicable tradition: the post-loss argument about which group to throw out of the boat. This year it’s the Transgender community, who have committed the terrible crime of “continuing to exist.”

Throwing the civil rights of our transgender sisters and brothers under the bus to try and pick up a few votes is, of course, a moral horror. “But!” I hear the worst people alive say, “it’s just a sound strategic move!” No! It’s a stupid strategic move! Because look—there’s already a whole-ass American Political Party whose core platform is “not everyone counts as real people.” The voters whose issue is “I only want people like me to be treated well” are already voting for the other guys! Why would you go see a cover band when the real band is playing next door? So you end up in Electoral Stupid Limbo, where you’re not bigoted enough to get the bigot vote, but have made it clear to a group of voters looking for a candidate that you won’t help them out if you win. So they stay home!

This is what is so enraging about abandoning “weird”, is that “weird” made it clear that this was the platform for everyone else. The Republicans have tied up the weirdo bigoted middle-aged white guy demographic, and I’m convinced a campaign centered on “screw those guys, we’re sick of them treating us like crap” would work, mostly because it was working.

I’m gonna come back to that in a second, but if you’ll indulge me, my entry for the department of “recent surprising events have confirmed my priors,” is that I remain convinced that there are, effectively, no such things as “undecided voters.” What you have is, both “teams” have a core group of voters that always show up, and then each team has another pool of people who will either vote for them or stay home, but won’t switch sides.

And yeah, there are definitely Trump-Biden-Trump voters, but if you dig in a little further they all seem to be voting for “not the chick,” rather than any kind of team preference. These guys aren’t “undecided”, they’re “sexist” and that’s a different problem.

This is one of the places where I think using the sports metaphor is really apt. Trying to “flip” voters is like trying to convince people to root for a different team. “Come on and root for the Cowboys just this once, the 49ers aren’t even going to make the playoffs!” Absolutely not, that’s deranged, I’m gonna root for whoever the Cowboys are playing. The people you want to get are the people who watched every 49er game until Steve Young retired. “Come on back! We’re good this year! Lemme tell you the good news about this neat kid we got to play QB!”

The big difference, I think, that this election really displayed is that the Reps have a larger group of core voters, but the Dems have a larger group of “maybes.” Higher floor vs higher ceiling.

There’s a fundamental tactical asymmetry here, in that the Red Team can focus on depressing Blue Team turnout and have that work, but the opposite doesn’t. After a decade-plus of playing the refs, the Red Team has gotten very, very good at this. The Blue Team has to actually get the “maybes” to turn out to win.

The problem is that the Dems keep trying to pick up the other team’s “maybes.” That’s the endless “pivot to the center” that never works. Why? Why spend all that time courting people that aren’t ever going to vote for you?

I think the “fourth why” really is how old most of the Dem leadership is. Most of the people running the show, either “on camera” or more importantly “behind the scenes” have been doing this since the 70s. A lot of great things game out of the 70s that I like a lot, like Star Wars, or The Sting! But things have changed since then.

One of the big things that changed is that the dems are now the “big tent” diverse party. They haven’t won the “white vote” since before Jimmy Carter. (I’m using “white” here as a shorthand for straight, cisgender people whose ancestors were from select areas of western europe and are probably Protestant, in the vague American way.)

I think the core problem, the “fifth why”, is that those 70s era leaders still think of “white, probably Protestant men” as the “real voters.” “If we can get them, we win!” Nope. Statistically, they vote Red team. Like it or not, and there’s a class of consultant who really do not, the Dems have been the “everyone but white guys” party for half a century.

And look, there is a way to maybe get that mass of vaguely racist, vaguely sexist white men to show up, and that was to run somebody that looks like Joe Biden But when you’re running a young-ish woman of color, there’s no getting that vote. They’re gonna find a whole bunch of reasons why they obviously support women, just not this woman. That’s not great, but it should not be a surprise. That’s just baked-in to the population we have. Once you’ve got a candidate that looks like this, you have to put all the energy on “everyone else.”

Speaking of the “male vote”, there was a lot of chatter around the fact that Millennial white men went for Harris but Gen-Xers went for Trump. And, while that’s accurate, I don’t think that it’s a “generational” thing so much as I think there’s a standing wave somewhere around 35-40. There’s a certain kind of dude who’s finally successful, got a good job, fancy truck they like, has all the wraparound shades he’ll ever need, is well paid, successful, and they can’t figure out why people still don’t like them. Their kids are jerks, their wives aren’t as hot as they thought they deserved. (These are the “I’ll do anything to protect my family” doofuses who refused to wear a mask. “I’ll do anything for love, but I won’t do that” was wear a mask and get vaxxed, it turns out.) There’s that oft repeated line about people getting more conservative the older they get, and this is usually framed as now you make enough money you’re for tax cuts, but no, I think this is about guys who never learned that the trick was to grow their own personality and develop empathy deciding that if they can’t have “social power” they might as well get some “political power.” The number of dudes online who made their whole personality “if Trump wins I’ll get laid” was bizarre. (And so I’m calling my shot now, in another two elections we’re going to get a whole set of thinkpieces about “why have Millenial men gone to the right?” Because they passed through that threshold.)

There’s a deep, deep insecurity there. (I saw someone online say that if we could cure baldness, the male vote would move left 20 points.) This is where the anti-elite thing comes from: a whole bunch of comfortable, insecure men who have convinced themselves that someone, somewhere think they’re better than they are, and they’re gonna vote for someone to take them down a notch. The people who want to be jerks, but think the worst possible thing is for them to be criticized for being a jerk. They tend to really dislike “liberals” because they’re giving “those people” things they “don’t deserve,” but mostly they dislike anyone who makes them feel like maybe being a jerk isn’t the best idea possible. The Red Team’s whole messaging the last several cycles has really centered on this: these people think they are better than you, but they are not! Let’s take ‘em down!

I’m bringing all this up because this was one of the brilliant things about having Tim Walz being the one saying “weird,” and why it was such a mistake for him to vanish after the convention.

There aren’t a lot of “cool dads” in pop culture, not as good role models anyway. So having Walz show up as CoolDad^TM saying, basically, “hey, fellas, there’s a better way to be a man and protect your family,” seemed like a real opportunity. This is the “toxic vs tonic masculinity” we were all talking about back in September.

And that’s what makes this election so maddening, is because what they were doing looked like it was working.

The real teeth-gritting part is that I can almost, almost see the logic in trying to peel off some R votes in an election where the stakes are “this guy wants to be a warlord.” There are probably Republicans to campaign with who are broadly well-liked enough for that to have worked. Clint Eastwood? Arnold Schwarzenegger maybe? But instead, they front and centered the Cheneys, and this is the other problem with having your leadership be that old, because to them the Cheneys are fellow “serious people”, but to everyone in that critical elder Millennial to younger Gen-X demographic, instead the Cheneys are “a big part of the the reason all my high school friends aren’t still alive.”

Again, I don’t know if that actually lost votes, but it also sure as hell didn’t gain any, and it was a huge opportunity cost versus things that could have.

Having someone that looks like Walz pointing at the loser weirdos calling them loser weirdos, while the creeps made fun of his kids? That was working.

But the real problem, the actual catastrophic problem there, is that the Dems didn’t actually have an answer to “well, if Trump did all these crimes, why isn’t he in jail?” Your whole argument about saving democracy evaporates when this is the third election in a row you’ve run on that, and haven’t been doing anything to save it with the resources you already have. To be fair, that wasn’t necessarily Harris’ fault, but it was her problem. If you’re a less-engaged, lower-information voter—which by defintion all those “maybes” are—it’s real easy to hear all “that stuff” about what Trump did, and then conclude it’s bullshit because obviously if it was real he’d be in the slammer. (But if you focus on the fact that he’s weird and gross? All that “danger to democracy”power slides away, and he’s just another asshole.)

Voters like it when the people they voted for actually wield the power they gave them. The dems have a long and inglorious history of just… not doing what they can because reasons. Because that’ll score more moral points with… somebody?

I was mid-draft of this mess when Biden pardoned his kid, and as near as I can tell the reaction from the Dem base was “yeah, man, like that! You shoulda done that one day one and kept going.”

Most normal sane people, the people you want to vote for you, would also absolutely do whatever they could do pull their kids out of a fire. The people you were gonna get blowback from weren’t going to vote for you anyway. It was a perfect microcosm of not using the power available because they thought that might impress… someone? Someone who still didn’t vote for them? Instead, you were asking people to come out and vote for someone who wasn’t even willing to help his own son until it was clear that wasn’t going to hurt him politically, but his party was going to fight for you?

Your sales pitch can’t keep being “the other people might do things! Vote for us so we keep doing nothing!” That’s a bad position.

A whole lot of people showed up in 2020, and the Dems didn’t do anything to make sure those people stuck around, instead they assumed they would and tried to flip others. There’s a sense that summer 2021 was the Democrat’s “Mission Accomplished” moment. “We’re done! Democracy saved! Pandemic over!” And then they let all the social programs expire and all the criminals off the hook. And then a whole bunch more people died?

Of course, when you do wield power, you have to actually show off a little, make some noise, take the credit. There’s a line I read somewhere over the summer that Biden was Progressive President with Centrist Vibes, and that’s stuck with me. And part of that was just not talking about the things they did manage to do.

Which brings me to my last major problem, which is that it’s hard to miss that people believed a lot of obviously untrue stuff this cycle. The Information Environment is absolutely cooked for the Dems these days, after years of Reps playing the refs and a media owned by a shrinking group of very rich Billionaires, who, I think, genuinely wanted Trump to win.

Pretty much every post-mortem on this one I’ve read boils down to “voters believed a lot of really obvious and easily disprovable lies.”

I continue to be slightly baffled by how much certain chunks of the center-to-left hate Biden? But aslo, if you only get your news from the NYT, I guess that makes sense. There’s a basic “tell people what you did and then keep telling them” side that the Dems can’t do, and big chunks of the media will refused to help with.

There’s a story I can’t find a link to again about a group of people who voted for Trump because “he gave us money last time,” and it turns out they thought the COVID stimulus checks were his personal money, not—you know—a program the Dems in congress voted for. This also tracks very closely to some conversations I had in real life over the summer, where it was very clear the people I was talking to were convinced Trump did a whole lot of things that were actually done by the Dems because he, you know, put his damn name on the checks.

There’s also that chart that was going around showing that “knowingly consuming” political news tracked incredibly closely with candidate choice: those that consumed a lot went Harris, those that didn’t consume any went Trump. (The other theme for this piece is that I failed to keep my references organized, so of course I can’t find that chart again.)

But the key word there was “knowingly.” I’m gonna loop back to that “male vote” for a second, because there is so much weird right-wing manosphere garbage in every “male hobby” out there. Video games, gyms, table top gaming, everywhere. So you start going to the gym, and maybe you personally don’t listen to Rogan, but the other guys there do, and this stuff seeps in. I cannot tell you how many middle aged guys I know who consider themselves to be proudly “independent centrists” and then two sentences later they start quoting opinions that would have got you kicked off 4chan a decade ago. It’s insane how good a job the far right has done in building out a media ecosystem that doesn’t look like one. It ought to be the easiest thing in the world to build out a youtube channel talking about Warhammer or Battletech or Star Wars, or TTRPGs from—if not a left perspective—at least from a non-fascist perspective, but instead I keep getting youtubes with the caption “pretty funny!” or “sounds about right!” that are just straight up nazi propoganda over promo photos of Luke Skywalker and Kathleen Kennedy. And then, the real kicker is, if you “don’t consume political news” you don’t have any context and aren’t reading any of the stuff pointing that out. Neat!

The flip side of all that, though, is that we’re clearly in a post-campaign era. I think overall Harris & co. ran a really solid campaign—excepting the part where they lost, obviously—but the other guy just mumbled his way though various slurs and swayed on stage to music made by people that hate him. But nothing got covered like that, and you end up with coverage about made-up versions of the two candidates. This post-truth era where no one believes either candidate will do what they say they will, good or bad. (Which is causing a lot of shocked pikachu memes at the moment.)

So, to summarize: going into this, the Dems had four big problems that I think mattered more than anything else:

1. International, wide-spread repudiation of incumbents.
2. Running a Woman of Color in a racist, sexist country.
3. The overall Information Environment being wired for the other team.
4. Not having an answer for “if Trump did all these crimes, why isn’t he in jail?”

And this is why I’m so frustrated about them abandoning “weird”, because it cut through all of those like a hot knife through butter:

The worldwide anti-incumbent attitude? Weird/Won’t go back neatly harnessed that energy, aikido style, and directed it away, framing this as moving on from what was basically the “Trump-Biden” era, but also the whole 90s era political scene that’s just never gone away, and the guy that Biff from 80s classic Back to the Future was literally based on.

The racist/sexists? “Do you want those weirdoes to be in charge?”

The Information Environment? No one would cover things like policy proposals, but they sure as heck carried “weird.” There’s no way to garble that!

Trump’s crimes? If you talk like he’s a threat to civilization, you have to answer why you don’t act like that. But if you just keep pointing out what a sadsack dipshit loser weirdo he and his cronies are, that drains all his mystique away. Plus the Red Team hated that, and started doing some really, really dumb things because of it.

You gotta focus on the base. Your own base. Not take your base for granted and try and pick up the other guy’s. Parts of this campaign felt like that kid in class who skipped the final project but tried to make it up on extra credit. (Didn’t work for them ether.)

I think the key political element of our times is that everyone, and I mean everyone is absolutely seething with anger. The entire Trump project is based on harnessing that from one subgroup and redirecting it towards everyone else. That health insurance CEO was gunned down while I was wrapping this up, and the utterly wild reaction to the shooting is what I’m talking about. People are done. This was basically the third “table-flip” election in a row, and that can’t be great. “Weird” was a way to harness that, direct it, say “we hear you, and we’re as mad about the same stuff you are.”

Would it have worked if they’d kept going with “they’re weird and we’re mad” ’til the end? I don’t know, but I’d sure like to have found out.

Oh wait, they’re really kicking us out of the restaurant…