Within the Margin

[continuing a series on the election that was. To read “Part 1: Acknowledgement,” click here.]

Democrats are doing the usual Democratic thing: analyzing the defeat and suggesting changes.
That’s healthy, in theory. It’s what normal political parties who assume their viability is more or less tied to the popularity of their specific policies would do. There’s a catch, though: just as predictably, the ideological bent of too much of the Democratic post-mortem discourse has been eyeroll-inducing. The party’s left flank argues that if only Dems embraced more leftist positions, new voters would stampede to the polls in support. It’s probably worth noting that Bernie Sanders¹ and Elizabeth Warren² received fewer votes than Kamala Harris in their respective states – though I’ll acknowledge those states are not demographically representative of “swing” states. Centrist Dems outran Harris in some of the toughest Congressional seats that Democrats held (see ME-2 and WA-3 for two good examples). At the same time, centrists argue that Dems must tack to the center to win back voters who have drifted to the GOP…but they mainly focus on what not to talk about rather than an affirmative set of policy prescriptions. Voters quite clearly signaled in the years leading up to this election that their primary concerns were inflation and immigration, so after-the-fact prescriptions about rejecting “wokeism” or embracing Medicare For All do not ring true – even if I tend to agree that the language Democrats use around certain issues is unhelpful, and agree wholeheartedly that Democrats would be wise to attack (legislatively as well as rhetorically) consensus evils like the outrageous, patient-killing tactics employed by private insurers.

Republicans are doing the usual Republican thing: exalting in victory and over-claiming their mandate. They had Sen. Bill Haggerty of Tennessee on Sean Hannity’s show shortly after the election declaring that “Trump certainly has a mandate that we’ve never seen before.” Countless Republicans have echoed the sentiment. In reality, Trump’s margin of victory ranks quite low in terms of the popular vote, with his vote share coming in under 50% and his lead over Kamala Harris ending up at less than 1.5%. That is the seventh-smallest popular vote margin since the Civil War. It’s wider in the electoral college, which is obviously the ballgame: but a 1.5% shift in the three closest states gives Harris an electoral college win, so we’re still not talking about big margins. Trump won, and no one disputes this. But the idea that it’s a large, historic mandate is confounded by simple math. His mandate in mathematical terms is nowhere near Biden’s, or either of Obama’s; even George W. Bush’s 2004 win came with a considerably larger popular vote share. But many media outlets are currying favor with the incoming administration and Congressional majorities. We’ve seen the settlements with Trump over lawsuits, which feel a bit like bribery. And they’re eager to be seen as ratifying voters’ choices and perhaps to attract Trump voters back to legacy media outlets they’ve long since abandoned. So the tenor of coverage presents an incongruously imperious political position for a party whose presidential candidate won narrowly and is currently polling five points underwater, and whose House majority is the smallest any party has enjoyed since 1931.

People who spend their time dismissing parties and elections as a means of improving the world are suddenly finding out that those things do in fact matter.
One can find folks online – and definitely in my own real-life circles – saying, “wait, Democrats prophesied doom if Trump won – why are they carrying on now like everything is normal? Heavens, why…why aren’t they DOING SOMETHING about it?” Folks, this isn’t hard: they argued the election was critically important *because* of the lack of things you can do when all the guardrails have been stripped away, which already happened: the Supreme Court has rolled over for Trump. His party, which now controls both house of Congress, long ago rolled over for Trump. Yeah, they’ll draw the line at a Matt Gaetz attorney general nomination, but not much else. What do you want Democrats in Washington to do? Chain themselves to desks? Get arrested? Your mileage may vary, but I’m not interested in performance politics right now. As Jonathan Van Last notes, most of the remaining power of resistance is in the hands of bureaucrats – the so-called “Deep State” – to work quietly – unseen – to delay harmful actions. In sum, Democrats said the election had existential stakes precisely because the last eight years have eroded the options to resist.

That being said: sure, I would rather Biden have dispensed with now-obsolete niceties like posing for pictures with the president-elect – especially if by pardoning his recidivist son, he was going to make politics harder for those of us tasked with carrying the torch for this declining, atrophied party in the aftermath of his presidency. I would rather Democrats have repaired any number of long-standing structural problems involving special counsel authority, ethics for federal judges, and background checks for cabinet appointments, to offset some of the erosion in guardrails in the Trump era. I would rather Senate Democrats have use their appointment powers to maximum effect in the lame duck period, but former Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are a limiting factor. And I’d rather responsible non-Democrats like Christopher Wray not resign as head of the FBI and instead make Trump actually fire him, so as to put more cards on the table for more people to see. But none of these individuals are behaving responsibly or effectively. They’re confused and capitulating. Caveat: David French offers another take on Wray’s decision.

Even as I write this, the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are responding in slow-motion – to the extent they’re responding at all – to Elon Musk’s friends potentially taking over payment systems at the Department of Treasury, or the firing of over a dozen prosecutors at the Department of Justice in retaliation for previously investigating Trump. It may be that to truly change the political dynamic, you have wait for Trump, Musk & Co. to do something that breaks through to people. But you still have to provide your own supporters with something to grasp onto to take advantage of those eventual mistakes.

1. my preferred candidate in the 2016 primaries – but it’s complicated and I came to regret that. Whatever her faults, Hillary Clinton deserved better in those primaries, and obviously in that general election. ↩︎
2. my preferred candidate in the 2020 primaries – after which I had to reckon with the reality that I am not particularly representative of the vast majority of the population. ↩︎