Post-Mortem 2024

Posted by Sappho on December 28th, 2024 filed in Election 2024, News and Commentary

One of my high school classmates, after the election, grumbled that people were complaining about election post-mortems, but, if you’ve fallen short, isn’t a post-mortem the normal thing to do? As someone who tends to wince at the sight of “here’s why we lost the election” articles and op-eds, and as someone who also respects my friend, I’ve been thinking about this, in the nearly two months since the election. I divide post-election thinking into three buckets.

The first (which I don’t think my friend had in mind) is the bucket for which I have no use, because I think it’s in fact useless. These are the post-mortems that take one of the following forms:

1. We lost because the candidate ran too far to the left or too far to the right. It’s not that we might not have, in any given election, including this one, lost either because the candidate ran too far to the left or to the right. It’s that, in every election that the Democrats lose, the people making these arguments have their pre-packaged reasons for the loss, that always amount to, “in order to win, Democrats need to be popular, and that means, agree with me.” Matt Yglesias talks a lot about “popularism,” but in practice, arguing “popularism” about any internal party position means skipping the hard work of getting people within your party to agree with you that your position is good, and instead expecting them to cave because you say it’s popular.
2. The candidate was horrible because by rights Trump should have lost in a landslide, and anyone who can’t win in a landslide against Trump must therefore be gravely flawed. Yes, if we’re going by how crappy a President he was, and how crappy a President he promises to be, Trump should have lost in a landslide. But taking as your starting point “Trump is so awful that it has to be the fault of the Democrats if he wins” is a prime example of Murc’s Law where only Democrats have agency – it ignores his strengths as a candidate (however awful he is as a President), ignores the real political background (incumbents losing around the world), and treats Trump voters as children with no agency for their choices. Screw that.
3. Some people, in their results to losing elections, are way too tuned to “fawn” in their fight/flight/freeze/fawn response – if Democrats lose, that means they need to yield in all kinds of core values, but if Republicans lose, the candidate isn’t even obliged, ever, at all, to acknowledge that he lost a free and fair election. Screw that.

The second (which may be what my friend had in mind), is the kind of post-mortem that I think is useful, and should be done by somebody, but I’m not the someone to do it. Look, as campaigns go, I think Kamala Harris ran about as good a campaign as she could, given the starting point she was handed. I think that Tim Walz was a great VP choice, and talks a hell of a lot more like a normal person than either Trump or Vance. But – I also think that people who are likely to run campaigns in the future should do a post-mortem of any failed campaign and look for ways to improve next time, just as I, in IT, would do a post-mortem of a failed deployment. And as long as these post-mortems aren’t skewed toward “fawn” and don’t skip the hard work of persuading others in a diverse coalition that your policies are actually good ones – I’m all in favor of someone doing the post-mortem. I just don’t think I’m the person to do it. I’m a foot soldier in any campaign, evaluating campaign strategy and tactics is far from my best skill, and, though I’ll turn out to vote every election and spend at least some time trying to get others to vote, I’m not spending my time between elections working on how Democrats can do better at messaging come election time. But if you want to spend your time on that – I won’t fault you. It’s a useful thing to do.

The third kind of post-mortem reflection is the kind that draws me – how do we built and maintain an opposition – an opposition that can carry us through the next couple of years until we can hope to prevail again. That’s what I’ve been looking for, and these are the thoughts that have caught my eye:

Jamelle Bouie on how Democrats can become a real opposition party

Dr. Joanne Freeman and Heather Cox Richardson respond to Jamelle Bouie’s op-ed with a YouTube video about Thinking Like An Opposition Party

Marc Elias at Democracy Docket on Building the Opposition

Marc Elias at Democracy Docket on We Are On Our Own (and what to do about that)

Indivisible has a new guide of practical strategies for dealing with Trump 2.0

Take a look at the ACLU’s roadmap for responding to the incoming administration – maybe you want to volunteer?