10 'What If's' of the 2024 Election

Plus, predicting the future

Among the many pundits blaming Kamala Harris and the Democrats for losing to Donald Trump, Andrew Sullivan argues that their support for transgender rights and Harris’s failure to join Joe Rogan’s 18-million-subscriber-podcast to mostly young men were among the reasons she was defeated.

Harris didn’t talk about transgender rights, except to say that her record on the issue was no different than Trump’s. But Trump successfully smeared her on the issue. Sullivan suggests that if she had made a simple statement like, “I don’t want girls competing with biological boys in high school or college sports,” she might have won. He cites data indicating that after watching Trump’s anti-trans ads against Harris, a crucial number of voters switched to Trump.

I seriously doubt that an issue directly affecting about one percent of the population would have decided the election. If that’s the case, swing voters are even easier to manipulate than I imagined.

What do you think? Could Harris and the Democrats have done anything to win the 2024 presidential election? Post your ideas in the comments or reply to this email.

I’ve considered the supposed 25 reasons Harris lost as compiled by Blueprint, a public opinion research initiative. It summarized the most important as “inflation, immigration, and the Democratic brand.” Yet that doesn’t entirely compute in Arizona, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where Democratic candidates won races for governor or senator. If Harris won those states, she would have won the election.

But it does raise questions: what if Harris, or whoever became the Democratic nominee, took tougher stands on inflation, immigration, transgender rights, and Israel’s war in Gaza than Biden?

1. Inflation: What if the Biden administration chose not to over-stimulate the economy with massive spending — not just COVID relief checks and temporary child care support, but infrastructure, health care, climate, and student loan forgiveness?

Inflation might have been less, but the country almost certainly would have fallen into recession, with much higher unemployment. And the most progressive wing of the Democratic coalition would have felt betrayed or at least lost enthusiasm for the administration because it didn’t bring about enough change.

UK Guardian: What do the British Conservatives, the New Zealand Labour party, the LDP of Japan and the ANC of South Africa have in common? Defeat. All four led governments that have been pummelled at the polls recently as part of the greatest wave of anti-incumbent voting ever seen. Governments of left and right, radicals and moderates, liberals and nationalists: all are falling.

The reason for Harris’s loss may be as simple as that.

A critical vote at the end of 2021 by two conservative Democrats — Joe Manchin of WV and Kirsten Sinema of AZ — ending the $300 a month childcare subsidies that raised 40 percent of children out of poverty may have been what killed the Democratic administration’s re-election.

A CNN poll in July 2024 may have foretold the election result: a key issue for swing voters was the perception of which candidate could best address inflation.

“39% of Americans worry they can’t pay their bills,” CNN Business reported. “About one in three (35%) of Americans say they’ve had to take on extra work to make ends meet. Many more say they’ve cut spending on entertainment and extras or changed their grocery habits….it’s similar to the numbers seen during the Great Recession (37%).”

“Even higher percentages of Latino (52%) and Black (46%) Americans said they’re worried most or all of the time about making ends meet, according to the poll. More than half (55%) of those making less than $50,000 a year similarly worry about having enough money to meet expenses.”

While unemployment was low and inflation was cooling in the latter half of 2024 according to tracking statistics, several years of inflation hit people who haven’t gotten adequate raises or were paying higher rents. Democrats were misled by statistics indicating that wages for most workers have moved ahead of inflation. Read the whole piece.

In addition, I can’t help wondering “what if” on:

2. Immigration: Some Harris supporters in retrospect are blaming Biden’s border policies for her historic loss. But that is oversimplified. The president had no authority to instantly hire and fund border guards when they were overwhelmed by a migrant surge. That’s the responsibility of the Republican House and Democratic Senate, who could not reach an agreement after Trump told the GOP to kill a bipartisan border bill.

Migrants were filling jobs in the U.S. when there was a huge worker shortage, keeping the American economy humming. American businesses were sure to scream to Congress that their companies were failing because they didn’t have enough workers. They may do so again if Trump engages in sudden, mass deportations.

If Biden shut down the border, that would hurt border economies and perhaps the American economy as a whole.

There is a lot of misinformation about border policy. There is no easy solution, certainly not one that fits neatly into liberal or conservative orthodoxy. But Trump offered simple solutions that resonated. Factcheck.org: Breaking down immigration figures.

3. Israel’s War in Gaza? Harris did support a two-state solution, but many Arab-Americans and students blamed the Biden administration for enabling Israel’s war. Without the war, Harris might have won Michigan, but she likely still would have lost.

4. What if Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race in the spring or summer of 2023?

It might have strengthened Harris to have time to crisscross the country and meet in small groups with voters in all of the primary states, especially in Iowa and the swing states. The last time Democrats held a truly competitive, full primary season was a lifetime ago in politics: 2007-8, when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, among others, competed vigorously.

Biden feared that an uncontrolled, chaotic environment may have resulted in bloodletting among Democratic factions and helped Trump’s re-election. 

Biden’s early withdrawal might have heightened nervousness among Republicans about nominating Trump, a 78-year-old convicted felon. If Biden opened up the Democratic primary to a new generation of leadership in 2023, might that have persuaded more Republican primary voters to abandon Donald Trump?

Some say no, Trump supporters were a cult and nothing could pry them away from their dear leader. Others, including the WSJ editorial board, claimed that Democrats ensured Trump’s nomination by prosecuting him and making him a martyr to Republicans. Except the prosecutions were not enabled by Democrats but by nonpartisan grand juries.

5. Would another Democratic nominee — Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan or Josh Shapiro of PA— have done better? Probably not. Fully engaged as governors, they weren’t ready to run for president. Even if they ran as a team and won their home states, Democrats would probably have lost the five other swing states.

6. What if Harris chose Shapiro as her running mate? It wouldn’t have been enough. She lost all seven swing states.

7. Who might Republicans have nominated instead? Anticipating that the Democrats would nominate a woman, might they have tried to co-opt the Dems by nominating former SC governor Nikki Haley? The WSJ editorial board gave her favorable coverage. Or perhaps the manosphere or misogyny within the GOP was too strong to ever nominate a woman, and GOP primary voters would have chosen a Trump sycophant instead.

8. What if Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in the winter of 2021 followed through on his condemnation of Trump, announced that he was voting for Trump’s second impeachment, conviction, removal from office, and banning him from running for president again?

According to a new book, “The Price of Power,” McConnell despises Trump, calling him “stupid,” “ill-tempered,” “a despicable human being” and a “narcissist.” He delivers a scathing rebuke of the modern Republican Party, saying the “MAGA movement is completely wrong” and that Ronald Reagan “wouldn’t recognize” the party today.

McConnell almost voted for Trump’s conviction and removal from office after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, saying Trump incited the riot.

If he dared to publicly condemn Trump, he probably would have brought enough of his Republican colleagues along for Trump to be removed and shamed forever by history. But he lost his nerve and did not vote to remove Trump.

9. Was a powerful right-wing media responsible for Trump’s win? Possibly. But just as in previous elections when Republicans blamed the media for their losses in 1992, 1996, 2008, 2012, and 2020, it seems like a feeble excuse for Democrats. While media gives people ideas of what to think about, it is not generally like a hypodermic needle injection that forces people to think a certain way.

In 2024, liberal media published reports that right-wing media was losing audiences. The Atlantic reported that Right-Wing Media Are in Trouble: The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing; it’s utterly collapsing. In February 2024, “readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media.” FoxNews.com lost “only” 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with 2020.

NPR: Right-wing Media’s Dark Days. Indictments, Bankruptcy, Fallout from defamation cases.

That said, one wonders how Harris managed to spend a billion dollars and not win? And yet Trump supporter Elon Musk spent a billion dollars for Twitter (X), a repository of mis- and disinformation, as well as $200 million to support Trump, and he not only won, but Musk is $15 billion richer since Trump’s victory.

10. Was Harris doomed because she was Joe Biden’s vice president? Or because she was a woman, and the U.S. “is not ready” to elect a woman president?

Are Democratic feminists now going to refuse to support a woman candidate for president because they assume she can’t win? I don’t think so. That’s “internalized oppression.” But will her gender identity be an advantage or the key factor? Probably not.

In a different political environment, Americans will surely, sooner or later, elect a woman president. A male Democratic vice president would have had just as hard a time, perhaps a harder time, as Harris had.

Since 2016, Democrats have underestimated Trump’s strength at every turn. They believed even after the 2016 election that he had a ceiling of 46 percent support. Shockingly, in 2024 he won a clear majority of the vote, 50.1 percent.

Trump’s victory in 2024 is looking less like an accident and more like a deliberate choice by the citizens of the U.S. He is no longer a temporary spectacle representing an angry, reactionary faction to be swept off the national stage, but potentially a powerful force representing a genuine watershed in American history.

That is, if he has enough self-discipline, and in his late 70s and early 80s, maintains his physical health. And if he can hold together his coalition, and make methodical and strategic rather than rash and impulsive decisions. We will soon begin to find out.

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