It’s hard to imagine a more incompetent group of people than literally everyone involved in the latest election season. Let’s go down the list.
Donald Trump
After losing a closely fought election in 2020, the smart thing to do would have been to concede gracefully and plot a comeback for the next election season. If he had just done that, he would have won resoundingly in 2024. Instead, we see the guy:
- Beg everyone he could find to conjure up extra votes
- Spread discredited conspiracy theories about the election being rigged
- Unleash a mob on the Capitol while the election results are being certified
- Take confidential national-security documents home, and show them to random people to impress them
- Convince his own vice-president that he is a threat to democracy
- Display such poor judgment that half of his own cabinet refused to support him, and 12 different senior administration officials endorsed his opponent
Back in 2016, Trump boasted that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters”. And in 2020, he decided to put that idea to the test. Why put himself at a severe handicap for the next election (not to mention screw over all of America’s democratic institutions)? Who knows.
The Republican Party
Okay, so Trump handled 2020 in the absolute worst way possible. But… the republicans can just nominate someone else, right?
They had no shortage of compelling candidates. Nikki Haley would have been a great moderate pick who would make sharp inroads among women. Ron DeSantis was extremely popular with both the base and with undecided voters, and was very closely aligned with Trump’s ideological beliefs. Given how badly democrats were perceived, the GOP would have won 2024 in a landslide with literally any other nominee.
And yet, they decided to ditch their entire slate of extremely viable alternatives. In favor of the guy who didn’t even show up to the primary debates. The guy who immolated his own credibility. The guy who actively sabotaged his own party’s 2022 election efforts. They handed the democrats a massive window of opportunity, out of fealty to a man demonstrably unfit for command.
The Democrats
Ah, my sweet innocent democrats. Has there ever been a party more noble but incompetent than thou? Championing open borders and amnesty during the 2020 primaries. Ignoring the border crisis for 3 years while in power. Sticking with a President with record low approval ratings and universally perceived as geriatric. It’s almost as though you have no interest in winning elections.
Except that isn’t true either, is it. You spent years telling everyone what a danger Trump is to democracy. But when push came to shove, you did everything you could to help MAGA win their primaries. You realized that Trump gave you your best shot at winning 2024. After all, no one can possibly win the white house with his track record, right? There’s no one else whom Biden could possibly beat, right? And so, you decided to chase the dragon. Even if it meant putting MAGA in the driver’s seat of the republican party.
Except it didn’t work out the way you thought. It turned out that Biden was so old and unpopular that even Trump was capable of beating him. And now you had a crisis on your hands. The clock was running out and Biden was refusing to step aside. You had to fight a civil war during election season, just to put in a more viable candidate. And after much agonizing, you won! Biden decided to step aside! Now we can replace him with someone really popular and win the election!
All you had to do was nominate someone who is popular. Nominate someone with a good track record of winning over centrist battleground voters. You had so many good options. Josh Shapiro won the Pennsylvania governor’s race by 15 points in 2022. 15 points! In an election-deciding battleground state! Gretchen Whitmer won Michigan’s governor election by 11 points in 2022. Again, 11 points in another election-deciding battleground state! And she would have given America her first female President as well!
Either of these two nominees would have mopped the floor with Trump. But for some reason, that wasn’t good enough. There were serious concerns that some key demographics would desert the democratic ticket if Biden was replaced with someone like Shapiro. People like AOC inflamed internal divisions with comments such as “if you think there is a consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave that they will support Vice President Kamala Harris, you would be mistaken.” Democrats were so enamored with a woman-of-color winning the Presidency, that they nominated someone who was inextricably tied to the extremely unpopular Biden administration. Someone with approval ratings almost as bad as Biden’s. Someone who had only ever won an election in deep-blue California and San Francisco, and had zero electoral success in any battleground district.
Don’t get me wrong. I thought Harris would have made a good President, ran a good campaign, and utterly destroyed Trump in the debate. Of all the people in the democratic party, the person I have the least beef with is Harris. The people who annoy me the most are literally everyone else who decided that their number one priority is to nominate a woman of color, regardless of popularity or electability, in a crucial must-win presidential election.
And to top it all off, they didn’t even course-correct for their vice-presidential pick. The Trump team was so afraid of Shapiro being picked as VP, that they actively sought to have someone else get the pick. And the Harris campaign did exactly what they wanted. They picked yet another progressive darling, over someone who would have been more popular with centrist voters in a battleground state.
For four years, democrats have been telling everyone who would listen that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy. It’s hard to know what to make of someone who claims that the following election will make-or-break the country… and then proceeds to prioritize partisan ideology over pragmatism and electoral success.
The Voters
Of course, no discussion about elections is complete without also discussing the voters. It goes without saying that the noble voter in any democracy is beyond reproach. Anything he decides is undoubtedly sacrosanct. Never mind that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter”. Never mind that “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public”. The judgment of the American voters is sacrosanct. And last night, their message was loud and clear. What the American people care about are practical issues like inflation and the economy. Not nebulous abstract ideas like “threats to democracy”.
That said, one wonders how the economy is actually doing. Looking at the stock market, it has grown 53% in the past four years. Looking at the unemployment rate, we are at 4%, one of the lowest points in recent history. Looking at both the GDP and GDP-per-capita, both are at all-time highs, with optimistic growth rates. But yes, voters “feel” that the economy is doing poorly. So clearly that must be true. Who needs facts when we can just go off vibes.
But what about inflation? Yes, let’s consider inflation. For 14 years, ever since 2009, interest rates have been rock bottom. When Biden took office, interest rates were literally at 0.08%. And sure enough, as is taught in any college economics class, these rock-bottom interest rates soon manifested themselves as rising inflation. One that was quickly tamped down within two years, without the recession that everyone had been expecting.
“But eggs cost so much more now than they used to!” Indeed. It turns out that egg prices specifically rose so much more than other food items, because of a bird flu pandemic in 2022 that killed a ton of hens. One wonders what the democrats could have possibly done to prevent this. And yet, this became the sticking point that convinced voters to put a sex offender in the white house.
But at least these are real issues that affect real people! Not abstract ivory tower ideas like “democracy”. Why do we even care about things like democracy. Why not just install a smart dictator for life, and be done with it.
Maybe it is because these “abstract” ideas end up having real-world consequences. If Trump had lost the election and started a civil war while trying to overturn the results, I wonder what impact that would have on the economy. If Trump ignores his advisors and impulsively starts a literal war with China, I wonder what impact that will have on inflation. If a future left-wing President decides to take a page from the Trump playbook and strong-arms congress into overturning the election results, I wonder how that will affect the price of eggs.
“Abstract ideas” like democracy and free-markets and rule-of-law have a greater impact on our day-to-day life than any legislation signed by any President. When voters say what they are voting on the basis of day-to-day issues that directly affect them, one wonders if that is truly wisdom. Or simply short-sightedness. Asteroids always seem very abstract and distant right up until they enter our atmosphere.
There’s been a lot of talk about this election being the end of American democracy. I personally am a bit more optimistic. What we did yesterday is more analogous to pulling the trigger once in a game of russian roulette. There is a chance that this second Trump administration will set in motion a sequence of events that will prove absolutely catastrophic to our way of life. But the more likely outcome is that we will weather the storm of the next few years, spend the next few decades diligently shoring up democratic norms and institutions from the damage wrought in the past decade, and emerge from this mostly unscathed.
It is too late now to cry over spilt milk. The best we can do is learn from our past mistakes… of which there has certainly been no shortage.
Outlook Zen 