Across the Great Divide

First thoughts on the 2024 election.

Before we turn to what’s next, I just want to dwell a bit on what just happened, and how. It’s early on Wednesday as I write this, and the picture is still incomplete, so mark these words as rushed first impressions.

We are in the midst of a global wave of anti-incumbent elections in the wake of COVID and inflation. Out-parties are defeating in-parties everywhere from Japan and Austria to the UK and France because the desire for change is greater than the desire for stability. Here in the US, the change that has been on offer from Donald Trump as the GOP candidate has been seen as so dangerous and destabilizing that of course Democrats have become defenders of the existing order. That was not the right place to be. People wanted change more than continuity. Add in all the racial animus and sexual resentment and religious sanctimony that the GOP runs on, plus a huge injection of mega-donations from America’s oligarchs and Elon Musk’s explicit conversion of a giant social network to partisan ends, and no wonder this election was close despite Trump’s manifest unfitness for the job.

But all that said, I have to double-down on a core theme of this newsletter: The Democratic model for winning elections is fundamentally broken. I spent a fair amount of time in the last month zeroing in on the Harris-Walz campaign in Pennsylvania, which everyone agreed was critical to their chances. What I saw was far too much emphasis on message testing and paid media, field organizing that only revved up a few weeks before the election, too much reliance on celebrity surrogates and outsider volunteers, and too much reliance on selling a candidate vs an overall vision. FutureForward, the superPAC that was the largest recipient of Democratic mega-donations, bet hundreds of millions on a data model that presumed to rank voters from zero to 100 on their degree of “contactability” and then told them precisely what ads and which celebrities would be most effective at moving which voters, and then compounded its hubris with an insistence on spending most of its money on bombarding people with ads in the last weeks of the election—precisely when folks are already most exhausted by the onslaught and just want it to be over.

An old friend of mine who is from Scranton and basically parked himself there these last few months to organize, told me he could sense the Polish vote and union vote slipping away this summer after hometown boy Joe Biden dropped out. The hopeful vision hinted at in the Harris-Walz ads was wonderfully representative, picturing a united America where a male steelworker, a female cop, a Latino sitting on their porch, and an interracial gay family joyfully shared the screen, but those ads felt like an illusion far from the reality of working-class lives, he said. He noted, sadly, that busses full of canvas volunteers “doing election weekend jaunts of cross culture shock to mine political capital wearing Patagonia vests and Apple Watches from porches falling apart because there is no money for the screen fix, maintenance, and paint is not going to drive a political shift.” He added:

“Across the chasm between us, the networks of people we avoid loving too often have also been sending up calls [for help]. They too have been screaming that the American dream is slipping away, communities don’t feel safe, drugs and fentanyl are killing us, and they need homes and eggs. On the other side are families who are economically stressed, struggling to find work, people stuck across the parts of the economy not booming, the pro-labor whites sick of being painted as the enemy, and the men. The last several years, there has been a steady pressure of outing the worst of those traditions and the inequalities it perpetuates. And the fallout of not having a strong enough sustained campaign of appreciation of good parts of hard, damn work and celebration of the value good men bring to society (which sounds crazy) left a vacuum which was filled by Trump messaging. There are bad people working to sow division and confusion. …Yet we vilified too much. We virtue signaled too much. We are guilty of thinking progress in my blue circle/my blue town is progress for all.”  

Another Pennsylvania canvas volunteer from the White Dudes for Harris group noted that after spending several few weekends canvassing in super split/swing counties in PA, “one way I could typically tell how a voter was leaning in 50/50 neighborhoods before even knocking: the nicer homes were with us and the more beat up homes were with him. For someone who grew up being told we were the ones fighting for the little guy, I found that pretty damning.”

How votes shifted between 2020 and 2024, per The New York Times

At the granular level in Philly, as I noted here two weeks ago, a top Harris field staffer said: “To be honest, this cycle has been one of the more poorly run campaign cycles I’ve experienced as an organizer.” Among their complaints: that organizing staff were blocked from contacting local community leaders, including board and committee people; that local volunteers seeking paid canvassing slots were overlooked most of those jobs going to outsiders; that multiple requests for a Latino-oriented field office were ignored and so were many of the Latino-heavy wards of Philadelphia. The same for other immigrant communities, like the Asian, Haitian and African communities. Most shocking for a field nerd: that all the field organizing was based on how many phone calls are made and doors knocked, not people engaged and vote plans documented. A ward was counted as canvassed if just one person in that ward was talked to, my source said.

And as I reported for The Nation, there was something soft about all the numbers being touted by all the groups doing door-knocking and phone-banking in Pennsylvania, whether it was the Harris campaign or independent efforts. A conventional canvasser might mark a voter as a “strong supporter” in MiniVAN after a brief chat at their door. But someone trained in deep canvassing, like my friend Kipchoge Spencer, said he discovered both in Philly and in the nearby suburbs that when he spent more time talking to a voter, someone who started out saying they were “strong” for Harris oftentimes was actually conflicted or not strongly motivated.

We’re just starting to get the first tidbits of post-mortem reporting, but as this piece in Politico today notes, “A Pennsylvania Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to speak freely, said that the Harris campaign predicted higher turnout in key counties such as Chester and Montgomery in the Philadelphia suburbs [than actually materialized]. ‘This is looking like Robby Mook 2.0,’ the person said.” That’s a reference to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, who also trusted his data models too much to listen to warning signs from the “blue wall” swing states that Trump won.

At a larger level, all the volunteer time that went into writing letters and postcards from afar, which is incredibly popular because it is so easy (comfortable) to do, seems almost totally wasted compared to the value of planting and sustaining an organizer permanently in a community. A recent meta-study done by a Democratic think tank found that in presidential general elections, nothing increases turnout much. Of all tactics, relational texting seems to have the strongest effect, which intuitively makes sense because it's based on people reaching out to people they know. But if you tried telling anyone involved in postcarding and letter-writing from the comfort of their kitchen tables that they were largely producing a band-aid for cancer, they’d turn on you angrily.

So here we are. There will be many post-mortems in the coming days, along with intensive discussions and planning for how to deal with a second Trump term. Two places to start: Tonight, Indivisible National is holding a “community meeting” at 8:30pm led by co-founders Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg; RSVP here. And tomorrow night at 8:00pm, a coalition of some 200+ progressive organizations led by the WFP, MoveOn, and Indivisible will have a mass Zoom called “Making Meaning of the Moment.” RSVP here.