Where Kamala’s campaign went wrong

INTELLIGENT and honourable people who enter politics, if such a thing is possible, soon understand that their entire career and everything they stand for can be derailed by a populist. When conditions are ripe for a powerful populist to rise above the earth and the chaos below, it is not so difficult to understand the reasons and why people emotionally resonate with it. The difficult part is finding a strategy against it that works.

Time and again in history, more rational opposition failed against strong populists in the same frustrating way, and time and again the world would have to patiently wait for the populist to burn out, quite often in a calamitous manner.

George Packer: Long road back to needs

George Packer, writing in The Atlantic, summarises the Donald Trump phenomenon very well: “Trump's basic plea is a promise, an oath, to take America away from the elites and invaders who have imposed a whole series of unreasonable cultural and economic changes, and to give the country back to its rightful owners – the true Americans."

This is problematic on so many levels and even extreme and scandalous, but it will certainly not disappear by itself. It is utopian marketing at its finest that can make a direct emotional connection with voters, one that frustratingly remains out of reach of almost anything the Democrats can throw at them.

A surprising but obvious insight from Packer is that reactionary politics is a novelty in America. American politics was based on optimism until recently. The point of reactionary politics is to restore the nation to an imagined golden era. His stunning insight is that people who vote for Trump do not share the Democrats' fear that Trump means the end of democracy. They feel that democracy has already ended and abandoned them and that Trump at least will do something about it.

He points out two outdated ideas in American politics – ideas that have become myths. One is the demographic illusion, that identity will drive political behaviour and that minorities will all become Democrats, and that there will always be a kind of solidarity among so-called oppressed people, or people of colour.

The reality is that half of Latinos and a quarter of black men voted for Trump. Packer goes even further, writing that concepts like “people of colour" are outdated terms that carry no meaning.

The other myth, slightly more complex for us to understand, is the majority myth, that power was kept from Democrats by a Republican popular minority through a series of techniques like voter suppression, gerrymandering, judicial legislation, the filibuster, the composition of the senate and the electoral college, effectively the constitution itself.

Democrats believe America needs reform and must become less Republican and more democratic. This has somewhat absolved Democrats of the responsibility to listen and convince, but Packer believes that despite these structural obstacles, the Republicans have just won the popular vote and the electoral college, and this myth should disappear.

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Underestimating disillusionment

Packer believes Democrats simply did not understand the extent to which the world had become anti-establishment. He says Trump offered disruption, chaos and contempt, while Kamala Harris offered tax benefits to small businesses. Trump speaks for the alienated, Harris for the status quo.

Packer argues that the Democrats have become the party of institutionalists. Something very important changed in 2008. People began to believe that the political and economic game was manipulated to benefit only distant elites; the idea that the middle class was disappearing took hold; and the absence of institutions that would help, including the Democratic Party, was clear. Before 2008, globalisation, immigration and technology were seen as positive forces and the Dems rode on this, but after 2008, these had become curse words.

He believes the broken landscapes were everywhere, but the media could not see them, nor could the Republican establishment. But Trump did. Incumbent pres. Joe Biden and Harris could see them too, but they were too late, they could do too little. Packer believes the Democrats' ability to connect with these bread-and-butter issues will take decades to recover. He says there was a long drift away by the Democratic Party from people's pressing needs towards the eccentric needs of donors and activists.

But, despair not. He believes Trump's position is more fragile than most people realise. He has already started surrounding himself with ideologues, opportunists and fools, and because he is not actually interested in proper governance, they will soon turn against each other, as before.

Packer also believes that with the majority in Congress, Trump will soon overplay his hand on issues like abortion and immigration and quickly alienate parts of his new coalition. He will also introduce economic policies that benefit the party's old rich friends at the expense of its new friends among the poor.

He also expands on the difficult task of the Democrats and the media to regain balance, but for that, you would have to read his article. In the end, he believes Trump can become one of the least popular sitting presidents in history much faster than people think.

Karl Rove: Democrats remain in denial

The seasoned Republican politician and analyst Karl Rove writes in The Wall Street Journal that Harris's campaign managers' claim that they could not have done better with their campaign is problematic.

He criticises her on four points. Firstly, he does not believe that Harris distinguished herself strongly enough from Biden. He refers to the now notorious interview she did with Sunny Hoskins on The View. Hoskins asked her if she would do anything different from what Biden did in the previous four years, and her answer was: “There's nothing that comes to mind right now." This was the moment where she could have sparked her own momentum, and instead, analysts across the country held their breath in amazement. She offered continuity, but that to voters who wanted change.

Her second blunder, according to Rove, was her message: “If Mr. Trump is elected, he walks into the White House office with a list of enemies. I will walk in with a to-do list." Rove says even now no one knows what was on that to-do list, and that was exactly what people needed to know.

He says the values and vision that people wanted to see were overshadowed by the swarm of celebs around her. There was too little that sounded authentic and too many Pop Idols. He wants to know where the three-hour interview was through which people could learn more about her, like Trump's Joe Rogan interview.

The third mistake that Rove believes she made was that discontented voters did not feel they could connect with her. As bad as Barack Obama's remark was when he mocked people about “guns and religion", and as bad as Hillary Clinton's was about the “basket of deplorables", they still connected better with many voters. Harris could not connect with voters on any scale.

His last point of criticism is that until the end, there were voters who were uncertain who to support, but that Harris was not an easy option for them, because they could not discern whether she was a moderate Democrat or a progressive Californian. According to Rove, she failed to convince voters that she rejected the woke culture that dominates the Democratic Party.

Jon Favreau: Where did true empathy go?

In an article in The Atlantic, Jon Favreau joins a growing group of analysts who realise that the vast majority of Americans do not have strong ideological convictions or coherent political identities. He says these are the people whose opinions they – especially the Democrats – do not understand, .

Such voters' political beliefs lie all over the spectrum. They are less partisan (but not necessarily centrist), less ideological (but not necessarily moderate), and less likely to see politics as a black-and-white, life-and-death struggle with heroes and villains (which doesn't mean they don't care).

They are also less likely to have a four-year university degree, which is nowadays the biggest indicator of how people will vote and the major division in the middle of American politics, a division that is growing larger.

Favreau says Democrats can continue with the kind of easy explanations for their failures that have been brought up over the past decade, such as Republicans being woman-haters (Hillary) or simply misinformed, or that Cubans in Florida are responsible for greater Latino support, or that the Dems don't have a Joe Rogan.

Most people in America would rather live under a convicted criminal than under a Democratic government, which should tell you something. He says there is no shortcut back to power.

Democrats have lost their true empathy with people and have forgotten what it means to really get on the ground with people and convince them one by one that the Democratic Party truly cares about their interests.

As an experienced door-to-door campaigner, Favreau says he can assure you that none of the smooth political rhetoric you hear in advertisements, high-level debates on television, or social media algorithms will help you when you stand before real voters with entirely different questions and perspectives than you expected, and who moreover believe that politics and politicians have failed them.

It's nothing unusual to meet, for example, an older lady of Eastern origin at her home, a person indicated by the system as a Democrat, who lives in fear of immigrants “who kill the police", he says. The general Dem instinct is to scold such a person or humiliate them, but these kinds of issues are very common among even Democratic voters.

He refers to Obama as the last Democratic leader who truly understood the empathy you should show voters because he came from a background of ground-level political organisation and because he realised that the great charisma he had on stage and his ability to inspire people was not even half the effort needed to get people to vote for him. He was essentially a community organiser and someone who knew many different communities.

He was also someone who understood that not just people who agree with you will vote for you. Obama understood that even if he knew people would not support him, he made sure they understood that he supported them.

Ronald Brownstein: Not Kamala’s fault

Brownstein, in The Atlantic, spoke with the Biden/Harris campaign managers and got a very clear picture that the election was already lost by Biden and that Harris could do little about it. They speak of political headwinds that were already so strong against Harris before Biden withdrew that it was basically a fait accompli that he would lose even if he had continued, even more so than Harris.

The former Obama campaign manager, David Plouffe, who was also a senior advisor on the Biden/Harris campaign, says Biden had a 42% voter approval rating at the end of his term, which is 10% lower than Trump's at the end of his term (according to the VoteCast survey conducted by AP and NORC), and from that point there was little expectation that Biden could win.

Brownstein speaks of “historically ferocious headwinds".  Every time in the past when a sitting president experienced these at the end of his term, he lost, as happened with Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Trump himself in 2020. Sometimes such a president would not even participate in the election, like Truman and Johnson.

The campaign management acknowledges that Harris made mistakes here and there, especially because she could not distinguish herself strongly enough from Biden's identity and campaign, but the general feeling in the party is that she did an excellent job under the circumstances and that she is the last one who can be held responsible.

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