By The Nation
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
This week, pundits, journalists, and Internet trolls alike started to sift through the wreckage of the 2024 election to try to figure out what the Democrats did wrong. Did they hug too hard right? Was Kamala Harris’s run too rushed to be coherent? Is our country simply sexist?
For our national affairs correspondent John Nichols, the mistakes of the Harris campaign started with Liz Cheney. The point of appearances with Cheney, Nichols writes, was to lean in on democracy as a unifying rallying point—“to signal to conservatives that they could split with Donald Trump’s Republican Party over their concerns about the former president’s election denialism.” The issue was that “while many Democratic tacticians were enthusiastic about Cheney’s jumping on board as a Harris backer…Republican voters couldn’t have cared less.”
But many of us would like to think Democratic misdeeds are more fundamental than a few press events—or even Harris’s decision not to deviate from the Biden administration’s line on Israel. (Read more on how Gazans are feeling about Trump’s victory here). As Jeet Heer wrote earlier this week, the party’s pursuit of former Republicans and elites only served to further alienate the working class. Some might point out that “Biden had actually done a great deal for the working class,” or that Harris did run on economic populism, Heer argues, but “the reality is that both Biden and Harris were compromised figures”—having, in Biden’s case, given up on economic populism by 2022, and in Harris’s, watered down her message for wealthy donors.
Whatever the reason for Harris’s loss, we are now faced with a second Trump term, which has already proved ominous. From nominating Matt Gaetz for attorney general and RFK Jr. for HHS, to appointing Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to a “non-governmental” government body called DOGE, the president-elect has given us a glimpse of what the next four years might look like. Things are probably not going to get better, but at least we will be here to give you a coherent analysis.
-Alana Pockros
Engagement Editor, The Nation
