Democrats! Stop Blaming Harris!

Since Tuesday’s disaster, I have heard a number of friends complain that Kamala Harris was responsible for her own defeat.  The reasons varied—she did not articulate policy; she did not let voters know what she actually stood for; she did not give interviews; she was ineffective in interviews; she should have chosen Josh Shapiro instead of Tim Walz.  Then there was the racism and misogyny component—the party should have known better than to pick a woman, and a black woman at that.

Although there is certainly some truth in this final point, it only matters if a white man could have won.

And that is a false premise, as are the rest of the gripes.

NO DEMOCRAT COULD HAVE WON.  To assume otherwise is to retreat to the 2016 argument that Trump had somehow deceived voters, conned them into voting for a man, a party, and a program they did not really want.  It would mean that if only Harris had laid out more specifics about her economic agenda and her plan to control the border, Trump voters would have said, “Aha.  That’s what I was waiting for.  Now I can vote Democratic!”

If that hypothesis sounds absurd, it is because it is.  Trump voters were not conned, deceived, or left with a shortage of information.  They had all the information they needed and made the choice they wanted.  In other words, these voters actively chose a candidate that the rest of us saw as possibly the worst person ever to run for president—a liar, a criminal, a not very good businessman, a sex offender, a clown, kind of dumb, and, worst of all, someone who cared nothing for the country, its people, of even a system of government that has survived any number of severe crises in 2 ½ centuries but might well not survive him. 

This, obviously, is an extremely chilling notion, but something I happen to believe is true.

I discussed this idea a lot, first in my post “What If…” again in “They WANT to Go Back,” and yet again in “We Cannot Blame Trump Anymore.”  In the first one, on October 1, I wrote:

 “What if Donald Trump has not conned these voters at all?

What if he has liberated them?”

I went on to say that if this is true, a large percentage of Trump voters were motivated by revenge against the liberal elites that they saw as marginalizing and demeaning them, failing to appreciate their contributions to the well-being of the nation, and sneering at their values, which they saw as reflecting American traditions.

If revenge is indeed what they sought, they sure got it.

Way back when I was an undergrad, I read The Responsible Electorate: Rationality in Presidential Voting, 1936-1960, in which the political scientist V. O. Key, Jr. demonstrated that the popular notion that voters were regularly hoodwinked or misled into voting for a candidate they did not really want could not have been more wrong.  In fact, voters, especially in national and state-wide elections, always knew what they were voting for—and against—and were unerring in selecting the candidate that matched their preference. 

Key was an empiricist, but qualitative as I am, I thought to extend the concept beyond an issue-by-issue analysis to the more general question of the mood each candidate presents to the electorate, and I found that Key’s conclusions held up there as well.

If one takes a qualitative approach, specifics will often not matter.  General statements of broad policy initiatives—“We’re going to deport every last one of them”—are not simply equally effective as the more wonky approach urged on Harris, but actually more so.  That explains why, as the race wound down, the Trump campaign blanketed the media with two ads—one showing immigrants overwhelming the nation and another featuring the most grotesque-looking transgender woman they could find.

That message was clear and could not have been more transparent—or more persuasive.  And it worked.

Blaming Harris is easier than admitting that the country made Donald Trump president once more because he represented exactly what his voters wanted, and that our nation has degenerated to a point that, with a gerrymandered House, a Senate rigged for Republicans, and a Supreme Court dominated by justices who care little for the system of government the Constitution was meant to enable, it might now be irredeemable.

Easier to blame Harris, to be sure. That makes it possible to think that this was just an ordinary election that had a terrible, but aberrant result.

It was not.

Kamala Harris ran a professional, highly competent campaign and, defying many skeptics, became an extremely effective candidate.  Her only problem was that she was enunciating a program of justice and fairness and humanity the majority of the electorate, at least those who control the result, did not want to hear.

Which makes the question, “Where do we go from here?” more poignant and a whole lot scarier.