12:27
> For years now, voters have been telling pollsters that they were fed up with the economy, and poll after poll during this campaign registered them saying it was the issue that would most decide their vote, especially among those who were leaning toward Trump.
> they felt their personal financial situation was worse and they thought so at significantly higher rates than they did in 2020; and huge majorities of those who voted for Trump viewed the economy negatively, considered it the election’s most pressing issue, and voted for the person they thought was going to bring “change.”
> they were disturbed by Harris’s inability to offer a change from Biden’s presidency. One eighteen-year-old first-time voter in Milwaukee picked Trump at the top of the ticket despite generally preferring Democrats and voting for them downballot because “I’m mainly worried about economics.”
> what happened last night was not just predictable but entirely typical in the history of US elections: an unpopular incumbent sees his party roundly punished as voters look for change. This is exactly what happened four years ago as well as when Barack Obama won a Democratic trifecta in 2008, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter nearly thirty years before, and when Franklin Delano Roosevelt first took power nearly fifty years before that.
> As CNN’s Harry Enten had said, never in US history had a party won reelection when its president’s approval rating was this low and when this many people felt the country was going in the wrong direction under him — and history was not bucked last night.
> For many loyal Democrats, this will not compute. The Biden economy, party-loyal pundits have said over and over again, is tremendous — low unemployment, strong GDP growth, slowing inflation, a booming stock market — and anyone unhappy about it must simply be brainwashed.
> evictions up past pre-pandemic levels, record-high homelessness, cost-burdened renters at an all-time high, median household income lower than the last pre-pandemic year, inequality returning to pre-pandemic levels, and food insecurity and poverty growing by large double digits since 2021, including a historic spike in child poverty.
> Sometimes that happened due to factors outside Biden’s control and sometimes because of his own decisions, but it always took place with little fight from the president, and it contributed to the ominous rise in hardship under his tenure. That meant not only adding to people’s already onerous monthly expenses — in one case in a self-imposed October surprise that made student loan repayment much more unforgiving for tens of millions of borrowers just before voting.
> It also saw twenty-five million people being thrown off their public health insurance, many of them in some of the battleground states Harris lost last night. Recall that one of Biden’s attack lines against Trump four years ago was that Trump was going to strip twenty million people of their health insurance.
This all happened in the battleground States. Wow. We weren't aware of that.
> There is little career incentive for Democrats and their associated commentators to talk about the fact that, however incidentally it had happened, millions of Americans saw sweeping new economic protections in Trump’s final year and even material improvements in some of their lives, then lost them all under Biden. But if they had, they might have understood part of Trump’s enduring appeal.
> the Democrats compounded their miseries by sidestepping the democratic process yet again and simply picking a nominee who, just as much of the party had originally feared, proved a weak candidate.
> Particularly fatal was Harris’s inability to distance herself from Biden’s unpopular presidency and explain how hers would be different — with, ideally, specifics, something voters continually said they wanted to see from her as they made up their minds.
> Hanging over it all was the festering political sore that was Democratic support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
They could take examples from other places:
> The Dems could have looked at recent election victories in Mexico and France, where left-of-center movements won big and halted what seemed like the almost certain advance of a far-right candidate by delivering on or promising (or both) boosts to people’s purchasing power, most notably through minimum wage increases.
> In practice, Harris ran a campaign that was one part the Democrats’ 2022 midterm approach, one part Hillary Clinton’s losing 2016 strategy of exchanging progressives and working-class voters for suburban Republicans, and one part Starmer’s win in July.
> it was a somewhat absurd plan, since it meant Harris had to try to paint Trump, the challenger, as the incumbent, even though she was the sitting vice president and served in the unpopular incumbent administration that she refused to publicly break from.
> Harris campaigned more with Republican warmonger Liz Cheney than with any other ally and more with billionaire Mark Cuban — who insisted to the public she wasn’t serious about some of her populist economic proposals — than with union leader Shawn Fain. This was all while courting big business and toying with firing Biden’s high-profile anti-monopoly enforcer who they hate.
> Maybe most egregious, Harris seemingly refused to run on the broadly popular $15 minimum wage hike that had been a big part of Biden’s winning 2020 platform.
> This decision likely cost her. Voters in Trump-voting Missouri and Alaska have approved or are on the way to approving ballot measures raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and instituting paid sick leave (another popular measure Harris declined to run on).
> Given a second chance by the friendly Stephen Colbert to answer the question of how her presidency would be different from Biden’s, Harris fumbled for an answer before reminding the TV host that “I’m not Donald Trump.” It may as well have been the campaign’s slogan.
> Harris ran a significantly more conservative campaign than Biden’s victorious 2020 run, one that eschewed that year’s ambitious progressive platform, kept at arm’s length many of its flagship policies, made a show of sidelining the Left, and rested on linking arms with corporate America and trying to win over conservative voters. It was a strategy that already failed once and that progressive voices warned over and over risked doing so again. They were right.
> “This is the leftovers of the 2016 kind of mess” that were never adequately settled due to the chaos of the pandemic, historian Leah Wright Rigueur told CNN in the wake of the result.
> As the Democratic Party picked up the pieces and figured out what it would do moving forward, she said, one important voice would be Bernie Sanders and his frequent calls that “[the party] needs to talk about bread-and-butter issues.”
> A law clerk whom Donald Trump frequently disparaged in social media posts during his civil fraud last year has been elected as a judge in New York City. Allison Greenfield, 38, ran unopposed for one of six seats on Manhattan’s civil court after her candidacy was endorsed by a local Democratic committee, reported the Associated Press. She clinched the seat in Tuesday’s general election.
