Autopsy for an Institution

Vice President Kamala Harris

Conventionally, political parties conduct postmortems following every Presidential election. These self-reflections especially matter after a loss. If parties and their voters can accurately identify what led to the outcomes, they can reverse their losses later. When Mitt Romney failed to unseat Barack Obama in 2012, the Republican National Committee determined their message was insufficiently inclusive. How that led to the pugnacious, bigoted Donald Trump, I cannot figure.

In 2024, Democrats lost the Presidency and the Senate. The House of Representatives remains uncalled, but a Democratic upset appears unlikely. After a campaign anchored on promises to hurt POC, queer people, and dissidents, American voters decided they preferred that over a Democrat with a proven, but workmanlike, track record. With a stranglehold on American government, Republicans stand poised to unleash epoch-making pain on ordinary citizens.

Democrats probably won’t begin their postmortem until January, between the Congressional and Presidential inaugurations. However, I believe it’s necessary to commence now, while feelings remain high. Why, with so much at stake, did millions of Democratic voters stay home? Trump gained almost no absolute numbers following 2020; his majority margin apparently consists of Biden voters who sat out the Harris campaign and didn’t vote at all. How did that happen?

(There’s no concrete evidence of voter fraud; the difference apparently consists entirely of voter apathy.)

Edit: in light of new evidence, it appears that Trump did not win an outright majority. Though he came first in the popular vote, continuing counts indicate that he fell short of the 50% threshold.

Though every election has its own character, one recurrent thread remains evident throughout my lifetime: Democrats desperately want to prevent another 1968 Democratic National Convention. Bipartisan anger at Lyndon Johnson’s mishandling of the Vietnam War, coupled with Hubert Humphrey’s general unpopularity, caused streets to erupt in violence. The brutality made the Democrats look slovenly and dangerous, which handed the general election to Richard Nixon.

Former President Jimmy Carter

Beginning arguably with Jimmy Carter, the Democrats began fleeing their legacy with FDR’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Teddy Kennedy primaried Carter from the Left for exactly this reason. Unfortunately, this challenge fractured the Democratic coalition and helped hold the door for Ronald Reagan. In autopsying their 1980 drubbing, Democrats decided their lesson was that they needed to tack harder to the center and abandon the New Deal.

Thus commenced the Democrats’ centrist fixation, beginning with Walter Mondale’s historically milquetoast 1984 campaign. 1988 should’ve been Gary Hart’s year, until he imploded following the notorious Monkey Business photo, kicking the nomination to Michael Dukakis. But Mikey-D proved inept and subjected himself to multiple humiliations, giving us the only time since World War II that the same political party won three consecutive Presidential elections.

Dukakis, a self-identified “liberal,” tanked in 1988, but centrist Bill Clinton won in 1992. To this day, many Democrats insist that this proves voters prefer centrists. Democrats decided they needed, again, to chase the center and abandon the New Deal. I’d contend that Democrats’ 1992 victory reflects less a centrist at the top of the ticket, than the absence of Lee Atwater from inside the Republican National Committee.

Moreover, though Bill Clinton won twice, he never carried a majority. He probably wouldn’t have carried the plurality if Ross Perot, a former leading Nixon donor, hadn’t split the fiscal conservative vote twice. Facing a visibly fatigued George H.W. Bush in 1992 and an unsmiling Bob Dole in 1996, Clinton was less the popular choice of the 1990s than the candidate Americans could live with. Which isn’t saying much.

Failed candidate Michael Dukakis

Al Gore won a razor-thin plurality in 2000, but lost the procedure. But like Clinton, Gore never got the majority. Both Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 appeared starchy and joyless on camera, which shouldn’t matter, but does. Since campaigns today are highly visual endeavors, driven by television and YouTube, candidates need visual dynamism, which Barack Obama, for all his many faults, had.

Obama, another centrist, won two straight majorities, the first Democrat to do so since FDR. But consider his opponents: John McCain and Mitt Romney, who ran two of history’s greatest room-temperature campaigns. Hillary Clinton, another centrist, got more airtime for her frequent verbal gaffes than her policies. Clinton lost to the more entertaining Donald Trump, who only lost reelection after shitting in the metaphorical swimming pool on national TV.

2024 could offer Democrats the opportunity to shed the illusion of the phantom centrist voter, but it probably won’t. The party squandered precious momentum chasing crossover voters who have probably never existed. So here’s my postmortem, not only for the Democrats, but also for the entire United States:

Doing what we’ve done for fifty-six years hasn’t worked. Let’s change course before it’s too late.