Winning by Losing, Losing by Winning
Additional thoughts on the 2024 presidential election
After today, Bastiat’s Window will move past the 2024 election for a bit and focus again on healthcare, economics, the Mideast, and popular culture. But here are a few more thoughts on the paradoxes and ironies that got us to last week and where it all might lead. We’ll examine how Joe Biden’s 2020 victory harmed Democrats and benefited Donald Trump. We’ll look for the silver lining that Democrats ought to see in 2024’s results. And we’ll explore the virtues of choosing candidates on ability rather than on symbolism.
2028: TURN THE PAGE?
Today, my best guess for 2028 is J.D. Vance versus Josh Shapiro. Philosophically, I have major disagreements with both, but either would be an able and attractive face for America on the world stage. Their debates would feature two young, articulate, cerebral, amiable, accomplished leaders—far from the cacophonous brawls between Trump and the trio of Clinton/Biden/Harris. In other words, less “Garden of Earthly Delights,” and more “Peaceable Kingdom.” Less “Night on Bald Mountain,” and more “Ave Maria.”
THE DANGERS OF WISHING
Recently, Democrats shook their fists and bellowed to the Heavens about the need to expand the Supreme Court, abolish the filibuster, override state abortion laws via federal legislation, and choose presidents by popular vote. All to save Our Democracy. So far as I can tell, all such talk has ceased—as if there were a great disturbance on the Left, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. It’s never wise to seek powers that you would fear in the hands of your adversaries.
HOW DEMOCRATS LOST BIG IN 2020
Joe Biden’s 2020 victory may have been the worst own-goal in Democratic Party history. If Donald Trump had been re-elected that year, he would now be finishing four years plagued by COVID, lockdowns, race riots, school closings, economic doldrums, and impeachment theater. His revolving-door mayhem of staffers and appointees would likely have accelerated. Democrats would have been spared the Biden-to-Harris-to-Purgatory saga and would today be watching Trump recede in the rear-view mirror.
Instead, Democrats managed to take back the White House just as civil order and Biden’s cognition were both shattering. Even with those twin problems, however, Biden could have set modest goals and retired after one term (as had been expected). With no disastrous debate with Trump, he would be remembered as a Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur, Calvin Coolidge, or Gerald Ford—a brief but calming bridge over troubled waters. Democrats would have been free to conduct an orderly search for his replacement.
But anyone expecting such from Biden ignored or knew nothing of his half-century as a lucky lightweight, laden with vindictiveness and hubris. His enormous power as chair of the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees came from seniority, not from the esteem of fellow Democrats, who never seriously considered him for a leadership position.
Once president, Biden’s elephantine ego persuaded him to be transformational, rather than transitional—another FDR or LBJ, rather than the fortunate and brief-lived beneficiary of Trump Fatigue. He and his minions hoisted scimitars aloft and slashed wildly at the Supreme Court, fiscal discipline, free speech, internal combustion engines, petroleum production, gas stoves, equality of opportunity, border control, parental rights, student loans, and—in ways as numberless as the stars—Donald Trump. Biden saddled Democrats with Kamala Harris as VP and then as would-be successor. After Harris’s ignominious defeat, Democrats are enraged by the fact that as president, Biden behaved like … Biden.
TRUMP WON HUGELY IN 2020
Conversely, Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat was his greatest gift. A large percentage of Americans were weary of the high drama of his tenure, and many more would likely have become so had he served eight straight years. Now, however, Trump re-enters office with voters furious about much of what transpired under Biden and Harris. The prosecutors, politicians, journalists, plutocrats, and entertainers tormenting Trump greatly overreached and have been ignored, overridden, embarrassed, and emasculated. Trump has had four long years to regroup and plot out details for a second term. He acquired powerful and previously unthinkable allies (e.g., Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Sam Altman, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Jr.) plus sizable numbers of supporters among African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, labor unions, and Gen X-ers. The steady barrage of lawfare afforded him martyr status—enhanced by two or three assassination attempts.
Love him or hate him, if Trump serves his full term, he will now be the central protagonist in a twelve-year stretch of American history—one month and a few days shy of FDR’s presidency. Bracketed by Trump, Biden has effectively been reduced to a supporting role in the Trump saga—a feeble opposition leader temporarily huddling in the Oval Office and unceremoniously dropped in the dumpster by his own party. In place of the anodyne Mike Pence, Trump tapped the young, intense, telegenic J.D. Vance—who now holds the inside track for 2028.
Trump and Vance won every single swing state, and lost New Mexico, Virginia, New Jersey, Minnesota, and New Hampshire by under 6%. Add those five states to 2024’s haul and the 2028 Republican electoral vote jumps from 312 to 358. Trump and Vance lost New York, Colorado, Illinois, and Maine by under 12%; add those to the pile and the Republicans win 418 electoral votes. These aren’t predictions—just warnings that Democrats had best rethink their strategies. Podcaster and Obama alum Jon Favreau has said that Biden’s internal polls, in fact, showed Trump winning over 400 electoral votes, had Biden remained in the race.
DEMOCRATS SHOULD SEE THE SILVER LINING
When British voters ousted Winston Churchill in 1945, his wife, Clementine, tried cheering him up by saying his defeat might be “a blessing in disguise,” to which he replied, “At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.” Democrats would do well to recall that anecdote in the wake of Kamala Harris’s loss. My two most recent columns (“The Thrill of Victimy, The Agony of DEIfeat” and “Kamala Harris’s Oakland Problem”) discussed Harris’s foibles as candidate and officeholder. As VP, she experienced repeated missteps and embarrassments in diplomatic ventures. Her shocking inability to field questions or offer coherent messages helped sink her candidacy. Post-defeat, stories are swirling about her campaign’s dysfunction, ruinous spending on staff and celebrities, and failure to achieve anything tangible from the billion dollars spent. She never provided convincing evidence that she had genuinely abandoned the far-left stances that helped sink her abortive 2020 presidential run.
Allow me to speculate. Had Harris become president, these problems would have worsened and received vastly more publicity. Democrats in 2028 would have been saddled by Harris as they were by Biden in 2024, with no easy way out of the dilemma. Democrats could have faced an extinction-level event on the order of 1980 1976, 1972, 1964, or 1932. Now, Democrats can wipe the slate clean, with Biden and Harris gone from the scene and—if the party is smart—with Pelosi, Schumer, the Clintons, and the Obamas similarly relegated to the party’s wax museum. For a model, they might take a look at what Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did with New Labour in 1994—and what Bill Clinton did with the New Democrats around the same time.
By the way, after his own “blessing-in-disguise,” Churchill rose to power again in 1951—though he and his party didn’t win the popular vote that year.
MISERERE NOBIS
The aforementioned “The Thrill of Victimy, The Agony of DEIfeat” recalled Kamala Harris’s decision to skip the Al Smith Dinner, thereby forfeiting an opportunity to reach millions of Catholics. Instead, she sent the hosts a painful video in which she awkwardly interacted with a hyperkinetic has-been comic who unwittingly reinforced the notion that Harris’s most important qualification for the presidency was her gender. This video represents the logical terminus of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion); the Left so thoroughly bought into their obsession with demographic quotas that they applied it to the presidency—perhaps forfeiting the White House in the process. In a conversation with a friend who is high in Catholic circles, I suggested that one ought to refer to Harris’s Al Smith Dinner video as her “Agnus DEI.” Initially, I didn’t include this observation in my essay, for fear of offending Catholics. My friend gave me the thumbs up to use the pun, so I’ll trust him and post it here.
SUBSTANCE FIRST, HISTORY SECOND
A reader commented last week that:
“If Democrats want a woman president then they need to present ‘a woman of substance.’ Trouble is, they don't seem to have any.”
I disagreed, and immediately offered him a specific name. But before identifying her in the next section, let me offer some friendly advice to despondent Democrats: in 2028, try to find an excellent candidate who would be an excellent president. Don’t aim for An Historic First. You did that twice in the past decade, and the trophies you got were not the ones you wanted: (1) First Woman to Lose to Donald Trump, and (2) First Woman of Color to Lose to Donald Trump.
Here’s my suggestion: Try looking for candidates in unconventional places, and you might coincidentally find a woman and/or person of color ideally suited for the task. Talent, not gender, carried Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and Angela Merkel to power. In 2016, Republicans looked in an unconventional place—the business world—for their nominee. Donald Trump’s only antecedent was corporate titan Wendell Willkie—the Republican nominee in 1940. Without Trump in the race, the GOP in 2016 might well have turned to yet another business leader, who just happened to be a woman—Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard. So perhaps some female CEO is waiting in the wings to return Democrats to the White House.
A WOMAN OF SUBSTANCE
But when the esteemed reader suggested that Democrats have no women of substance to offer, I immediately suggested one impressive counterexample—Associate Justice Elena Kagan. In 1916, Republicans persuaded Charles Evans Hughes to leave the Supreme Court to run for president. He came within a hair of sparing America a second Woodrow Wilson term. Today, Elena Kagan is 64 years old, loaded with gravitas, brilliant, personable, accomplished. She would be a star on the international stage.
Kagan was Deputy Director of Bill Clinton's Domestic Policy Council. As Dean of Law at Harvard for six years, she excelled at attracting talent and raising money. She was Solicitor General of the U.S. for a year. She has spent fourteen years on the Supreme Court and is the heaviest hitter on that side of the Court. I have no idea how she'd do at retail politics, but I guarantee she’d do far better than Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris did.
I don’t actually expect Kagan to run for president and only mentioned her as the type of unconventional candidate that Democrats might like to consider. To run, Kagan would have to step down from the Supreme Court, thereby giving soon-to-be-President Trump yet another appointment—not likely to happen.
SCHADENFREUDEAN ANALYSIS
Frannie Block at The Free Press writes of therapeutic sessions to help diplomats-in-training at Georgetown University cope with the 2024 election. As shown above, students have been offered tea, cocoa, self-care, Legos, mindfulness exercises, milk, cookies, coloring books and crayons, snacks, and self-guided meditation. Consider this: if you need psychological counseling and care because your candidate lost the election, it’s a fair bet that you’ve needed psychological counseling for quite some time.
EMILY LITELLA ON PRESIDENTIAL RANKINGS
An earlier Bastiat’s Window essay (“Polls, Pols, and Poli-sci: Extraordinary Scholarly Delusions and the Madness of Experts”) disdainfully described the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, which ranked U.S. presidents in order of “greatness.” A New York Times article bore the following title and subtitle:
“Poll Ranks Biden as 14th-Best President, With Trump Last: President Biden may owe his place in the top third to his predecessor: Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Donald J. Trump from the Oval Office.”
“Never mind.”
I'm not sure how much of a future the Democrats have right now. I mean I hate early predictions and declarations of the death of political parties but what I have been seeing lately is just disturbing. Instead of reflection on obvious deficiencies in their platform the party apparatus has decided it is really the fault of the American voters. I mean I am a guy who hates political correctness and would gloriously fail sensitivity training but stuff like the racism being expressed towards Hispanics who voted Trump is mind boggling. This does not feel normal to me. It might go away and things go back to regular politics but I am not sure it will.
I am 74 years old, a lifelong history student (had state awards in high school) and while not active as a partisan, I have always watched what goes on in politics. One observation I have is this--senators, especially long-serving ones, do not make good presidents. The Senate does not build the skill sets for executive positions. Governors are usually better--with some exceptions, such as Carter.
I grew up in a UAW household, in the '50s and '60s, when the Democrats were the party of the blue-collar worker. I realized long ago that they had abandoned that base. In its place, they have put together a coalition of outgroups--first blacks, then gays, then Hispanics, Muslims, and most recently transgenders. And I have been wondering for a while how long they could hold it together. Years ago, I saw reports that while the black politicians went along, most grassroots blacks did not like the gays appropriating the language of the Civil Rights movement. Depending on their background, many Hispanics are not that thrilled with blacks. Many Hispanics I have known are hard workers and small business owners. And in recent years, some lesbians are not thrilled with what transgenders have been doing to women's sports. And while they have gained a lot of Fortune 500 types and professors, the blue-collar workforce is a much larger body of people. I have a bachelor's degree myself, but I ended up being a remodeling contractor for 40 years. I am not all that surprised at what's going on. But I do not know for sure how this will turn out. And BTW, I have Appalachian roots myself--my mother was born in 1920 near Hazard, Kentucky, about 20 miles or so south of where Vance's grandparents were from.