Let's Talk About It
Hi!
I know this is billed as a free monthly newsletter, and I’m sorry to bother you a second time in one week. But I feel compelled to send out an additional post because…well, frankly, I’m currently in the darkest sustained emotional state that I think I’ve ever been in, and I assume that some of you might be in a similar spot. Tuesday was brutal, and the darkness doesn’t seem like it’s going to lift anytime soon.
But a piece of information and analysis in my boss Zach Silk’s newsletter today helped me to make a little sense of what happened in this election, and I wanted to share it with you. We Americans often think of ourselves and our politics as happening in a vacuum, but that’s simply not true. We very much live in a global community, and our politics tend to follow global trends.
And friends, right now the globe is in the middle of A Big Trend. First, take a look at this graph from the Financial Times. You don’t have to understand all of it for it to make sense; I’ll give you the context you need below:
Okay, so. What this chart is telling us is that the incumbent parties in every single developed country on earth that had an election this year have lost a significant amount of vote share. This has never, ever happened since World War II, which is when they started keeping these kinds of records.
Everywhere on earth, people are anxious because of the pandemic and the high inflation and weird economic conditions that followed the pandemic. And they’re responding by Throwing the Bums Out, regardless of who “the bums” are. They want to punish their leaders because of the massive disruption they’ve experienced in their lives.
What does this mean? First of all, it means that I don’t think there’s anything the Harris campaign could have done to stop this global tsunami from hitting America. There’s no single policy position she could have taken that would turn this around. Americans didn’t reject her because of her messaging, or because too many celebrities endorsed her.
In other words, absolutely do not believe those dumb pundits who are saying that Harris lost because of trans rights, or because she’s a woman of color. Anyone who says the electorate is sending a clear message about “woke identity politics” and pronouns is simply projecting their own bigotry onto reality. Anyone who says this is proof that Americans will never elect a woman for president is wrong. That’s all bullshit. It’s just not true.
No Democrat could have won this election, unless maybe they were from waaaaaay outside the administration and they actively ran against Biden and pretty much every other establishment Democrat the whole time. It was a virtually impossible job.
I realize that might sound fatalistic, but there’s actually some good news hidden in that chart. If you look at where America is—it’s the red dot—you’ll see that it’s at the very top of the vertical line. That means Harris actually outperformed every other incumbent party in the developed world.
But there’s no second-place medal in politics. Winning is everything, right?
That’s not quite true. That chart shows us that the absolute worst-case scenario could have been a bright red electoral map and a downticket disaster for pretty much everyone with a (D) next to their names. That was a realistic scenario that we were facing, if we lost by 10 or 20 points like those other democracies this year. But instead, Democrats kept the House and the Senate pretty close, and Democrats won state offices around the country.
These election results are the difference between an unchecked Trump Administration romping their way to dictatorship and a world in which state attorneys general and lawmakers fight those bastards every single step of the way, slowing them down and tossing monkey wrenches into their machinery.
Most importantly, Harris’s best-in-the-world performance means that all that work you did during the election helped protect us from that worst-case-scenario loss. I don’t ever want you to think that what you did didn’t matter. You made a huge difference this year, and you will continue to make a difference. You fought back a historic tide and you created an opening that we might be able to use to escape the worst of what’s to come.
Please don’t mistake any of this for complacency, or a sign that we should allow the Democratic status quo to stay in place. I’m not sending another goddamned red cent to any of those vultures who send hyperventilating fundraising text messages with siren emojis ever again. That kind of glib elitist politicking is in the past, and it can stay there.
We need to rip up the party organization and start over again. We can’t rely on the exhausted Clinton-Obama coalition to eke out another win; that coalition collapsed in this year’s election. Instead, we need politicians who can find new ways of communicating new ideas to the American people.
The 2026 midterm elections need to be transformational, sending a convincing message that the American people will not stand for any of this phony strongman bullshit. And because of what you did this year, I do believe that there will be a 2026 election. It’s not much hope, but it’s enough for me to wake up in the morning.
So basically, I’m writing to say thank you for making a difference. There’s a lot of work to do somewhere down the line, but not right now. For right now please take care of yourself and your people, and make the time and the space to feel the feelings. You’ve earned the right to put yourself back together again at your own pace. I’m going to be doing the same.
Thanks again,
Paul