The Crack-Up: Last Rites for a Doomed Party

“I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to ‘succeed’–and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills-domestic, professional and personal–then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

+ Two things are certain about the DNC’s reaction to getting crushed by Trump: No lessons will be learned from the pummelling, and the people who predicted the loss will be blamed for it. One usual scapegoat the Democrats habitually blame, the Greens, underperformed in the role of spoiler, so they’ve redirected their fire to Bernie Bros, Arab-Americans, men (Hispanic, Black, and white), and advocates for trans rights.

+ Harris lost the popular vote by five million votes. Jill Stein only garnered 642,000 votes, just 25,000 more than RFK, Jr., who’d long since withdrawn. In no state did Stein get enough votes to cost Harris the state. Good luck blaming the Greens (which says much about the politically emaciated condition of the Greens). Even in Wisconsin (where Harris lost by only 31,000 votes), Stein, who captured only 12,666 votes, didn’t fare well enough to be blamed (or credited) for costing Harris the state. In Pennsylvania, Harris lost by 165,000 votes. Stein collected only 33,591 votes. In Michigan, where Stein had her best showing in a battleground state, winning 44,648 votes (0.8%), Harris lost to Trump by 82,000 votes.

+ In an election where both major party candidates backed genocide in Gaza and more oil drilling and fracking at home, the already withdrawn RFK Jr. got more than twice as many votes as Jill Stein in Oregon, who managed only 0.7 percent in a state that’s been very friendly to 3rd party candidates. Maybe the Greens need to reassess their strategy and their candidates.

+ Typically, the ritual knives are also out for Biden, who some Democrats, including Harris campaign staffers, are eager to offer up as a sacrifice for the loss.  “Biden will hold a lot of blame for it,” a senior Harris campaign official told CNN. “And frankly, he should.” This is shameful asscovering. Harris ran the worst, most uninspired Democratic presidential campaign since Mondale, but Fritz was more likable and actually tried to offer a slate of policies to counter Reaganism. Harris ran against her own base–textbook Clintonian triangulation without Bill’s charisma to pull it off.

+ Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker: “Joe Biden’s stubbornness in refusing to step aside as the Democratic nominee until July is the single biggest reason for Donald Trump’s victory…Biden’s arrogance remains astonishing to behold.”

+ Chuck Todd: “I think John Fetterman could be a North Star for the party. He’s a guy who’s figured out how to win. He’s basically a working-class Democrat who has stayed a Democrat while all of his brethren have basically moved toward Trump. I think Fetterman could play a pretty big role in how the party’s going to get wherever it goes to next. Fetterman sees to get it. Look where he was on Israel, too.” 

+ Fetterman? This has got to be an SNL routine, right?

+ Fetterman gives new definition to “working class.” He grew up in an affluent suburb of York, PA. His father was an insurance company executive who supplemented John’s income by $54K a year when he served as Braddock, PA’s part-time mayor.

+ Joe Scarborough: “Democrats need to be mature and Democrats need to be honest. And they need to say, yes, there is misogyny. But it’s not just misogyny from white men! It’s misogyny from Hispanic men! It’s misogyny from Black men who do not want a woman leading them. There might be race issues with Hispanics. They don’t want a Black woman as president of the United States. The Democratic Party likes to Balkanize people into groups and say, oh, white people don’t like women and Blacks. A lot of Hispanic voters have problems with Black candidates! They don’t like each other.”

+ Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) says Democrats “have to stop pandering to the far left…I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.” I don’t want to discriminate against anyone but them, them, uh, pro-noun people!

+ Rep. Seth Moulton also blamed Democratic support for trans-rights for their losses…“I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” (I wonder if Moulton can contemplate his two little girls getting (god forbid) burned to death in a tent by a US-made bomb?)

+ Democratic strategist Ally Sammarco: “White men without college degrees are going to ruin this country.”

Julie Roginsky: “I’m going to speak some hard truths…We are not the party of common sense, which is the message the voters sent to us…When we address Latino voters…as Latinx, for instance, because that’s the politically correct thing to do, it makes them think we don’t even live on the same planet as they do. When we are too afraid to say that, hey, college kids, if you’re trashing the campus of Columbia University b/c you’re unhappy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning, that is unacceptable. But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we do not know what to say when normal people look at that and say, wait a second. I send my kids to college so they can learn, not so they can burn buildings and trash lawns, right?” (Correct me if I’m wrong, but it was Democratic mayors and liberal university administrators who called SWAT teams onto campuses to beat up students.)

+ With snobbish and disdainful attitudes like these, the Democrats may not win another presidential election this century.

+++

+ Here’s a breakdown of the electorate that restored Trump to office…

White (71%)
Harris: 41%
Trump: 57%

Hispanic/Latino (12%)
Harris: 52%
Trump: 46%

Black (11%)
Harris: 85%
Trump 13%

Asian (3%)
Harris 54%
Trump 39%

American Indian (1%)
Harris 34%
Trump: 64%

Other (2%)
Harris 43% Trump 52%

+ Trump won 64% of the Native American vote, perhaps because of the fact that Neil Gorsuch, of all people, has become the most pro-Native voice on the Supreme Court. Gorsuch wrote the sovereignty decision in the Oklahoma case and was engaged in a two-year-long spat with Kavanaugh on tribal rights, while the Biden-Harris administration approved a vast copper mine on Oak Flat, an Apache sacred site in Arizona.

+ This “white wave” electorate didn’t reject progressive ideas; they rejected the candidate who failed to advocate them for fear of alienating Big Tech execs and Wall Street financiers. Voters in both Alaska and Missouri approve increasing the minimum wage to $15. Voters approved paid sick leave in Alaska, Missouri and Nebraska. Voters in Oregon approved a measure protecting marijuana workers’ right to unionize. Alaska voters banned anti-union captive audience meetings. Arizona voters rejected a measure that lowered the minimum wage for tipped workers. Massachusetts approved the right of rideshare workers to organize for collective bargaining. New Orleans voters approved a Workers Bill of Rights.  Voters in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and New York approved measures granting a state constitutional right to abortion.

+++

+ If you’re looking for one anecdote that explains why Harris lost the election, this one is hard to top: According to a piece by Franklin Foer in the Atlantic, Harris’s early attempts at voicing a populist economic message, timid though it was, attacking corporate greed was quickly muted by one of her top economic advisors, her brother-in-law Tony West, the chief legal officer Tony West, who told her that if she wanted to curry favor with his network of CEO’s she’d have to lay off Big Business. So figures like Shawn Fain were replaced on the campaign trail with the likes of Mark Cuban.

+ In October, Harris appeared more times on the campaign trail with Mark Cuban than UAW president Shawn Fain and was escorted by Liz Cheney more often than anyone else.

+ Favorability with Independent Voters

Bernie Sanders: 41-41 (even)
Elon Musk: 42-43 (-1)
JD Vance 34-42 (-8)
Tim Walz: 32-41 (-9)
Kamala Harris: 39-51 (-12)
Liz Cheney: 24-36 (-12)
Donald Trump: 40-53 (-13)
Joe Biden: 29-62 (-33)

Source: Economist/YouGov.

Trump embraced Musk, and Kamala left Bernie out in the cold. You wonder what analytics the Harris campaign was looking at. Or did they go Old School, i.e., what would Jamie Dimon want?

+ But it wasn’t just Bernie Harris rejected; it was also Tim Walz, whose role in the campaign was limited to emphasizing his career as a (assistant, as Trump acidly noted) high school football coach and duck hunter. As a result, Walz became so unrecognizable that he lost his own county, which Biden won handily in 2020.

+ Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, on what focus groups told her: “Everybody knows what Trump economics is — China; tariffs; tax cuts. Then you go to them and ask, ‘What are Democratic economics?’ and someone will make a joke about welfare, and half the people can’t name anything. It’s nothing like the Republican brand.”

+ Who’s fault is that? They’ve spent the last 35 years trying to extinguish the legacy of the New Deal and Great Society. ObamaCare wasn’t public health “care” but a mandate to have private health insurance.

+ Harris completed the transition of the Democratic Party into the party of the rich…

2020: Trump wins voters over $100K, 54-52
2024: Harris wins voters over $100K, 54-45
2020: Biden wins voters $50K-$100K, 57-42
2024: Trump wins voters $50K-$100K, 49-47
2020: Biden wins voters under $50K, 55-45
2024: Trump wins voters under $50K, 49-48

+ FDR, 1936: “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. Never before in our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they are today. They are unanimous in their hate-and I welcome their hatred!”

+ The entire Harris strategy was based on using Liz Cheney to convince disaffected Republicans to vote for her while not taking any progressive position that might alienate such mythical voters. They convinced no one.

+ How registered Republicans voted:

2020
GOP 94%
Dem 6%

2024
GOP 94%
Dem: 5%

+ Matt Duss, former Sanders advisor: “The first thing Democrats should do is find the consultant whose idea it was to campaign with Liz Cheney in Michigan, and put that person on an iceberg where they can’t do any more harm.”

+ Moreover, it turns out that Harris couldn’t sell the one policy message she tried, no matter how haltingly, to sell: “In 2022, Dems won voters who said abortion should be “legal in most cases” by 22 points, 60-38.  Yesterday, those voters split 49-49.”

+ Abortion rights proved a bi-partisanship issue almost everywhere it was on the ballot and far outdistanced the support for Harris…

Arizona
Abortion: 63.1%
Harris: 49.5%

Colorado
Abortion: 61.4%
Harris: 54.9%

Florida
Abortion: 57.1%
Harris: 42.9%

Maryland
Abortion: 73.9%
Harris: 59.8%

Missouri
Abortion: 53.8%
Harris: 42.2%

Montana
Abortion: 54.5%
Harris: 34.9%

Nebraska
Abortion: 53.2%
Harris: 44.7%

New York
Abortion: 63.1%
Harris: 56.3%

+ The Harris campaign raised a billion dollars and ended $20 million in debt. Many people got rich by dispensing terrible advice.

+ People joke about Trump Steaks, Trump Wine, Trump University, and all the other ludicrous and failed ventures. But the Democrats burned through a billion dollars on a campaign that yielded a worse result than HRC in 2016. In the interim, both Ohio and Florida have gone from 50/50 states to deep red, even to the point of Ohio evicting a popular senator with working-class cred like Sherrod Brown for a lunatic like Bernie Moreno. Yet the same high-priced, loser consultants are already lining up gigs for next spring’s gubernatorial primaries and shopping themselves around to potential Senate and House candidates for 2026.

+ Among the many bone-headed decisions made by her campaign savants, the Harris campaign rejected a plan by the Congressional Black Caucus in September to spend $10 million recruiting black undecided voters. This move proved even more arrogant than Gore shutting down the Caucus’s effort to challenge the Supreme Court’s hijacking of the 2000 election…

+ As a consequence of Biden pulling the plug on the expansion of Medicaid during the pandemic, more than 25 million people lost their government health insurance by September 12, 2024. People living in Michigan (1.1 million), Georgia  (800k) and Pennsylvania (1 million) were among those hit the most brutally. Is it any wonder they may have felt betrayed by Biden and Harris? 

+ Trump got two million fewer votes than he did in 2020 and still won by five million votes. It was a turnout election in which Harris–who performed only a little better than HRC in 16–gave Democratic voters little reason to turnout–other than fear of Trump, who they’d already endured and (mostly) survived.

2016

HRC 65.85 million
Trump 62.9 million

2020

Biden 81.3 million
Trump 74.2 million

2024

Trump  72.7 million
Harris 68 million

+ Jeff Shurke, Blue Collar Empire: “The 2020 election was a miraculous reprieve. Dems had a short window to enact the kinds of sweeping, New Deal-style reforms necessary to reverse the rise of fascism. They obviously failed, or rather fulfilled Biden’s promise to donors that “nothing would fundamentally change.”

+ Non-college voters make up around 60% of the electorate. Here’s how they split in the last five presidential elections…

2008: Obama +7
2012: Obama +4
2016: Trump +7
2020: Trump +2
2024: Trump +14

+ Noah Kulwin: “I don’t think anyone who gloats about the economy has to buy Obamacare insurance.”

+ Harris was a bad candidate who delivered a bad message. As a consequence, she ran significantly behind most Democratic senatorial candidates.

Tester +13
Osborn +13
Klobuchar +11
Gallego +7
Brown +7
Allred +5
Rosen +4
Heinrich +4
Kim +4
Kaine +3
Slotkin +2
Baldwin +2
Casey +2
Mucarsel-Powell: 0

+++

+ In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump amplified his anti-war rhetoric. Why? According to the New York Times, internal polling showed that still undecided voters were “six times as likely as other battleground-state voters to be motivated by their views of Israel’s war in Gaza.” Either the Harris campaign missed this lurking demographic or, more likely, just didn’t care. Of course, Trump’s still going to give Netanyahu the greenlight to burn Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon to the ground and then target Iran.

+ In the primaries, 100,000 Democrats voted “Uncommitted” as a protest against the Biden-Harris administration’s arming of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Two weeks before the election, Bill Clinton was sent to Benton Harbor to berate them for failing to fall in line. Harris lost Michigan by around 80,000 votes. Maybe they should be blaming Bill?

+ Hamid Bendas, IMEU Policy Project: Trump saw this polling and started kissing babies in Dearborn; Harris’ people saw it and sent Ritchie Torres and Bill Clinton to berate voters in Michigan. I will never understand it.”

+ There are more than 200,000 Muslim voters in Michigan and more than 88,000 Lebanese Americans of any faith and they made Harris pay the price for her indifference to their concerns about their relatives and friends in Gaza and Lebanon.

Vote totals in Rashida Tlaib’s Dearborn, Michigan congressional district…+

Rashida Tlaib 62%
Trump: 43%
Harris: 36
GOP James Hooper 30% (Tlaib’s challenger)
Stein: 15

+ Mouin Rabbani: “For the first time in modern American history contempt and disdain for Arabs, and demonization of Palestinians, has proven to be a losing rather than winning electoral strategy.”

+ But it wasn’t just Arab-American voters in Michigan who’d expressed their distaste for the Biden-Harris administration’s obscene support for genocide in Gaza. Earlier this year, a CBS poll found that 48% of Hispanic registered voters said the war on Gaza would be a “major factor” in their vote for President, a higher percentage than Black (39%) or White (34%) registered voters. In addition, 64% of Hispanics polled said the US should stop sending weapons to Israel. Yet, another warning that went unheeded.

+++

+ Jimmy Williams, president of the Painters Union (IUPAT), one of the most progressive unions in the AFL-CIO, on Harris’ defeat: “Working people deserve a party that understands what’s at stake, and that puts their issues front and center when campaigning and governing. A potential Republican trifecta, along with Project 2025, will be catastrophic for unions, including my own. But if the Democrats want to win, they need to get serious about being a party by and for the working class.”

+ UAW President Shawn Fain on the 2024 Presidential Election: “UAW members around the country clocked in today under the same threat they faced yesterday: unchecked corporate greed destroying our lives, our families, and our communities. It’s the threat of companies like Stellantis, Mack Truck, and John Deere shipping jobs overseas to boost shareholder profits. It’s the threat of corporate America telling the working class to sit down and shut up…It’s time for Washington, DC, to put up or shut up, no matter the party, no matter the candidate. Will our government stand with the working class, or keep doing the bidding of the billionaires? That’s the question we face today. And that’s the question we’ll face tomorrow. The answer lies with us. No matter who’s in office.”

+ Bernie Sanders: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo. And they’re right…Will the big-money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”

+ Murtaza Hussain: “Suppressing the Bernie movement in 2016 effectively destroyed the Democratic Party. That was a turning point year GOP also had an insurgency with Trump but they ultimately worked with him to some new kind of synthesis. The Democrats never got past their decrepit ancien regime.”

+ The Democrats have tried to extinguish every insurgent movement within the party, from Eugene McCarthy in 1968 to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow coalition in 1984/88. They didn’t even have the sense to coopt their ideas and organizing methods. They tried to quash those, too.

+++

+ The big question is whether Trump, intentionally or not, has defeated the neoliberal/neocon project in America or simply vanquished some of its most inept political practitioners.  Capitalism seems almost effortlessly to adapt to every new threat, and Trump surrounding himself with a retinue of rapacious billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks is undoubtedly a warning sign that we may be about to enter a darker and more cruel phase of late-stage capitalism.

+ Hey, MAGA really stuck it to the elites this time!

+ The crypto industry pumped more than $130 million into the campaign, often cryptically not even mentioning “crypto” in its ads, which may have taken down Sherrod Brown in Ohio and won enough contested House seats to save the House for the GOP.

+ Shares in private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic soared on the news of Trump’s election and the prospect of the mass roundup and detention of immigrants, anti-genocide protesters and lefty journos….

+ According to the Financial Times, “the incumbents in every single one of the ten major countries that….held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.” Apparently, Mexico, which elected Claudia Scheinbaum decisively to succeed the term-limited AMLO, is not a “major country.” No wonder lessons are never learned.

+ Biden picking Merrick Garland as AG was the most self-defeating cabinet pick since Obama picked Tim Geithner to run Treasury and bail out the same bankers who’d screwed over the people who elected Obama.

+ Musa al-Gharbi, in an interview with Reason on the fatal contradictions of progressive elites…

One of the core cultural contradictions is that we have these two drives that are both sincere. It’s not the case that we are cynical or insincere when we say we want the poor to be lifted up. We want the people who are marginalized and disadvantaged in society to live lives of dignity and things like that. I don’t think people I don’t think people are being cynical or insincere about that. But that’s not our only sincere commitment. We also really want to be elites, which is to say, we think that our opinions and our views and our wishes should carry should carry more weight than the person checking us out at the grocery store. We think we should have a higher standard of living than the person selling us clothes and shoes at Dillard’s. And we want our children to reproduce and have an even higher social position than us. And these drives are in fundamental tension, right? You can’t be an egalitarian social climber.

+ And, let me tell you, children, the prophecy was fulfilled…

+ El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, the Victor Orban of Central America, said he spoke on the phone with Trump after his election, where they had “an interesting conversation about his podcast strategy, the bullet that nearly killed him, the incredible people around him, the sometimes harmful effects of U.S. aid funds, Soros-backed NGOs.”

+ Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said the military is prepared to carry out all “lawful orders” under President Trump. Too bad they didn’t commit themselves to this restriction when Obama ordered them to drone American citizens…

+ The movement to divert public money into private/charter schools suffered three big defeats in a couple of unlikely states.

In Colorado, voters defeated a measure to constitutionalize “school choice.”

In Nebraska, voters repealed a law that diverted public money to private schools.

In Kentucky, voters rejected a measure to allow public money to be sent to private schools.

+ Ann Selzer’s Iowa poll, which gave so many liberals false hope, only missed by 17 points. Call it Far-Outlier polling…

+ Jack White, who is suing Trump in federal court for his unauthorized use of Seven Nation Army, on Trump’s victory: “All those rich pricks riding in their Cybertrucks listening to their Rogan and Bannon and Alex Jones podcasts, are laughing all the way to the bank looking forward to their tax cuts that don’t apply to the middle class.”

+ Where will roadkill rank on RKF, Jr’s Food Pyramid, when he takes over the FDA?

+ One positive outcome from Harris’ defeat: UAW members felt free to renew their campaign to push the union to divest from one million dollars in Israeli bonds.

+ I was up until 3 am Wednesday writing my obituary for the Harris-Walz campaign and then couldn’t get to sleep, so I picked Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americans off the shelf, as a refresher course in what’s coming our way. It’s a morbidly funny novel, even when it cuts perilously close to home.

+ Democrats shouldn’t despair for long. Their party will soon be resurrected into a facsimile of its former state with few noticeable changes. Capitalism needs two faces of roughly equal power in the US to make the entire game seem legit.

Crawling from the wreckage,
Crawling from the wreckage
You’d think by now at least
That half a brain would get the message

The post The Crack-Up: Last Rites for a Doomed Party appeared first on CounterPunch.org.