The Election of 2024: A Predictable Debacle for the Democratic Party?

The 2024 U.S. presidential election is over, and if you are reading this you almost certainly know exactly how it went.

Not only did Trump win, but he became only the second Republican to win the popular vote in a presidential election since 1988 (the only other such case was Bush in 2004 when he was up against John Kerry, 'nuff said), and that by a margin of almost three million votes at last count. It is also the case that in spite of (the fixation of many analysts on the existence of an unprecedented "gender gap" in this election ) those same observers, including the folks at the Guardian (second to none in its stridency about this reading of earlier polling), are now looking at the actual result of the election and scratching their heads in their inability to support that conclusion with the available data, though not for lack of trying --the better, I suppose, to sideline the way in which the matter of "the economy" was decisive with voters who largely experienced the situation as miserable, all as the Democratic Party's "strategists" delivered a "greatest hits" edition of their record of post-World War II failures. Consider the following:

* An unpopular Democratic Party incumbent (an ex-Senator who was the last Democratic President's VP) whose domestic program withered while he escalated U.S. involvement in a major land war on the Eurasian mainland in a process that saw him keep going beyond his formerly declared limits with no clear end in sight, announces late in his first term that he will not run for a second. Leaving his party off-balance, the party bosses, displaying contempt for the preferences of the Democratic Party base--and giving a rising anti-war movement two middle fingers--sideline any input from the party base to put "their" candidate on the ballot, with, among other consequences, their leaving the Republican candidate room in which to pose as a "peace candidate" before a public sick and tired of war.

* A Democratic President elected in a period of backlash against what was seen by its detractors as disgracefully crude, corrupt and even impeachable Republican governance presides over a period of national crisis in his first term including inflationary shock. The rising prices, and his opposition to striking workers, which saw him resort to old anti-union legislation to suppress a major strike action, infuriate a great many working people, enough so as to make them shift their support to his Republican opponent.

* The VP of a Democratic administration which was widely seen as having betrayed working people runs as his party's nominee for President in the next election--with the baggage of their predecessor's unpopularity compounding the candidate's problems of simply being "uninspiring" to the electorate, both as a policymaker, and as an individual in his own right (with their having tried and failed to get the party nomination in a prior presidential primary arguably not a point in his favor).

* The Democratic Party, facing a rising tide of anti-elitist, anti-Establishment sentiment and popular opposition to neoliberalism and neoconservatism that the incumbent Democratic President has not dispelled, insists on running a thoroughly Establishment neoliberal-neoconservative candidate against a Republican (the very same one!) appealing to populist resentments in ways that made many in his own party uncomfortable, and relying on identity politics and the failings of the opponent much more than a positive platform to "sell" the public on them.

Yes, as the above implies this election saw repetitions of the mistakes of 1968, 1980, 2000 and 2016, of Johnson and Humphrey and Carter and Gore and Hillary Clinton in just the one election, while not content with simply repeating their own mistakes they decided to repeat at least one great Republican mistake of the past as well. In 1992 the Democratic Party in a hard-times election went by the principle "It's the Economy, Stupid," as the Republicans tried to make it an election about the "culture war." However, that was exactly what the Democratic Party did this time, its supporters insisting "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" on the way to making clear who really was being stupid here.

No serious analysis of "what went wrong" for the Democratic Party can overlook the plenitude of factors discussed here--and no analysis which does overlook them should be taken seriously. Which tells you just how seriously you can take the drivel that is most of what has been written about the matter to date, and the worse sure to come as the party bosses and their supporters blame anything and everything but themselves for the outcome in a reminder that the "pragmatic," "practical," "conventional wisdom"-abiding person abides by the opposite of what Uncle Ben taught Peter Parker. If hypocritically saying that with power comes responsibility in practice they go by the principle that those who have all of the power have none of the responsibility--and vice-versa--and snarl at anyone who would suggest they ought to do otherwise.