Politics: Postmortems on the US Election
Politics: Postmortems on the US Election
What Not To Do Courtesy of Some Folks at The New York Times and MSNBC
There have been countless postmortems on the 2024 US election, and I think it's helpful to listen to the criticism toward the Democratic party that has arisen rather than dismiss it out of hand. That doesn’t mean we embrace everything that comes up, but it’s good to weigh and thoughtfully consider what we can.
Some people are understandably lashing out in anger and in pain wishing ill on everyone who voted for Trump and promising no sympathy or forgiveness when some of them, inevitably, realize their error down the road. Poetic justice is one of my favorite kinds of justice. I am not ashamed to say that I tend to find it extremely satisfying when people get what they were unjustly dishing out. But the older I get, the more I recognize that, honestly, sometimes a little grace and mercy can go a long way. It can benefit everyone, and a person who realizes an error can be more driven by their own conscience to make up for it than someone who sits unmoved in their rightness. I think there are already people regretting or uneasy about their vote for Trump. I hope we welcome them when they need someone to talk to about it and want to make amends. People believed Trumpists lies. They convinced themselves that Democrats were fear mongering, that Trump was a victim of his political enemies and of the judicial system, that the things he said that made them uncomfortable were “just talk” or limited to what they themselves would do if they had presidential power, and that Trump really did not have anything to do with Project 2025. After all, he assured them he did not.
They forgot about the importance of separation between church and state some years ago, maybe a whole generation or more ago. Many would not outright say they want a theocracy, but they might wonder whether it would be better for everyone if church values and state values were the same. And their distrust toward people who they perceive as godless or under demonic influences can surely be understood. As a witch, an atheist, or a polytheist, do we not distrust what they might do under the influence of their churches? While we advocate for the separation of church and state, it’s not hard to see where many of them might not recognize the importance of it, or might not see harms restricting the religious freedoms of others as harmful should some among their number seize the power to blur the line.
So when we come across postmortems that seek to dignify these voters with the possibility of intentions that—while selfish and narrow—may not be wholly motivated by things like hate, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and unchecked greed, we can allow them to become openings to learn something about ourselves, about the Trump voters, about our shared histories, and about legacy and digital media. That has value. And when someone says they “chose the price of eggs” over the human rights of other people, in many cases, what they mean is, they chose basic food staples and low cost meat alternatives that have themselves become out of budget in recent years in order to better feed their families. It reminds me of the time when many people voted for Brexit in the UK in order to “save the NHS.” Some were, but many were not thinking about the impacts their vote would have on immigrants and a host of other things. They were using poor and misleading information and basing their vote on concerns over the future of their healthcare and the healthcare of their neighbours and of their children.
It’s important to humanize as many Trump voters as we can—and maybe its too early for you; just keep it in mind as something on the back burner—because dehumanizing them will not win any of them over, and when they realize their error, and some will, we do want them on our side, not that “our side” will look the same in four years as it does today. And we want their children to grow up into adults who are “on our side” as well. That does mean winning them in time, not demonizing and alienating them.
Having said that, let’s talk about Maureen Dowd, the New York Times, MSNBC, and the example they set of what not to do during this postmortem.
Maureen Dowd1, US American columnist, had an opinion piece published in The New York Times on Saturday, the weekend immediately after the 2024 US election: “Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics.2” She opens with this line about woke being broke: “Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke,” and she builds a case claiming identity politics is the reason voters who would otherwise vote Democrat chose to vote Republican instead. People have been grieving while reading the postmortems on the election and grasping for explanations that make sense to them, and unfortunately, this is resonating with a lot of folks. Dowd’s opinion piece was damaging enough on it’s own, but it was then amplified by MSNBC where it was read out in full and discussed on Morning Joe3.
After reading Dowd’s article out, Harris was criticized on the program for her “defund the police” stance, an intention to dismantle the police that she does not have4, but one that Trump regularly implied was a policy Harris was campaigning on in his speeches and in his campaign ads. Similarly on the Morning Joe show, stances about transgender people5 and campus protests for Palestine were distorted and reduced to Trump’s anti-Harris ads6 and to Republican perceptions of Democrats, not Harris’s position on the topics covered, not Democrats’ position on the topics, and not anything like a remotely balanced reflection of either transgender people or anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses7. And in one truly stunning moment, Scarborough even mentions the anti-war campus protests in the ‘60s8 [during the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War era] implying that those, too, were misguided and similarly amounted to little more than election losses and the mindless juvenile trashing of college campuses, as unpopular with voters then as it is with voters now. He weirdly bulldozes right through history and any sense of nuance in this scold.
So why have I been so fired up and aware of the Dowd article and the Morning Joe follow up tea such that I am up this morning writing about it on Substack?
I gather news from various sources, most of them online. And because of my living situation—I live with my mother, a retired senior—I also typically watch clips from the major news networks. Like many people of her generation, that is by far her preferred method for getting the news. At least, it was before the election. She’s deep in the denial stage of post-election grieving and avoiding all news as a coping strategy at the moment. Her current plan is to check major headlines for the next four years just to see if we’re involved in a nuclear war, but to otherwise avoid, avoid, avoid. So I was almost shielded from the Dowd NYT opinion and the Morning Joe episode, because neither of those news outlets have been at the top of my reading list this week. But the online subsequent flood of anti-trans, anti-pronoun, anti-woke, anti-identity politics in left spaces on Monday had me looking for the sources.
Alas, and here we are.
Part of me empathizes with the release of built up frustrations over leftists feeling like they can’t disagree out loud with other leftists out of fear of aggressive pushback or being canceled. Mostly, I wish people were better toward one another across the board. By now, and this wasn’t something I thought 10 years ago, I think most people—and I genuinely mean most people of every race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and age group—have either directly experienced being on the wrong side of someone else’s (someone who should be an ally) projections, narrow-mindedness, misunderstanding, or disagreement where bad assumptions are made by one or multiple parties and things get out of hand. And those that haven’t experienced this themselves have witnessed the experiences of others in that position. Even simple social interactions can be a challenging space to navigate, so it makes sense that discussions around political issues that directly influence people’s lives and well-being can get intense.
But none of that explains why Harris lost the election. None of that is what being “woke,” a shorthand for identity politics, a shorthand for the advocacy of equal human rights and equal human dignity while recognizing the implications of a legacy of historical difference and inequality, is about. And which group of leftists can out finger-point and blame the others is not what people left of center are here for. While we celebrate our differences, division along identity lines is not what defines Democrats. But it sure does offer low-hanging fruit for people looking for an outlet for their post-election angst and fear. And unfortunately—it leads to the scapegoating of people who are not the cause of the election loss.
Trans people existing did not cause the election loss. Disagreement among Democrats over guidelines for transgender people participating in sports did not cause the election loss. Are there democrats, independents, and other people on the left who self-censor, who experience self-doubt over what is and what isn’t appropriate to say in our changing world who are now weary with their own fear of mis-speaking? Yes—we can acknowledge that this is an experience people have without demonizing them for having it. But we do not need to make out as though they are oppressed and justified in their votes for Trump just because change is hard and uncomfortable for them. Nor do we need to imagine voters who were persuaded to vote for Trump did so based on their exhaustion with needing to be politically correct on transgender issues as opposed to unfounded fears based on Trump talking points, lies, and half-truths. Trump was telling people that with Harris and the Democrats, their kids would go to school one gender, have surgery without their parent’s knowledge and come home another gender.
“‘Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?’ Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state.”
— Matt Lavietes, NBC News
This fed into pre-existing fears, and people were believing these lies. But that is not at all how gender affirming surgeries work.
Before the election, I attended a class in a Catholic church in my neighbourhood where it was openly asserted that a family was, and could only be, a man, a woman, and their children. This discussion pointedly and explicitly excluded all LGBTQ+ people and their children. The very godhead and the trinity were reflected in this principle for the Catholics local to me, and any deviation from it was considered a direct challenge to the legitimacy of their faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I expected to encounter homophobic and transphobic beliefs based on poor translations and interpretations of Biblical texts, but this went deeper than that, linking the man + woman + child family structure to a divine blueprint that had nothing to do with Biblical translations or interpretations and that could not be challenged on any authority that I could discern. Further, the man was always positioned at the head of this family unit promising to love his wife as Christ loved the church, and the woman promising always to obey her husband with no room whatsoever allowed for any other arrangement.
Folks, we really need Christians to care about the separation of church and state again.
So what caused the election loss?
Anyone reducing this down to a handful of scapegoats is unconsciously looking for swift relief and an outlet for built up frustration and anger. Anything that has been irritating them about the Dems in recent years—that’s the thing they’ll point to right now. The Democrats are far from perfect. And while I was proud to vote for her—especially under the circumstances—I would never suggest that Harris was a perfect candidate or that she ran a perfect campaign. But she did a damn fine job in the time that she had, and a much better job than I dared to hope for when Biden stepped aside and she announced her intention to earn the Democratic nomination.
Culturally, I do have to recognize that identity politics did, at times, surround the campaign in ways that were not to my liking, not that “my liking” is the standard that should be deferred to. I just want to note it. For example, initially, I thought the various phone calls for Harris based on identity groupings were weird and needlessly exclusionary when we needed to be building party unity, and I wondered how people would respond to white men forming a White Men for Harris call. But that happened, and there was some stink but for the most part people seemed to absorb it, were okay with it, and appreciated the funds the men raised. And it’s true that Black women, Black men, white women, white men, Christian men, South Asian women, South Asian men, Latina leaders, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders, etc. each have their own unique needs and ways of responding to political engagement and outreach. The argument in favor for all the separate calls was for people to be able to develop strategies specific to their identity group for reaching unconvinced voters within their identity groups. I was swayed by the argument in theory, and I was brought round to seeing where each group could benefit from their own group call. But I could, and still can, also see where it might look like an awful lot of disunity to undecideds on the fence on the outside. And I wish that we could encourage one another to talk more across these lines, rather than constantly reinforce the need for the lines and boundaries.
However—Harris did not organize any of those calls. Grassroots Democrats did that, and they all worked hard to reach their identity groups.
What’s the most insightful postmortem I have read so far, you ask?
“Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” by Michael Tomasky, The New Republic, 8 Nov. 2024.
And yours?
We have a lot of room for internal party improvements, less division, increased unification, more listening. That was true long before this election, and it’s still true now. But it would be an error to court and uplift changes that seek to cater to and perpetuate Trumpists talking points that are based on ignorance9, misperception, and misinformation—those are the things a healthy society works to push against and correct, not integrate as if majority opinion creates fact rather than consensus belief.
Before closing, in light of the recent rising anti-trans sentiment, I’ll leave you with two independent transgender writers who have been focused on politics for several years that you may want to follow on Substack. First, I recommend the work of Charlotte Clymer, a Christian trans woman who writes on culture and religion. Being, herself, a Christian, Charlotte has endless patience with her fellow Christians. She is exceptionally skilled at knowing the difference between a troll and someone she might reach through dialogue, and I have loved watching her unfolding conversations as much as reading her posts. And I recommend Erin Reed. Erin is a transgender journalist who works to keep her audience informed on LGBTQ+ legislation.
If you have read this far, thank you. I have friends who are much better at this kind of post than I am, but there is no time like the present to start developing new skills. It feels like we’ve entered an “all hands on deck” era, and I had the time, and I had the thoughts.
Finally, if you have a comment, an opinion, or an article you’d like to share, I’d love to hear it.
Maureen Dowd. “Opinion: Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics.” The New York Times, 9 Nov. 2024.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. “How Democrats’ Unexpected 2022 Midterm Wins Led to Harris’ 2024 Defeat.” MSNBC Morning Joe, 11 Nov. 2024.
Amy Sherman. “Fact-Checking Trump’s Misleading Statement That Kamala Harris ‘Wants to Defund the Police.’” PolitiFact, 30 July 2024. For contrast, see Scarborough’s distortion at time stamp 09:15 on MSNBC Morning Joe.
This article by Grace Abels would be better titled: “Trump Ads About Harris and Transgender People Versus Reality,” —> “Fact Check: Harris on Gender-Affirming Care for Incarcerated Trans People.” The 19th, 28 Oct. 2024.
Federal law requires that prisons provide necessary medical care to inmates, and several courts have ruled that gender-affirming care, including surgery, is included. Despite these court rulings, access to gender-affirming surgery in prisons is very limited, and the number of transgender prisoners in federal prisons who have received it is minuscule — two. We found no record of gender-affirming surgeries being provided in immigration detention.
For contrast, see time stamp 06:55 of MSNBC Morning Joe and time stamp 08:05.
See time stamp 07:54 of MSNBC Morning Joe.
Brooke Migdon. “Harris Vows at Michigan Rally to Do All She Can to End Gaza War.” News Nation, 7 Nov. 2024. For contrast, see time stamp 08:49 of MSNBC Morning Joe where Scarborough reduces this issue to protesters “trashing college campuses” last spring.
Campus protests in the 60’s were during the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War era. See time stamp 08:50 of MSNBC Morning Joe where Scarborough reduces the 60’s protests to students trashing college campuses and blames them for Nixon taking office. The unfortunate implication Scarborough is leaving in the air here is that the students in the 60’s were wrong to disrupt and “trash campuses,” not that history vindicated them, suggesting that pro-Palestinian anti-genocide protesters should learn from this and stop trashing campuses during an election year.
In many instances, ignorance is too generous a term, but I want to be generous where generosity may be due. Opportunism, deliberate fear mongering and misdirection are often more apt word choices.