I want to start by wishing the 47th President well. As of now, he’ll be President of the United States, including mine, for the next four years. I didn’t vote for him in any of his three campaigns, but clearly he inspired something in tens of millions of Americans. We must hope they are on to something now, as his failure would be the nation’s. I obviously disagree with him on many things. There’s still no point to hoping he makes a fool of himself though.
With that said, I do operate in an outcome driven world. I think results matter. I expect Donald J. Trump’s second term to be a failed Presidency. I see two pathways to failure- either he does pass harmful things like tariffs into law, bad the results of his success are painful, OR he’s ineffective and life doesn’t really get better this term. He may succeed at cutting some government spending on the margins, or at deporting a couple million people here illegally, but I doubt he gets everything he wants. Maybe the economy continues on autopilot and people decide that’s fine. If he actually pushed through most of his promised agenda from the 2024 Election, I predict tough times ahead.
What do I expect? More tax cuts for “inheritance baby” class levels of wealth. Deregulation of corporate America. Ukraine to have to surrender land to Russia. A roll back of environmental protections. Cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies. Two more conservative judges on the Supreme Court. Cuts to public education. More death in the Middle East. I don’t think any of this will be good. I think it will harm lives.
Look, there’s no reason to hope I’m right. There’s no point to keeping an enemy list of everyone performing at or attending his inaugural (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all are above that). You don’t need to pray for failure. If you believe in what you voted for last Fall, you believe it will come out in the wash. It’s time to move forward now. Joe Biden is gone and Donald Trump will be four years from now. Best of luck to the guy. I’m out living life today. If you’re raging at your television right now, please get out and touch grass.
Today will mark the end of a career of public service spanning more than 50 years. A New Castle County Councilman (elected in 1970). A U.S. Senator of 36 years (elected in 1972). Vice-President of the United States (elected in 2008) for two terms. The 46th President of the United States (elected in 2020). In a time of great division, Joe Biden served with class. He leaves certainly controversially, but history will be kinder than the present.
Joe Biden is leaving Washington with few to no allies. His own party sliced his candidacy to death, reportedly lead by the man who made him Vice-President 16 years ago and the powerful former Speaker he was friends with for decades. The media has laid his Vice-President’s defeat at his feet. The opposition blames him for everything from migrants at our border to inflation. Despite record low unemployment, record four year job creation, and rising wages, the public thinks his economy stunk. It’s hard to think of any positive coverage or feelings towards the 46th President right now. Even the activist groups he rewarded with student loan forgiveness, gun control legislation, and a record number of judges have moved on from the Biden White House. It’s fitting that he eulogized President Carter in one of his last major speeches. His Presidency will, in the near term, be equated with President Carter’s.
To be fair, Joe Biden brought some of this on himself. He built a White House around him filled with people who really didn’t owe their careers to him. That White House lacked powerful voices that were articulating his vision. His promises and achievements to liberal interest groups cast him as a “normal” Dem at a time when the Democratic brand is at it’s lowest popularity in a couple decades. His cabinet was full of experts and wonks, but short on inspiring messengers to put out to communicate with America. His public promise to pick a woman Vice-President opened the door to Republicans attacks on her as a “DEI hire.” He aged before our eyes, as an 80 years ago old man should, but never really addressed the elephant in the room. He picked a cautious Attorney General when he needed an aggressive pitbull. He allowed bad actors on the Supreme Court, in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, and running tech companies to drag out his Presidency. He seemed unaware of his sagging poll numbers as his re-election campaign sulked along for months, lacking any real, positive vision of why he deserved a second term. The Hunter saga drug on way too long. Trump remained too focal in his message. He clearly got nothing right with that June debate. Joe Biden got a lot wrong. Probably stuff I left out of here. For that reason, he’ll wake up on Tuesday as a former President.
I mentioned President Carter above, and he’s a great reference point for President Biden- Biden will leave office with 36% approval in his final poll, President Carter was at 34%. Carter went on to live nearly 44 years out of office, and his approval improved substantially. Harry Truman and Donald Trump left office in roughly the same range, and both saw markedly solid improvement out of office. LBJ left with 49% approval, but has also seen some image improvement. It is in fashion right now to regard Biden as nothing more than a pause in the two Trump terms. History suggests that won’t be a popular view soon.
The Biden Administration began in the midst of a major pandemic and on the heels of an attack on our Capitol on January 6th. Because those events subsided, we largely have politically forgotten about them. In time, that is likely to matter more. Sure, it is possible that the doomsayers are right, and Trump ends democracy and feeds us propaganda about Biden, but I’m not in that doomsayer camp. I think it is just as likely that the next four years are less eventful than people think, maybe even disappointingly so, and the passage of time leads to higher marks for President Biden. I don’t know that he’ll ever see it in his lifetime, but he may even become a fairly popular figure. Maybe even a 21st century version of Truman or LBJ.
Many of Biden’s critics in Washington will never rise to the level of giving a farewell address from the Oval Office. Few men really do, and sometimes their speeches are actually fairly memorable, because they say something actually profound. Joe Biden did that this week. In a speech that is being panned by critics across the spectrum, he gave us shades of President Eisenhower’s farewell, in which he warned us about the military industrial complex. President Biden warned us about the unchecked powers of big tech companies and the dangers of a few very rich men consolidating power within an oligarchy. This coming Monday we will watch an inauguration largely funded and attended by tech giants from Apple, Amazon, X (Twitter), OpenAI, and Meta, to name a few. These billionaires run companies that make them unbelievable wealth, in an industry almost totally unregulated by Washington. Many of them have extremely large government contracts that fund their excess. Several of them spent unheard of amounts of personal cash to influence the election. Others have censored the free flow of information to the public, on the behalf of the incoming President. Biden’s warnings about these dangers in his farewell are less predictions of the future and more an acknowledgment of where we are now. We may have little ability to stop them right now, but we probably need to make this front and center to our future.
For 50 years, Joe Biden had a front row seat to history. Now, as he put it, it’s someone else’s turn to stand guard. Democrats shouldn’t go overboard and call for an end to capitalism and free enterprise. Democrats should heed his warnings though. The next four years of Trump will be about deregulating corporate America, cutting spending on programs that benefit normal people, and cutting taxes for the super rich. This isn’t going to benefit successful six figure earners that worked hard and made it. It’s going to benefit people who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from their daddy. The next four years is designed to benefit them, not us. The Democratic Party Biden is leaving behind is not equipped right now to fight that battle. We need to heed the voice of experience and wisdom, and find authentic voices who can credibly articulate our case.
Later on today, Republicans will take control of both houses of Congress, setting up for a unified control of government when Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th President, later this month. Regardless of what you want the Democratic Party to be, they will essentially be irrelevant in governing America soon. Parties that win elections get to govern. Parties that lose get to complain.
I’ve largely stayed out of the debate over why exactly the Democratic Party lost in the 2024 Election. The reasons for that are fairly simple. First, I think there’s ample evidence that the election should have been much worse for Democrats, based on how they did down ballot from the Presidential race (they did better), so I think I’d be wrong to sit here and tell you how awful everyone did. Second, while I think there were serious problems with the Vice-President’s candidacy, I think it’s unfair to dunk on her after the loss when she didn’t cause most of the problems. Third, while I think Joe Biden does deserve some of the blame for the state he leaves the party in, I basically reject the media’s narrative that he lost the campaign for the party, or even that pushing him out was some stroke of strategic brilliance. My general read on what happened to the Democratic Party is that the root cause of their defeat was a death by a thousand cuts, that many different factors played into their defeat. My big picture opinion is that the problems with the Democratic Party were bigger than Biden, Harris, or even campaign tactics on the trail. Democrats have a mostly systemic problem that would be painful for a lot of people involved if they fixed it.
We make campaigns really complicated and scientific, and really at the end of the day they are more marketing than data science. Whether you’re trying to grow the electorate, shrink the electorate, or whatever, your goal is to convince more people that they want to make the effort to vote, and to vote for your candidate. Most voters don’t have some long checklist of issues they care about, they’ll look at the personal qualities they want and maybe one to three issues they care about. In other words, you want to be talking to the broadest audience possible about things they agree with you on, with the most likable/least offensive messenger possible. If you’re spending a lot of time as a party on stuff that excites 45% of the population, you’re probably going to lose, no matter how well you target voters. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were both generally likable people, who seemed to like things that normal guys liked, and ran competent governments on the day-to-day. There were a lot of people who didn’t consider themselves progressives or activists, many people who didn’t ever donate a dime, who felt fine casting their vote for them. The same could be said for Joe Biden in 2020.
The Democratic Party largely misread exactly why Barack Obama won two terms, and it has plagued them in almost every election after. It was less about changing social norms and demographic tidal waves changing the country, and more about President Obama providing cool, competent leadership coming out of a turbulent time. He wasn’t winning record numbers of Black, Latino, and young voters because those groups somehow are naturally more liberal than the rest of the population. He won them because they liked him, and he offered ideas that they liked when they heard him. I think that the misread of why Obama won has done serious damage to the party’s brand, and maybe gave a false sense of security that lead Democrats to take positions that were never going to sell. Democrats found themselves arguing the virtues of progressive social policy against conservatives, rather than going back to the faithful argument that all Americans deserve rights and security afforded to them simply as human beings. Democrats found themselves defending an open border, rather than a competent, orderly, and fair immigration process that has the resources to keep people safe. We got cornered into virtue signaling arguments about slogans like “Defund the Police” and “Green New Deal,” rather than fairness in the justice system and a clean, safe environment. Because a lot of donors, activists, and operatives in the Democratic Party wanted Obama’s mandate and legacy to be a demographic tsunami that was leading us to a rejection of white, traditionalist, Evangelical male values, we took his impressive electoral strength as confirmation that he won for the reasons we wanted him to. He didn’t. The belief that he did though lead a lot of the Democratic Party being very comfortable in a perpetual culture war that a combined majority of America either didn’t agree with us on, or just didn’t give a damn about. We spent a lot of time telling America what a bad guy Donald Trump and his supporters were. We probably would have done a lot better the last eight years talking about lowering Medicare’s eligibility age, funding public schools, and building more affordable housing. The Democratic Party lacked anything that could make a majority of America feel excited. We didn’t put forward a big idea that most people felt would improve their lives.
For sure there are other problems with the party. Our campaigns are overly bloated and inefficient, our messaging is too narrow, perhaps our candidates are too cautious. We waste our power on Capitol Hill when we win worrying about process arguments and norms. We view digital and online campaigning as largely a fundraising tool, rather than the battleground. I could go on. None of that on its own is what does us in though. If you don’t know what people like about you, it’s really hard to sell those attributes.
To the extent Joe Biden deserves blame, perhaps the timing was just bad. An 82 year old man just isn’t going to look and act like a 62 year old man. That’s not his fault, nor does it necessarily mean he was incapable of actually doing the job. Perhaps he should have run in 2016. Perhaps, given how close Kamala Harris lost, he should have never (been forced to) dropped out at all. Unfortunately, I think Joe Biden’s biggest political miscalculation in 2020 was trying to appease the numerous but small factions of people in the Democratic Party with his candidacy. Some people were never going to be happy and enthusiastic with Joe, because his brand really was different than the rest of the party. There’s a reason he looked like the most moderate guy on the debate stages in 2020- he knew better than to chase slogan politics. The unique brand that got him nominated and elected in 2020 should have been something he defiantly defended. Doing so would have given him much more space to address inflation, to address global issues, and to deal with a Congress that was increasingly dysfunctional for the latter half of his career in Washington. Governing as a fairly standard ideological Democrat boxed him in with a large chunk of America.
When Kamala Harris de facto took over the Biden campaign in the Summer, I privately told family at the time that she had no chance. Here she was, with terrible approval ratings, serving under a President with bad approval ratings, jumping into the race late, swimming uphill against the demographic history of our country (we elect white guys), and frankly her last Presidential run didn’t go great. She far exceeded my expectations of her. She was a disciplined and focused candidate, she raised money, she motivated people, and most of all, she didn’t make big mistakes. She picked a Vice-Presidential candidate who did the least harm even, a move that is almost always smart. She damn near won despite everything. About the only thing I can say bad about her was that previous Presidential campaign. Her instincts coming out of the 2018 midterms were to chase the lefty activists who seemed to have momentum in the party. Most of America was never there. Trump’s campaign effectively used her words against her. She just couldn’t quite get clear of being viewed as the average Democrat. She just couldn’t quite out run the past. Most of the reasons why (bigotry, the nature of her current job, poor media coverage, etc.) weren’t her fault. That doesn’t change the sense in hindsight that this was baked in from the jump.
The evidence suggests Democrats should have gotten blasted worse in this election. Basically every other governing party in the developed West has either lost or lost seats since the Covid-19 pandemic has faded from public view. Senators Rosen, Gallego, Baldwin, and Slotkin won swing states that Vice-President Harris lost, as did Governor Stein, while outgoing Senator Bob Casey out performed Harris in PA. House Democrats basically held the status quo. All this happened while Donald Trump won the election and the popular vote. If the Republican Party had matched his performance across the country, they would hold a sizable majority in both houses of Congress, comparable to now. This could have been way worse for Democrats. That they avoided it is worth some congratulations.
If you want people to buy your product, you have to sell them something they want. Republicans are always going to try and define the Democratic message as something terrible. The Democratic Party didn’t really push back against those perceptions. Most Americans view Democrats right now negatively. Allowing the GOP to define the Democrats as a “globalist” (such a gross term) status quo, Beltway insider, ideological, “DEI” (I know, horse shit), nerd party isn’t going to work. Marching out a collective of the same old faces and leaders, a surrogate list that still looks like 2009, and messaging points that are approved by every partner in the coalition isn’t breaking that mold.
In short, I think it’s time for some of our leading voices to take a break. Too many of our leaders listen too much to activists and donors in our party, and their views of the world just don’t jive right now with most of the people. Elections are won out where the people are, and the next generation of Democratic leaders should take the timeout we’re in to get out and meet them. Learn what the product is that they want from us, and run with it. Most people aren’t looking for a Bolshevik Revolution in America, but they do want something to be excited and hopeful for. Twenty years from now, the world will remember Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi fondly for the actually good governance they gave us over these past couple decades. We boxed them in though, and it’s time for Democrats to get outside of the box.
Apocalypse Vibes 