Back in Little League, I used to think I was a pretty good baseball player. I hit a bunch of home runs and thought I could play in the majors—until about seventh grade. That’s when I stepped to the plate against a pitcher from Warren Jr. High School who could throw a curveball.
His first pitch appeared to be coming straight for my head. I hit the dirt and then peeked up just in time to see the ball break perfectly over the plate. Humbling! The umpire called it a strike, a bunch of Warren players laughed at me, and I would eventually go on to become one of those writers who uses too many sports analogies.
Embarrassing as that was, the decisiveness of my defeat dealt a fast end to my delusional diamond dreams. I never learned to hit a curveball but did take a tidy lesson from the experience: When life offers clarity, take the gift.
Democrats should take the gift.
If nothing else, the party’s electoral battering last week should provide a clarity that Democrats clearly lacked before. They were shocked by the results. I knew a bunch who were indeed predicting a rout, but with Kamala Harris doing the routing. “This could be glorious,” a Democratic operative friend said to me last weekend after the now-ingloriously wrong Des Moines Register poll that showed Harris leading Trump by three points in deep-red Iowa was released. Trump wound up winning the state by 13 points.
At minimum, the prevailing sentiment was that the election would be very close. Pundit consensus seemed to place the race at the cliché junction of “razor-thin” and “wafer-thin” (personally I thought it would be “paper-thin,” but then, I was an outlier). The contest, many predicted, might take many days to call. Election lawyers swarmed battleground states. I don’t recall speaking with more than one or two Democrats in the final weeks who foresaw the ultimate beatdown the party suffered.
Then came the knee-buckling curveball that electorates have a knack for throwing.
“We at least have some precision here with this result,” Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan told me. “There’s really no ambiguity in what voters said, at least at the presidential level.” This can save time and focus the collective mind on the larger problems that confront Democrats.
No one is debating whether it would have helped if, say, Bad Bunny had endorsed Harris sooner. In other words, last week’s drubbing was not conducive to small-bore second-guessing; no use dwelling in the margins when the margins are, in fact, so conclusive.
This was not the case after the defeat that Democrats suffered at Trump’s hand eight years ago. That election was much closer. It lent itself to strategic quibbling (“if only Hillary Clinton had spent more time in Wisconsin”), numeric hypotheticals (“if only X number of votes in X number of states had swung the other way”), and systemic laments (damn Electoral College). All of this amounted to the political equivalent of In any other ballpark, that’s a home run.
And it distracted from—even muddled—whatever lessons that loss could have provided.
Partly as a result, Democrats engaged in no real reckoning after 2016. Essentially they became a party that defined itself in opposition to Trump, just as Republicans have been defined in submission to him. This probably made sense for Democrats in the short term. Trump’s presidency, his post-presidency, and the lame knockoffs that he inspired gave Democrats plenty of material to work with. They enjoyed good midterm results (2018, 2022) and picked Joe Biden as a winning stopgap candidate in 2020.
Unfortunately for Democrats, Biden never got the “stopgap” memo. The obstinate octogenarian insisted on running again until it was way too late for someone else to enter, putting Harris and her party in a terrible position.
Bewildered Democrats are casting blame, and Biden seems to be catching the most. But the recriminations will subside soon enough, and the faster Democrats can embrace the clarity of this moment, the better.
“This has more of a feel of wiping the slate clean,” Pete Giangreco, a Democratic campaign strategist, told me. “Sure, you can maybe argue whether Josh Shapiro as the running mate could have helped with Pennsylvania, but who cares? It wouldn’t have mattered. It makes it easier to focus on what matters.”
Dingell says that what matters most—and what the 2024 results expose—is that working-class voters, across racial lines, are put off by the Democratic Party. This should be apparent not just from the defeats of last Tuesday but also the successes. She mentioned two of her Democratic House colleagues who have been elected and reelected in treacherous swing districts: Jared Golden of Maine, who holds a slight edge (about 700 votes) in one of the few races in the country that has yet to be called, and Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who appears to have narrowly retained her rural Washington State district, and who has criticized national Democratic leaders for their inattention to working-class voter concerns.
“I think we just need to go out and learn and listen for a while,” Dingell told me.
First, listen to the results: They were not close. Trump won all seven battleground states and the popular vote; made big gains with Black and Hispanic voters, as well as with young people; and even polled 52 percent of white women. Republicans took the Senate and kept the House.
As it turned out, Democrats were much closer to delusion than the reality that voters would impose. So, by all means, digest the postmortems, posit the theories, and engage in the various “conversations we need to have” that Democrats and pundits keep prescribing. Better yet, skip those.
“Here’s what we know: We don’t know anything,” Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show on Election Night. “We’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is, and what this world is, and the truth is we’re not really going to know shit.”
There is a simple humility in that, something to sit with back in the dugout.
