History on a golf cart

Three lessons from the 2024 election.

Richard Nixon had a favourite line in the chaotic leadup to his victory in 1968: “There’s nothing wrong with this country a good election can’t fix.”

Nixon’s line has stuck with me as a useful way to think about the ideal of an election. Wouldn’t it be great if a single vote in a single election really could change everything for the better? But it also begs its opposite: If all problems can be fixed with a ‘good election’ - can everything fixed be broken with a bad one? What about two?

Donald Trump has a warped version of this line, telling his supporters to “get out and vote, just this time….you won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more.” This is another kind of ideal - the election so consequential you can not just turn off from politics for four more years, but turn off from politics for good.

There are certainly elections that we can look back at as hinge points¹, as moments where if the vote had been different a lot of history would be too. What if the Florida recount had been slightly changed and Al Gore had won - does he end up invading Iraq? What if FDR had not won in 1932, or the Nazis not cobbled together a majority in 1933, or NZ First not gone with Labour in 2017? Now, we may have a new one - what if Trump hadn’t won in 2024?

Here’s a follow up post to my preview on the US election, looking at some lessons from Trump’s convincing victory.

White collar professionals are not a governing majority

About 38% of Americans 25 years or older have a bachelors degree or higher. Harris won this group by about 13 points. This was not enough to win the election.

This isn’t something that we are all just learning now. Joe Biden also won college voters by a wide margin, but he put this coalition together with plenty of working class non-white voters to win the actual election. There were signs then that this coalition was not rock solid, but Democrats didn’t do enough to shore it up.

It now appears that Trump actually won a majority of voters in households making less than $50,000, after making huge gains with Latino voters in particular. It’s not just the white working class backing Trump any more, it’s the working class in general.

Given the results, it is now easy to look back at the campaign Kamala Harris ran and see how little it did to truly reach out to these voters.

Part of this issue was forced on Democrats through Biden’s late-game exit giving them nowhere near enough time to run a real primary - meaning Harris herself was the only candidate on offer.

Harris lost the 2020 primary for a reason. She has barely ever had to compete against a Republican in an election and oozes blue state lawyer. One of her big moments in the vice presidential debates with Mike Pence was her saying “Excuse me, I’m speaking” - a line that clearly resonated with many women sick of men interrupting them, but also encapsulated an attitude many voters find repellent, with its emphasis on politeness and a very professionalised decorum.

Another useful phrase is one Harris inherited from Hillary Clinton. When Clinton was running in 2016, President Obama and many other supporters liked to tell people she was the “most qualified candidate in history”. This line stuck around after the loss and was also attached to Harris, often trotted out to explain to voters why they should actually love her. This was not a good idea: credentials are good for winning you a better life, not a presidential election. And lecturing people about how they really ought to like your candidate, as Obama did this time as well, does more harm than good.

As Adam Tooze and many others have pointed out, for working class voters it is people like Harris who have been in positions of authority for much of their life, whether as teachers at their school or as managers at their work. It is natural to hold some distrust for these people who seem to be running your life, and also setting so much of the terms of the national debate, whether as TV anchors or late night hosts. It is especially hard to back them when you feel your life is getting worse and they tell you you’re just imagining it.

Trump might have a degree and be a big success, but he will rarely talk down to you. He is far richer than you and is brash about breaking the rules where it suits him, like you would be if you won the lottery, instead of being a bit richer than you and seemingly obsessed with setting the rules in the first place.

Part of this is undoubtedly sexism. Barack Obama was also a lawyerly type, even if he was far better at turning that side of his personality off, and he won two solid wins. But I think it is too simple to blame it all on gender. South of the border in the famously macho country of Mexico, Latinos overwhelmingly elected a woman president this year. There are women who could win power in the US, but it will be hard, and they will have a far better chance if they don’t feel anything like your boss.

The working class vote is a prize worth having. Unionisation is on the rise in the US. AI may proletarianise many of the laptop class eventually. Democrats need to win what was once their traditional base back to have a sniff of real power.

This is probably the biggest lesson for New Zealand political parties, although we obviously have vastly different systems and societies. Uni graduates aren’t a majority in New Zealand and won’t be any time soon.

The incumbency curse is inescapable

Not to write off the entire last section, but if Donald Trump had been in power for the last four years and Harris had run against him, she probably would have won. The “incumbency curse” after the inflation spike has seen sitting governments of left and right defeated all around the world - including in New Zealand, Australia, and the UK. Back in the 1970s a similar inflation spike took down basically every sitting democratic government.

Source.

So at a certain level this election was unwinnable, was even over-determined. Harris lost not for one reason but for many, each of which might be enough on their own. But inflation is the biggest one. The US had a better time of it than most others, but at the end of the day voters really hate it when things cost more than they used to, and they blame the Government for it.

Trump is a world historical force

Napoleon was history on horseback. Trump is history on a golf cart.

It is very hard to think of a recent president who has reorientated the world as much as he has, from the complete victory of free trade and neoliberalism to one in which banks are urgently modelling what an across-the-board 10% tariff on all US imports might look like. In his first term, Trump lacked the patience and stamina to pass much significant legislation, but everything else he does - from Supreme Court picks to trade wars - are big enough deals that we all have to sit up and pay attention. Plus he has all those nukes.

Part of this is the reality of US world dominance. Even normal non-disruptive US presidents make big decisions that change the lives of millions of non-Americans. If the US was one of three or four similarly-sized powers the world would be nowhere near as obsessed with the Trump phenomenon. But that is not the world we live in - we live in Trump’s world. Who knows where he will take us.

1. Before we get going on reading the political tea leaves, it’s worth remembering that elections are often just the cresting wave of major movements, useful demarcation points rather than actual drivers of history. Mass society has many other ways to change the world, from organised protest to consumer preferences. That doesn’t mean elections don’t matter - of course they do - but it does make it a silly to see them as a lens for the entire world, or as a singular fix.