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In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victorious reelection bid, Democrats are searching for an explanation of Kamala Harris’s loss in order to begin rebuilding for the future. So it goes every election cycle—a loss, a scramble for causality, and competing narratives begin to set.

Just one week out from Election Day, there are multiple dissenting and overlapping arguments being made to try to make sense of the results. In 2016, many Democrats believed that Trump’s attack on trade policies was core to his victory. As a result, the Biden-Harris administration pursued Trump-like policies on trade, none of which seem to have made a significant difference in increasing the union vote share, reducing Trump’s likelihood of victory, or stemming the flow of working-class voters out of the Democratic Party.

Now, again, various parts of the Democratic coalition are seeking to define the party’s loss. But what do we actually know about why the Democrats were defeated? There are still theories forming, but on today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the former Republican strategist and current host of The Bulwark Podcast, Tim Miller about the postelection narratives jockeying for power.

“But for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes, that still is a unique experiment in the world. That “America is an idea” type of thing. The idea is pretty dim at this point,” Miller argued.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: In the aftermath of a bruising electoral loss, the losing party begins participating in a well-worn democratic tradition: slinging takes about what happened.

This is democracy! When the voters send a dissatisfied response, the messy work of recalibration requires parsing the signal from the noise.

Were voters mad because of a global inflationary environment that no Democrat could dig their way out of? Did they want to see specific breaks between Harris and Biden on policy? Were they frustrated by a candidate they saw as too left on cultural issues?

There are data points in favor of many different theses. Here’s where I’d put my stake in the ground, with the caveat that we still don’t have a complete analysis on subgroup dynamics, or even a final vote count on all the races:

First, incumbents worldwide were facing tough election odds. Electorates were frustrated by the COVID inflationary years and were clearly seeking change. In Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and beyond, ruling coalitions lost power across the political spectrum.

Second, I don’t think Kamala Harris was ever going to be a great candidate. After Biden’s disastrous debate effort in late June and it seemed he might be pressured to drop out, I wrote an article calling on Democrats not to coronate their vice president, and pointing to key vulnerabilities she displayed and the value of an open democratic process.

Figuring out how much of this is in the campaign’s control—would it really have mattered that much if she’d gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast?—or figuring out what this means for America’s two political parties will take months, if not years. As you’ve heard on this podcast, I’m still arguing about what 2016 really meant on trade and immigration.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. As a disclaimer, I worked for the Harris primary campaign in 2019 before becoming a journalist, and my guest today, Tim Miller, is a political strategist who was Jeb Bush’s 2016 communications director on his presidential campaign. He’s been an anti-Trump conservative since then and is the host of The Bulwark Podcast.

Today we’re going to talk through some of these inchoate narratives and debate which ones we think are likely to hold water.

[Music]

Demsas: Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Miller: Hey Jerusalem. What’s happening?

Demsas: Well, we’re recording this six days after Election Day. And—as you have seen on Twitter, and I’m sure in your various interviews—the takes are already coming in very, very hot. And this is a show where we often look at narratives that have already baked, and kind of look at the research and data behind how these narratives formed and what truth is there and what sorts of things have gotten ahead of themselves.

But we’re in an interesting moment right now where we’re seeing very important narrative formation happen in real time. In the aftermath of an election, everyone’s scrambling to define what happened in order to maybe wrest control of the future of the party from an ideological perspective or just a pure power perspective. And so we’re seeing a bunch of people arguing about why Trump won and why Harris lost in a time where there’s a bunch of unknowns. So we’re going to go through a few of these different narratives that are coming up.

But Tim, right off the bat, I wanted to ask you: What’s your perception of why Trump won and Harris lost?

Miller: I’m going to preempt my answer by saying that I think that uncertainty is important in this moment, and that false certainty can lead to some very mistaken and disastrous results. I say this from experience, having worked on the Republican autopsy in 2013, when the conventional wisdom congealed very quickly that Republicans, in order to win again, needed to moderate on immigration and cultural issues to appeal more to Hispanics and women. And not only was that wrong, but the person that became the nominee and then the president used that autopsy for toilet paper and went exactly the opposite direction.

It also always didn’t also work out in Trump’s favor. In 2022, the conventional wisdom was that Trumpism was badly hurt and that Ron DeSantis was ascendant. Right? So anyway, in the week after the election, bad takes abound.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: That said, my answer is, I’m open to a variety of different things that the Democrats might have to do, among them being maybe nothing and watch Trump self-implode. Might be as simple as that. That said, the one thing that I think is certain that the Democrats need to reflect on when it comes to this question of why Trump won and why Harris lost—it’s that the Democratic message is not landing outside of a particular demographic of middle- to upper-income, college-educated, not particularly religious, urban- and suburban-dwelling white Americans, in addition to Black women, right? Those are the demos that the Democrats are doing well with, that Kamala Harris grew her share with from last time, at least in the case of college-educated women. And I think that the Democrats are doing a very poor job of communicating to people in all of those other demographics.

On what they need to do, I’m very open to various possibilities about whether it’s about affect or vibe or policy or whatever. But I’m certain that there is—fair or unfair, there’s a perception that the Democrats don’t care about these other demographics, particularly working-class demographics, particularly working-class men. And that they did not offer them something that was more appealing than the nostalgia and promises of gold bullion that they got from Donald Trump. And so we can hash through all the different theories about why that was. But I think the fact that what happened—you can’t argue with.

Demsas: Yeah. I think that that’s very descriptively true. But I guess what I would want to know from you is do you feel like there are specific things that Democrats have done that tipped the scales against them? I think that what you’re outlining here is very sound. There’s a difference between why Harris may have lost and what the Democrats need to do going forward to be a more electorally relevant party at the presidential level. And so from your perspective, though, is there something about the Democratic argument around the economy or other issues that you think was particularly relevant this time around?

Miller: I think that, for starters, people were unhappy with the economy. And I don’t think that the Democrats presented a message to them about how they plan to change that for the better. But, again, I’m also not even really ready to concede that, with the exception of inflation being annoying and that broadly hurting people, the Democrats were hurt based on their economic argument. It might simply be cultural. It might be the way that they spoke, and having people feel like they weren’t being heard.

I think the Democrats in particular—I always want to immediately go to, What is the policy prescription that would have appealed? And I’m like, It’s possible that there wasn’t one.

Demsas: Yeah. An important backdrop that I think you’re alluding to here, as well, is that the inflationary environment was really, really bad for incumbents across the world, right? You’re kind of going into an election where the fundamentals are sort of rigged against incumbents because the inflationary episode was just really, really hard for people. I think one narrative that I’m seeing come up a lot is about campaign strategy. And this seems like something that’s going to be hashed out significantly. But I guess the question I have here is whether you think Harris could have won with a campaign run differently, even given the shortened timeline.

Miller: I’m giving another “I don’t know” answer to that question: I don’t know. I think that she, by all accounts, ran a strong campaign that was based on her strengths. And I think she had an undeniably dominating debate performance. They ran a nice convention. Her speeches were good. The messaging pivot, the launch was good. There wasn’t a lot of drama inside the campaign, right? There are other things that she isn’t particularly strong at. I don’t think that she is that great in unscripted moments. Sometimes she’s better than others.

And so then that’s the other thing that people come to, which is like, Oh, she should have done Rogan and all this. And I agree. I think she should have done more of those interviews, but they also weren’t really her strong suit. And I think that this was something that might’ve borne out had there been a longer primary, and maybe somebody else would have emerged. But that said, I don’t think so. I think Kamala Harris was going to emerge from a primary, no matter when Joe Biden dropped out.

And so I’m not saying, Oh, this was inevitable. Just give up. Life is pain. [Laughs.] That’s not really what I’m saying. Any specific thing that people are like, Oh, if this tactic had been different, that would have helped—I don’t really buy that. I mean, I think that broadly speaking, her having the ability to separate herself from the administration would have been helpful, and I think that was very challenging to do given the situation Joe Biden left her in and the time period that was left. And I think that it’s very likely that she might have separated herself from the administration more and still lost, and we would have been here on this podcast with people saying, Why did she distance? [Laughs.] You know what I mean? Why did she break up the Democratic coalition?

Demsas: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I think that, on the tactics, I’m sort of with you here. I was looking at some of the data analyses that are coming out now, and it looks like, at this point, given the data we have, while the national average from 2020 to 2024 shifts roughly six points, in battlegrounds, that number is going to end up closer to three points. And that speaks to campaign effects. That speaks to the fact that in battleground states where, again, the majority of the money is going, people are putting ads in battleground states, the campaign is putting rallies there, she’s visiting, they’re really working the press in those places to get her story and message out in a way that you’re not really going to do in a safe, Dem county in Illinois or something.

And so as a result, what they see is that the campaign effects were good on a tactical level. Their ads were persuasive. There’s evidence from Dan Rosenhack at The Economist that it looks like the campaign effects were more effective than Trump’s on things like—indicating things like ads and rallies were better for Harris.

I think on this kind of broader meta question that you kind of raised, right, about Harris as the nominee, I don’t think this is inevitable. I mean, I wrote an article on July 9th arguing that she was unlikely to be a good nominee and the party shouldn’t coronate her, and Nancy Pelosi to The New York Times—I don’t know if you saw this quote, after Harris’s loss—she says that she had expected that if the president were to step aside that there would be an open primary. And that maybe Kamala would have been stronger going forward if she’d gone through a primary and that the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, which made it impossible to have a primary at the time. But it sounds like you’re saying that you think that, regardless, this would not have really changed the game that much.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, I think that had Joe Biden followed the—you can argue whether it was a promise or whether it was an indication that he was going to be a one-term [president] and pass the torch. And had there been a two-year process, maybe Kamala Harris does not emerge. But, look, there are three things that I think of when I hear this counterfactual about what would have happened had it been a more open process. The first thing is, the Democrat—one of the things that the Democrats have a lot of baggage around is identity politics. I think it would have been very challenging for a Black woman to be passed over.

Demsas: But the Democratic primary voters did this in 2019, right? There was this argument being made, but they said, no, we care most about electability and they chose Joe Biden.

Miller: Right, that’s true. But Joe Biden had been the vice president in that case. Kamala Harris was the vice president. You already saw this on social media. I saw this on social media, and I was basically for Kamala but also, at the same time, was like, maybe I think it’d be healthy to have an open process. And I guess if you could wave a magic wand, I probably would want Shapiro, Whitmer. Because hopefully that would win two of the three states you need to win the presidency. And that just seems like a safer bet to me. That was my position: It was like pro-Kamala and/but. And I had hundreds of people calling me a racist over that.

So, I think that it would have caused a lot of turmoil within the party.

Now, again, in a longer, two-year process, is that a lot of heat that then just dies out after a while, and you settle on something that’s a little bit more electable and everybody gets behind it except for a few people who have hurt feelings? Maybe.

No. 2, an open process opens up Gaza [as a] wound and rips that apart even wider, and I think creates potentially even greater turmoil than she already was dealing with on that issue. And that’s cost her, frankly. And then No. 3 is then if the theory of the case is a more electable person with someone that could get more distance from the Biden-Harris administration, that assumes that the Democratic voters were looking for somebody to do that.

And that is really where the tension is here, Jerusalem, because if you look at the data, a majority of the Biden-Harris Democrats were basically happy with the administration, right? There were surely big parts of the Democratic coalition, particularly younger voters, particularly working-class Black and Hispanic voters, the types of people that they lost ground with, that were unhappy with the Biden administration. But I think that there was a plurality within the party that was not going to be for somebody—look at the response to Dean Phillips, not exactly the most talented candidate, but total rejection and mockery for somebody who ran trying to get distance from the Biden-Harris administration.

So I think it would have been very challenging to run as a candidate and get distance. So to me, it’s like if we lived in an imaginary world where identity politics wasn’t an issue, Gaza wasn’t an issue, and there was no backlash to distancing yourself from Biden, then certainly the Democrats could have come up with a stronger option.

We don’t live in an imaginary world. And I think that within the world that we live in, within all those constraints, I think it’s very challenging to see a situation where you end up with somebody stronger than Harris.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, all those points I think are very well taken. And I think I’m seeing a lot of people make that argument of both Harris’s inevitability as the vice president, and also this sort of sense of It would have been a worse candidate. I do think that kind of my general belief is sort of, when you think you’re behind, you run a high-variance play. If you’re gonna lose anyway, you just kind of throw everything you can at the kitchen sink.

And on this kind of inevitability point, right, I think there is this burgeoning sense that Democrats were just repudiated across the board here. You kind of brought this up, this idea that Democrats do not have a good answer on economic issues or on the issues that Americans care about.

But I don’t know, how do you reconcile that with the clear ticket-splitting you see going on here? [Nebraska’s Dan] Osborne ran seven points ahead of the Harris ticket. [Montana Senator Jon] Tester ran seven points ahead of the ticket. Amy Klobuchar ran six points ahead. That’s just in the Senate. And in the House, we see over-performances from everyone from AOC to Jared Golden in Maine, who’s a much more moderate member of the Democratic coalition. Doesn’t that indicate at some level that candidate quality was important here and that there were other candidates that were much more electable?

Miller: For starters, running the presidential race is so far different from running a Senate or House race that it’s almost not even the same sport.

It’s literally like T-ball versus the major leagues. What people expect from their—I mean, nobody’s like, Oh man, does Amy Klobuchar have to go on Joe Rogan? Nobody watches Amy Klobuchar’s debates. Obviously it’s a little different in Montana, where you’re running a competitive race. But again, just the interest in Senate races is different. I think that the Democrats have a coalition that is perfectly durable and able to win nonpresidential elections. I think that this trade in the voters that has happened where the Democrats are picking up more high-trust, more middle- to high-income, more college-educated voters, and the Republicans are picking up more low-trust, more middle- to low-income, and less educated voters. As a trade, that accrues to Democrats benefits in off-year elections and midterms and special elections, just because it’s the type of person that shows up for those types of things, and it accrues to the Republicans benefit in presidential elections. So that’s not good when the Republicans are nominating Donald Trump, and the Republicans’ presidential nominee is an existential threat to the fabric of our republic. And so that’s a problem.

And so I agree that you can’t look at the data and say, oh, the Democratic brand is irreparably harmed. Like, no, the Democrats won. And a lot of these Senate races are going to end up very narrow minorities, in the House and the Senate, that they will probably be able to win back in the midterms, depending on what happens.

But I think that there are two things, which is, No. 1, the Democrats are not well suited to running presidential elections right now, in this media environment, and then No. 2 is that the Democrats have abandoned huge parts of the country where they are not viable. And that’s particularly problematic, given the Senate and Electoral College and the way that’s set up.

So okay, back to No. 1. Democrats are really good at running campaigns that are set pieces. They have professionals that are running these campaigns: the ads, the conventions, the speeches, the going to the editorial-board meetings, the 2004-type campaigns. And that’s how Senate and House campaigns are basically still run in most of the country, and even governor’s races, right? People just don’t care about those races at that deep of a level. But the presidential race is—the media environment around it is so different. I mean, people are consuming information about the presidential race on their TikTok, listening to sports talk, listening to their random podcasts that aren’t about sports at all that are cultural, on women’s blogs, at a school function, people are talking about it casually, you know what I mean?

I’m a parent, and obviously this is a little bit of selection bias since I’m in politics and people know that, but people don’t come up to me and ask me what I think about the House race in my district. Nobody’s mentioned Troy Carter to me at any events,, at any school functions or any of my kids’ sporting events.

Demsas: He’s got to get his name out there. [Laughs.]

Miller: And so the information environment is just a total category difference. And Trump and even J. D. Vance in certain ways were able to take advantage of that by running campaigns that are a little bit more unwieldy, that are better for viral clips, that are also better for sitting down for two hours and broing out with the Theo Von and talking about how you can’t even do coke in this country anymore because the fentanyl is in it, right?

She wasn’t doing any of that. And doing one of those interviews isn’t really the answer, right? It’s like, can you communicate in a way that feels authentic? It might be fake authenticity, but in a way that feels authentic to people in their Instagram Stories, in their TikTok, in their podcasts, whatever.

And Democrats are not producing a lot of candidates who I feel are good at that.

Demsas: But I think there’s also this broad concern that the media ecosystem itself is not producing convincing, progressive-sounding or left-leaning media personalities. There’s a 2017 AER study that I remember being very, very shocking to people when it first came out, right after Trump’s election in 2016. And there are a couple economists, they look at the effect of Fox News, and they find that watching Fox News for an additional 2.5 minutes per week increases the vote share by 0.3 percentage points. But watching MSNBC has essentially no effect, and they see that Fox News is actually able to shift viewers’ attitudes rightward. And they look at 2004 and 2008 and find that Republican presidential candidates’ share of the two-party vote would have been more than three points lower in 2004, and six points lower in 2008 without Fox News.

And so that’s something where I’m just like—there is something to the fact that the media ecosystem does not have that sort of targeted apparatus. But my usual belief about these sorts of things is that we’re discounting the fact that so much of the media is so liberal that Fox News can have this large effect because it I think stands out among a pack of more liberal institutions, but I am kind of surprised at MSNBC.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, as a person on MSNBC, did that study go on before I was a political contributor? I think it did. So we might need to update the study and have them focus on my hits and see if that changes anything.

I guess I want to noodle on that for a little bit. That does surprise me a little bit as well, but I would say this: I think that I’m less concerned. I think there’s a category of person out there, and maybe this is right, that is focused on Republicans have better propaganda outlets than the Democrats do.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And maybe that’s true. I don’t know. So to me, then the question is, okay, what can be done? What is realistic in this media environment? And it goes back to this question of, can the Democrats speak more through using existing outlets or finding a candidate who has a compelling story in their own right, or compelling communication skills to figure out how to speak to people that don’t watch mainstream news?

And that’s just really what it comes down to. The Democrats are very good at talking to people that are high-information, high-engagement, high-education, middle-to-high-income, and offering persuasive arguments. I think that they’re not good at talking to anybody else. And Obama was good at that, and Clinton was good at that. And we’re in a totally different media environment now than we were back then. But I think that there’s still things that can be learned from that.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break, why the abortion-ballot-measure strategy didn’t pan out for the Harris campaign.

[Break]

Demsas: I want to pull us out of this media conversation here, because I think that there’s also this, let’s say things go a little bit differently—and again, the margins here are not very big—and Harris has won.

I think one of the big things we’d be hearing right now is that she won because of abortion, right? And looking at Election Night, you see a lot of wins for abortion. There are 10 states that have referendums on abortion policies, and seven of them win: New York, Maryland, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Missouri. And in Florida, where it loses, the threshold is 60 percent and it earns 57 percent, so it lost, but there’s clearly a majority in favor.

And, going in, I mean, especially after the midterms, there was a real feeling, kind of the big narrative that came out of those midterms was that abortion is the place where Democrats can clearly distinguish and can clearly win over Republican candidates, even in deeply Republican states, and especially in deeply purple states.

And I’m trying to think through this. What explains in your mind the sort of difference between how many voters were saying, Yes, I do have more liberal views on abortion; I’m willing to express those in these ballot measures; but no, I’m not going to then reward Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris for it?

Miller: Well, a couple of things. No. 1, this tension has always existed as old as time, and it’s particularly existed as old as time in places like Florida. I did one of these, you know, time is a flat circle—

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I forget which election it was at this point, but it was like, how did the minimum-wage-increase ballot initiative in Florida pass at the same time that Ron DeSantis won by 18 points or whatever, whichever election that was.

And it’s like, voters are complicated. Voters have complex views. And so you see this as kind of just a common thing in voter habits. In this case, I think that there are a couple of complicating factors in addition. No. 1 was, Donald Trump muddied the waters on his views.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And I think that Donald Trump’s whole brand and vibe—I know we’re getting outside of the data space that you like to be in, Jerusalem, but there’s a certain group of people that are like, Yeah, that guy’s not gonna ban abortion. You know what I mean? And there’s just some percentage of voters out there that that’s just it. He doesn’t come off like Ted Cruz on abortion. He comes off as different, because they assume that he paid for an abortion or whatever, that he doesn’t care about it, and that he’s not gonna—this isn’t gonna be what he’s focused on. There are going to be people that are pro-choice that prioritize their economic views or their nativist views, right?

So that is going to be some of it. I think less so in Florida, but more in Arizona. To me, I think that there is actually a strategic backfiring of having these ballot initiatives on the ballot almost gave some people an out to do both, right? People that did not like Kamala Harris or that were more center-right and said, Oh, okay, great, I can protect abortion in Arizona and also vote for Donald Trump. I can have my cake and eat it, too.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I think my read of it is more that when you think about the specific argument being made about abortion, it was largely, he’s to blame for all these horrible things that are happening to women in states that have made abortion inaccessible. And by he, I mean Trump is to blame for that. And also, you know, he appointed these Supreme Court nominees who overturned Roe v. Wade. But as a prescription for the future, I feel like there was not a real clear argument made to voters of how Kamala Harris is going to actually protect abortion.

But again, it all comes back to the overarching question, did voters view this as an abortion election? And it seems clear that they viewed it as an inflation election. That was the core thing that they were focused on. And I think that one thing that I’ve heard a lot is what this means for understanding America, right?

So after 2016, people were just, I think, in shock, and were saying, I can’t believe this is the country I live in. And again here I’m hearing the sort of question of, you know, this is a black mark on the conscience of America, that people would vote for someone who threatened to overturn the results of the 2020 election, who talks with such liberal disdain for women and immigrants.

Something someone said to me in 2016 was really interesting: If your entire perception of America would have shifted if a few hundred thousand people voted differently, maybe don’t completely change everything you believe about everyone. And to me, I think that this framing about Trump’s reelection means something really dark about all the people that voted for him doesn’t really sit well with me because it seems like people are voting based on cost of living. At the same time, too, I think they’re taking their signal from Democrats who, if they’d taken their own warnings about the threat of fascism or the threat to our institutions, I think would have behaved very differently over the past couple of years in trying to win.

Miller: Yeah. It doesn’t change my view of the American people, really, that there are good people and bad people everywhere, that we all have good and bad inside of us. I’ll say that what it does impact for me—and maybe this is wrong and maybe I’m raw and it’s six days out—but for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes but still is a unique experiment in the world. You know, the “America is an idea” type of thing.

The idea is pretty dim at this point. And, to me, that is the change, having him win again, that I’m having trouble getting over. Mentally, it’s not that it makes me look poorly at my neighbors, but that we just might be at the end of the experiment and the sense that America is something different than Hungary or Switzerland or whatever, any country—you name the country.

It was the old fight with Republicans and Democrats during the Obama years, which is, Obama doesn’t think of America as any different than Belgium. Obama believes in Belgian exceptionalism. And that to me is kind of where I am. I think that we’re about to move into an era where America’s flaws, in addition to all of our existing flaws like gun violence and our history of racism, et cetera—the American system’s flaws look a lot more like what flaws look like in other countries.

There’s going to be oligarchy, kleptocracy, corruption. There’s no special sense that the huddled masses around the world are welcome here any more than they might be welcome anywhere else. They frankly are probably going to be welcome here less than they’re welcome in certain other places.

And so to me, that is what I see differently. I reserve the right to change my mind about that at some point, but that’s where I’m at right now.

Demsas: Yeah. I think in contrast to this large view about the American idea of maybe being different than we believed beforehand is this, I think, really popular take that’s picking up steam, which is about just Democrats need to moderate on cultural issues, whether it’s about immigration, or it’s the issue of trans women and girls in sports. They’re just too left of the median voter, and you don’t actually need to do a bunch else other than accept that people are where they are on those places and not go so far away from it.

The data point that’s kind of in favor of this, particularly on the trans-girls-in-sports one, is Kamala Harris’s leading super PAC, Future Forward, finds that the most effective, or one of the most effective, Trump ads is one of the “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” ads. They find that it shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor after people watched it.

How relevant do you think that the Democratic Party’s leftward shift on cultural issues is to Harris’s loss? And I mean, there’s some people who I think are really making the claim that you could just really focus on this and you don’t need to make these kind of larger arguments about strategy or how we’re speaking to America on economic policy.

Miller: I don’t think that this was alone to account for Harris’s loss or even maybe the biggest thing to account for her loss. I think that she didn’t really respond to that ad in particular quite well, and that maybe that was a strategic mistake. I think her campaign—and she didn’t run like an overly “woke,” culturally left campaign. Ao the question is, did the Democratic brand on those issues drag her down? I think possibly.

To me, look, could Kamala Harris have squeaked out a victory this time while holding the same positions on trans issues had inflation been 20 percent better? Maybe. Probably. It was a clear victory for Trump, but it wasn’t, you know, Reagan ’84.

A couple of things changed, and had that one, the cultural stuff stayed static, could she have still won? Clearly. I mean, Biden won in 2020, when all of those issues were more high-salience, I think, than they were this time. Biden, not a Black woman—so maybe there’s something to that as well, that he was able to be a little bit more resilient against attacks on those issues.

So maybe that’s worth thinking about. I would say this, though. If the Democrats want to have 60 senators again ever, then yeah, they got to moderate on cultural issues. You know what I mean? There are two ways to look at this: Can Democrats still win elections by maintaining their views on everything? Yes. Are the Democrats giving away huge swaths of the country by not really even engaging with their concerns about the leftward shift of the party on a wide array of issues? Yeah, they are. I get the land-doesn’t-vote thing, I get it, but look at the map.

Demsas: [Laughs.] We’ve all seen the map.

Miller: The map is still the map, you know what I mean?

And Trump gained in all of those little red counties out there where it’s just land, all right? But he gained. There are a handful of people out there, and he got more of them, in every county. And the Democrats’, I think, choice to just say, Well, we’re just giving up on that and we’re just going to focus on the more dynamic parts of the growing parts of the country and, eventually, demographics are destiny and blah, blah, blah, that looks like a pretty bad bet today.

I’m not out here being like, yeah, you got to throw trans people or migrants under the bus for them to win. But certainly the cultural leftward shift has created a ceiling on Democratic support that I think has a negative effect for the party, but also for progress on a lot of those issues.

Demsas: Yeah. I think it’s obviously very up in the air here, how people are gonna take this mantle of how you should moderate, and I think that there’s bad and good ways that people can take this. And I think that there’s a level to which people—you don’t have to be throwing trans people under the bus. Maybe we need to figure out ways, whether it’s how Democrats responded to this with gay rights, where they talked about federalism a lot and made sure the country moved toward the issue before making it a national issue.

But I think the most important and damning thing that Democrats are clearly responsible for in the choices they have made is about the poor governance in blue cities and states. This is one of my hobbyhorses, but you see massive shifts, as you mentioned, in high-cost-of-living places that are heavily democratic, in New York and in California and in a lot of the Northeast. And I think it’s hard to see that as anything other than just a repudiation of Democratic governance and particularly the cost of living and the cost of housing in these places.

And so, to me, when you talked about the Democratic brand, I mean, when you’re in a cost-of-living election, yes, there are marginal effects on these cultural issues we’re talking about here. Yes, there are things that campaigns can do better. Yes, there are candidate effects. But if people are asking themselves, What does it look like, how does it feel to my pocketbook to live in a Democratically run state versus a Republican one? I feel like they’re being told a very clear story.

Miller: I think that that’s true. I’ve been ruminating on this a lot over the past week. I live in Louisiana, so there is the kind of emotional guttural response I have to this, which is, do you think Louisiana is being governed that well? Because I don’t.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, on cost, though, right? It’s cheaper, obviously, to have a house in Louisiana.

Miller: It’s cheaper to have a house in Louisiana because of the economic destruction of the state over the past couple of decades and the fact that everybody that grows up in parts of the state that’s not this corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge leave home. And a lot of people in these places leave home, too, looking for better economic opportunities. And that’s sad for the state.

That is my initial response, which is emotional, which is like, okay, sure. But why does Kamala Harris have to carry the baggage for the place I used to live—Oakland—but Donald Trump doesn’t have to carry the baggage for the hollowing out of big parts of Louisiana? That said, it’s true that it hurt the Democrats, right? And it’s also true that the Democrats have been badly managing these big cities. And if you just look at the numbers, suburban Democrats—and this could be a counterargument. Now, I’m going to really give you a galaxy brain, Jerusalem, to your original data point earlier that the three-point effect in the battleground states versus national speaks to a campaign effect? Maybe.

Maybe it also speaks to the fact that a lot of these battleground states are made up of places that have mixed governance and big suburbs where the Democrats are doing better. Democrats are doing better in suburban America because they know they’re not feeling the acute pain of governing issues that have plagued a lot of the big cities. And surely there are a couple of big cities in those seven swing states, but none of the ones you think of when you think of major disruptions, and that maybe that explains it and that the Republican gains were in a lot more of those places like that, Illinois, New Jersey, California. Anyway, just something to noodle on.

But I think that it is objectively true that Democrats are doing better in places that have not been plagued by some of these bad governing decisions on crime and on housing that we’ve seen for in Democratic cities, and the Democratic mayors and Democratic governors in blue states should fix that.

And it’s the No. 1 thing—the last thing I’ll say on this is—the No. 1 thing that comes to mind when I already hear stupid parlor-game stuff about 2028 and it’s like Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker. And to me, the No. 1 thing Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker need to do if they want to run in 2027 is make Illinois and California run better in the meantime. Otherwise, nothing against either of those two guys, but I think that they’re going to carry this baggage that you’re talking about.

Demsas: Well, I could go on about housing in blue states forever. And there’s an article popping, I think today, listeners, as you’re hearing about this, about why I think this was a big issue for the election.

But Tim, always our last and final question.

Miller: Okay.

Miller: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up only being good on paper?

Miller: Oh, okay. Hold on. I wasn’t prepared for this. I misread the question. I thought it was an idea that was only good on paper that then ended up being not good on paper.

Demsas: Idea could be good.

Miller: No, no, no. I’ll come up with one where I’m wrong. I’m happy to bet where I’m wrong. I was just saying the ideas are endless on those.

Demsas: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something that you held, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Miller: An idea that I thought that was good on paper that ended up not being good on paper. Well, I guess I have to give the obvious answer to that question, sadly. I don’t get to rant about daylight savings time as I hoped to—an idea that was certainly good on paper in the 1800s or whenever they came up with it that’s no longer good. Falling back, that is. Permanent daylight saving time: good idea.

Changing times: not good.

Demsas: Four hundred electoral votes for whoever does this.

Miller: Yeah. The idea that I thought that was good on paper that is relevant to this podcast—because I literally put it on paper and wrote it—was the aforementioned 2013 GOP autopsy.

Demsas: Oh, yeah.

Miller: Well, how great! Compassionate conservatism. Republicans can diversify their party by getting softer on cultural issues and reaching out to the suburbs and reaching out to Hispanic voters and Black voters, criminal-justice reform, and that through criminal-justice reform and immigration reform and softening on gays, that Republicans can have a new, diverse electorate, and we can all move into a happy, bipartisan future.

That was a great idea on paper that backfired spectacularly, and now the Republicans have their most diverse electorate that they’ve had ever, I think, voting for Donald Trump after rejecting all of those suggestions that I put on paper. So there you go.

Demsas: As one vote of confidence for younger Tim, there are very many ways that history could have gone. I think that people often forget how contingent things are and how unique of a figure Trump is. And right now we’ve talked through a bunch of different ways that people are reading this moment, but there are a lot of ways that people can go, depending on what candidates do and say and how they catch fire and their charisma and what ends up being relevant in two years and in four years. So a little bit of sympathy for younger Tim.

Miller: I appreciate that. And that is true. Who the hell knows, right?

Demsas: Yeah, exactly.

Miller: Had Donald Trump not run that time and he decided he wanted to do some other scam instead, then maybe Marco Rubio is the nominee and those things do come to pass.

Demsas: [Laughs.] Yeah. If Obama doesn’t make fun of him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, we’re not even sitting here on this podcast.

Miller: Great job, Jon Lovett, or whoever wrote that joke.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I’m just joking.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Tim. Thanks for coming on the show.

Miller: Thank you, Jerusalem.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Representative Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat, cut me off before I even finished my question: Congressman, were you— “Surprised? No, I was not surprised,” Torres, who represents a poor and working-class district in the Bronx, told me. “Much of my side in politics, and much of the media, was in a state of self-deception. We confused analysis with wishful thinking.”

Which is to say, too many in Torres’s party assumed that they were heralds of virtue and endangered democratic values and that Americans would not, as a despairing New York Times columnist put it this week, vote for an “authoritarian grotesquerie.”

This, Torres argued, was purest delusion. Inflation and steeply rising rates on credit cards, car loans, and mortgages may not have been President Joe Biden’s fault, but they buffeted Americans. The immigration system was broken, and migrants swamped shelters in big cities. There’s no need to assume—as some commentators have after Donald Trump’s sweeping victory Tuesday—that the United States has a uniquely fallen electorate; across the globe, voters have tossed out governments on the left and right over the disruptions of the past five years. “A majority of Americans disapprove of Biden’s performance and felt they were worse off,” Torres said; Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, “was not responsible for the inflation, but objectively, that was a near-insurmountable disadvantage.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

Torres pointed as well to the cumulative toll taken by progressives who for at least a decade have loudly championed cultural causes and chanted slogans that turned off rank-and-file Democrats across many demographics. “Donald Trump had no greater friend than the far left,” Torres told me, “which alienated historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews with absurdities like ‘Defund the police’ or ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘Latinx.’”

The result is the reality that Americans woke up to on Wednesday. The overwhelming majority of counties in the nation, even some of the bluest of blue, had shifted rightward. The Republicans had broken down the door to the Democrats’ house and were sitting in the living room drinking its beer (or wine, as the case might be). On the day after the election, I clicked through a digital election-results map of New Jersey. Biden in 2020 took New Jersey, a Democratic Party bastion, by nearly 16 percentage points over Trump; Harris won the state by a more parsimonious five points. Everywhere, Republicans sanded down Democratic margins. In the state’s northeast corner, across from New York City, Biden had taken prosperous Bergen County by 16 percentage points in 2020; Harris took the same county by three points. Far to the south, in Atlantic County, which includes the deteriorating casino capital of Atlantic City, Biden had won by seven points; Trump took it by four points.

Torres emphasized that in his view, Harris ran a vigorous and effective campaign, given the circumstances. He did not discern many missteps. Although she sometimes tossed up clouds of vagueness when asked about past positions, she was disciplined and avoided mouthing the buzzwords of the cultural left during her 2024 campaign. But she could not sidestep her previous concessions to liberal cultural fevers, as she discovered when the Trump campaign bludgeoned her with endless commercials highlighting her decision, during her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, to champion state-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners.

In recent election cycles, Democrats have invested much hope that “people of color”—the widely varied and disparate peoples long imagined to be a monolith—would embrace an expansive list of progressive causes and rearrange American politics.

Politics, alas, is more complex than simply arranging virtuous ethnic and racial voting blocs, and Trump’s gains this year among nonwhite voters are part of a longer trend. Four years ago, even as Biden triumphed, a majority of Asian and Latino voters in California rejected a ballot proposition that would have restored affirmative action in education and hiring.

For some anti-Trump and progressive commentators, the leakage of Latino, Black, and Asian voters from the Democratic column this year registered as a shock, even a betrayal. This week, the MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough and his guest, the Reverend Al Sharpton, both upset with Trump’s triumph, suggested that Harris’s race and gender worked against her. “A lot of Hispanic voters have problems with Black candidates,” Scarborough opined; Black men, Sharpton said, are among “the most sexist” people.

To accept such stereotypes requires ignoring piles of contrary evidence. In 2008 and again in 2012, to cite an example, Hispanic voters up and down the Rio Grande Valley in Texas delivered huge electoral margins to President Barack Obama, who is Black. Many millions of Black men, nearly 80 percent of those who cast a ballot, exit polls suggest, voted for Harris this past Tuesday.

Black and Latino voters are not the only demographics drawing blame for Trump’s victory. Some commentators have pointed an accusatory finger at white women, suggesting they bear a group guilt for selling out women’s rights. This fails as a matter of fact. Nearly half of white women voted for Harris. But more to the point, telling people how to think and not to think is toxic in politics. Yet many liberal commentators seem unable to help themselves.

A week before the election, Marcel Roman, a Harvard government professor, explained on X that he and a Georgetown colleague had discovered that Latino voters deeply dislike being labeled Latinx, a gender-neutral term now widespread in academia. This term also came into use by Democratic politicians eager to establish their bona fides with progressive activists. Alas, voters liked it not so much.

[Josh Barro: Democrats deserved to lose]

This problem seems easily remedied: Refer to voters by the term they prefer—Latino, say, or Hispanic. Roman drew a different conclusion, calling for “political education meant to root out queerphobia in Latino communities.”

Professors might heed the words of Representative Ruben Gallego, a Latino Democrat who is currently wrapped in a tight race for a Senate seat in Arizona. Four years ago, I spoke with him about identity politics in his party. A progressive, Gallego is a favorite of Latino activists, who flock from California to work on his campaigns. He told me that he appreciated their help but warned them that if they used the word Latinx when talking to his Latino constituents, he would load them onto the next bus back to Los Angeles.

“It’s just important that white liberals don’t impose their thoughts and policies on us,” he told me.

And nonwhite liberals too, he might have added.

Having lost twice to Trump in three election cycles, and this time watching Republicans reclaim control of the Senate, Democrats might do well to listen carefully and respectfully to the tens of millions of Americans whom they claim to want to represent. This need not entail a turn away from populist economics so much as remaining clear-eyed about self-righteous rhetoric and millennialist demands.

The party might pay some heed to Torres, the Bronx representative. A veteran of political wars, he is a progressive Democrat on economic issues and has taken much grief of late from left activists for his vigorous support of Israel. He noted in our conversation that he is strongly in favor of immigration, and his majority-Latino district has many hardworking undocumented residents who need his aid.

But he recognizes that the national electorate, not least many Latino and Black voters, now seeks to at least partially close the door and tighten restrictions. He accepts that reality. “You have to recognize that in a democracy, public opinion matters,” he said. “We cannot just assume that we can reshape the world in a utopian way.”

In an election year that fell decisively, disastrously short of utopian for Democrats, such advice registers as entirely practical.

There is no single explanation for Donald Trump’s unambiguous win. But if, as we were constantly told, this was in fact the most important election of our lives, in which the future of democracy really was at stake, Democrats never conducted themselves that way.

It was an egregious mistake—not just in retrospect but in real time—to allow Joe Biden to renege on his implicit promise to be a one-term president, and to indulge his vain refusal to clear the way for younger and more charismatic leaders to rise up and meet the magnitude of the political moment. Perhaps no candidate, not even one blessed with the talents of a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama, could have overcome the handicap imposed on Kamala Harris when she emerged valiantly from the wreckage of the Weekend at Bernie’s campaign this summer, which her own administration had so brazenly tried to sneak past the voting public.

But other major mistakes were made over the past four years. The Biden presidency was understood to be a return to normalcy and competence after the terrible upheavals of the early months of COVID and the circus of the first Trump administration. That was the deal Americans thought had been accepted—that was Biden’s mandate. Instead, as president, even as he leaned into plenty of policies that served all Americans, Biden either could not or would not forcefully distance himself from the Democratic Party’s need for performative “wokeness”—the in-group messaging used by hyper-online and overeducated progressives that consistently alienates much of the rest of the nation.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

Here’s one narrow but meaningful example: On day one—January 20, 2021—the Biden administration released an “Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.” The order said that “children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.” Supporters argued that the order was simply pledging that the administration would enforce previously established legal protections for LGBTQ people, but critics saw it differently. As the author Abigail Shrier wrote on Twitter: “Biden unilaterally eviscerates women’s sports. Any educational institution that receives federal funding must admit biologically-male athletes to women’s teams, women’s scholarships, etc. A new glass ceiling was just placed over girls.”

In signaling their commitment to an extreme and debatable idea of trans rights, Democrats hemorrhaged other constituencies. Many Americans of all races care about girls’ sports and scholarships, and they believe that protecting women’s rights and flourishing doesn’t begin and end at safeguarding their access to an abortion.

Out of this larger context, Harris entered the final stretch of the campaign already compromised. Republicans seized on her previous comments in support of progressive proposals such as defunding the police (which she later renounced). But it was more than culture-war flash points. Fair or not, many Americans didn’t believe Harris deserved to be vice president in the first place. This is in large part the fault of her boss, who stated up front before selecting her that he would prefer a vice president “who was of color and/or a different gender.” It was a slightly less blunt version of what he said before appointing Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—that the job was only ever available to a Black woman. Harris’s very presence within the Biden administration therefore, to many onlookers, amounted to a kind of glaring evidence of precisely the kind of DEI hiring practices they intended to repudiate on Tuesday.

Voters’ response was definitive. According to a New York Times analysis, “Of the counties with nearly complete results, more than 90 percent shifted in favor of former President Donald J. Trump in the 2024 presidential election.” That is to say, Trump improved with every single racial group across the country except one. He performed slightly better with Black voters overall (13 percent voted for him this time, according to exit polls, compared with 12 percent in 2020), and significantly better with everyone else—particularly Latinos, 46 percent of whom gave him their vote. He received an outright majority of ballots from voters marking the “other” box—a first for Republicans—and his party reclaimed the Senate and looks poised to hold on to the House. All told, the only racial group among whom Trump lost any support at all turned out to be white people, whose support for him dropped by a percentage point.

Were Trump not such a singularly polarizing, unlikeable, and authoritarian figure, one of the most salient and—when glimpsed from a certain angle—even optimistic takeaways from this election would be the improbable multiracial and working-class coalition he managed to assemble. This is what Democrats (as well as independents and conservatives who oppose Trump) must reckon with if they are ever going to counter the all-inclusive nihilism and recklessness of the new MAGA majority. Much attention has been paid to the gender gap in voting, and it’s true that more men voted for Trump than women. But the fact that so many citizens of all geographies and skin tones wanted to see Democrats pay a price, not just for policy differences but also for the party’s yearslong indulgence of so many deeply unpopular academic and activist perspectives, must be taken seriously.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

“The losses among Latinos is nothing short of catastrophic for the party,” Representative Ritchie Torres of the Bronx told The New York Times. Torres, an Afro Latino Democrat, won a third term on Tuesday. He criticized the Democrats for being beholden to “a college-educated far left that is in danger of causing us to fall out of touch with working-class voters.”

Yet I fear that far too many elite Democrats will direct their ire and scrutiny outward, and dismiss the returns as the result of sexism and racism alone. In an Election Night monologue on MSNBC, the anchor Joy Reid expressed this mentality perfectly. Anyone who knows America, she said, “cannot have believed that it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color.” Her panel of white colleagues nodded solemnly. “This really was an historic, flawlessly run campaign,” Reid continued. “Queen Latifah never endorses anyone—she came out and endorsed! She had every prominent celebrity voice. She had the Swifties; she had the Beyhive. You could not have run a better campaign.”

Over on X, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” wrote that we “must not delude ourselves”: “Since this nation’s inception large swaths of white Americans—including white women—have claimed a belief in democracy while actually enforcing a white ethnocracy.”

Moments after North Carolina was called for Trump, Reid diagnosed what went wrong for Harris: White women, she said, didn’t come through; it was “the second opportunity that white women in this country have to change the way that they interact with the patriarchy,” and they had failed the test again. On X, commentators immediately jumped on the blame-white-women bandwagon, as if it was an evergreen obituary they all had on file, ready to post within a moment’s notice.

Reflexive responses like these exemplify the binary framing of culture and politics in the United States—white/nonwhite, racist/anti-racist—that ascended with the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and peaked after the racial reckoning of 2020. For many on the left, it has proved a powerful and compelling means of contextualizing enduring legacies of inequality and discrimination that are rooted in past oppressions. And it has notched real successes, especially by forcing the country to confront bias in the criminal-justice system and policing. But it has also become a casualty of its own discursive dominance—an intellectual and rhetorical straitjacket that prohibits even incisive thinkers from dealing with the ever-evolving complexity of contemporary American society. As a result, it has taught far too many highly compensated pundits, administrators, scholars, and activists that they never have to look inward.

[Ronald Brownstein: An uncertain future beat an unacceptable present]

But the framing didn’t work for many other people. “I’m thankful that victimhood didn’t win as a strategy,” one of my oldest and closest friends, a Black man who doesn’t have a college degree, messaged me after Trump’s victory. (It is worth noting that his twin brother, a veteran, turned MAGA during the racial reckoning.) If we are to listen to what enormous numbers of our compatriots—including unprecedented numbers of newly minted nonwhite GOP voters—are trying to tell us, the straitjacket proved decisive in their shift rightward.

All of us who reject the vision of America that Trumpism is offering are going to have to do something grander than merely counter a vulgar celebrity demagogue who commands a potent populist movement. It is too late for that anyway. We are going to have to reimagine the inner workings of the multiethnic society we already inhabit. The stale politics of identity that tries to reduce even the glaringly inconvenient fact of Trump’s multiracial alliance to “white women” stands in the way of overcoming the real democratic crisis.

Harris herself knows this. When Trump attempted to goad her, mockingly pondering whether she was even Black at all, she shrewdly avoided appealing to superficial categories. In this crucial way, her campaign may be viewed as an unequivocal success, one that we can learn from.

Photographs by Ross Mantle

Maybe the tell was when the mayor of Philadelphia didn’t say Kamala Harris’s name. Cherelle Parker looked out at her fellow Democrats inside a private club just northeast of Center City last night. Onstage, she beamed with pride about how, despite Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims on social media, Election Day had unfolded freely and fairly across her city. But Parker did not—could not—telegraph victory for her party. “You’ve heard us say from the very beginning that we knew that the path to the White House had to come through our keystone state. And to get through the keystone state, you had to contend with our city of Philadelphia. And I want to thank each and every Philadelphian who participated in democracy in action,” she said. Her remarks were bland, vague, safe. Soon, the mayor slipped out of the venue.

The watch party trudged along. Four ceiling fans blew hot air. Stacks of grease-stained Del Rossi’s pizza boxes filled a rear table. Anxious Philadelphians sipped $5 bottles of Yuengling from the cash bar. But no single word or phrase could encompass the swirl of emotion: anticipation, dread, denial, despair. Across two floors of what might technically be considered “partying,” attendees peered up at projection screens that showed MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki pacing and pointing. His big map was glowing red. The revelers were blue.

Early on, many partygoers were still clinging to fleeting moments of zen. Around 9 p.m., after Rachel Maddow declared Michigan “too early to call,” the venue erupted in earnest applause. The hooting grew even louder when, shortly thereafter, Maddow announced that Pennsylvania, the place that most of these voters called home, was also in toss-up territory. But by 9:30, when Kornacki showed Trump comfortably up in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, enough people could grasp that the “Blue Wall” of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—which Harris had been counting on to win the White House—was now crumbling, brick by brick, county by county.

[Read: This was the second COVID election]

I saw genuine fear in people’s eyes when, just after 9:50, zooming in on the Pennsylvania map, Kornacki mentioned Trump and Lackawanna County. A union leader named Sam Williamson told me about all the door-knocking he’d done. He had been “really confident” Harris would win Pennsylvania. But by 10:30 or so, even the formerly blue Centre County, where Penn State University is located, had flipped red. Was this actually happening? Hardly anyone even murmured when Kornacki spoke of Harris’s success right there in Philadelphia. People were pissed. Demoralized. Many began to filter out. Democrats had spent this twisty, complex presidential campaign with a narrow path to victory, and now that path was narrowing to a close.

People gather for an election night watch party at the Ruba Club in Philadelphia, PA (Ross Mantle for The Atlantic)

Each voter I spoke with processed the night a little differently. A 38-year-old nurse named Abena Bempah conceded, somewhat sheepishly, that she had tuned out this election until late June, when President Joe Biden had his disastrous debate against former (and future) President Donald Trump. After that night, Bempah had an awakening: “It actually reminded me that I need to be an engaged citizen throughout a candidate’s entire term.” So she spent the summer and fall volunteering with the Philadelphia Democrats. She told me that to preserve democracy, people need to do so much more than vote—they need to voice their concerns to elected officials. “I think that Republicans are planning on Democrats to rest on our laurels and not be as active,” she said.

Near a billiards table, I met a father and son, Shamai and Liv Leibowitz, who live in Silver Spring, Maryland, and had driven up to Pennsylvania to volunteer. Liv, who is 21, is taking a year off from school, and had recently been canvassing in nearby Bucks County and Chester County. He wore a baseball hat with Representative Jamie Raskin’s name on the dome. “I was here for the past two weeks,” he told me with a smile. Half of the undecided voters he’d met felt that they didn’t know enough about Harris and her positions. But many, he said, were staying home because of her support of Israel.

Liv’s father, Shamai, told me that he had the gut feeling that Trump would win. Shamai had grown up in Israel, and he moved to the United States in the early 2000s. He believed that Harris was doomed in this election because she wouldn’t substantively deviate from Biden’s Middle East policy. “I’m worried right now because she didn’t come out forcefully for a weapons embargo, or even hint at a weapons embargo. We met people canvassing who told us, ‘We’re voting Green Party’; ‘We’re staying home,’” he said. Shamai knew it would have been politically risky for her to criticize Israel, but, he told me, in the end, not changing course was hurting her more.

Philadelphia, PA (Ross Mantle for The Atlantic)

I also spoke with two people who might be considered interlopers. One was a 27-year-old Swede named Gabriel Gunnarsson, who had flown to Philadelphia from his home in Stockholm just to witness the U.S. election with his own eyes. As he nursed a beer, he told me that everyone he knew in Sweden had been following our election particularly closely this year. “I’m feeling bad,” he told me. “I’m sort of dystopic about the future, I think, and just seeing this, it’s a horrible result for the world.” I asked him if he recalled one of Trump’s more vile comments from his first term in office: He’d said that America was bringing in people only from “shithole countries,” and he’d lamented that we don’t have more immigrants from places like Norway. Gunnarsson laughed and shook his head. “He did this when he was president as well: He just randomly said, ‘Look at what’s happening in Sweden!’” Gunnarsson recalled. “And we were all like, ‘What did happen?’”

[Read: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

Finally, as the evening was winding down, I met a man named Tim Brogan, who very quietly told me he was an independent, not a Democrat. Would you care to share whom you voted for today? I asked. Brogan looked down at his feet, then off to the corner, then back at me. “I voted for the other party,” he said. “I did in fact vote for Trump, yes.”

He had come out to this particular event because he lives in the neighborhood and wanted to be around some friends. He told me he works in real estate, and as a lifelong Philadelphian, he was distressed to see inflation and more crime in the city. This was, in fact, Brogan’s third consecutive time voting for Trump, even though he had previously voted for Barack Obama. He earnestly believed that Trump was the only person who could set America back on the right path. “There’s just so many things that we missed—and we’re allowing—with the Democratic Party,” he said. “I think my choice was a good direction for my beliefs.”

I asked him how he talks about politics with his friends, family, and neighbors.

“Simple,” he said. “We don’t like to get into it.”

On August 18, 2020, Americans marked the 100-year anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and of women’s right to vote. The next day, Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for her current role, vice president of the United States. The consonance punctuated an already historic candidacy: Harris was the first woman of color to seek that office on a major-party ticket. She acknowledged the moment’s gravity at the beginning of her acceptance speech, thanking Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Mary McLeod Bethune, and many of the other women whose paths had led to the ground she broke that evening.

Harris now seeks to go further still, aiming for the U.S. presidency. But the history-making possibilities of her campaign have been easy to overlook, in large part because of the man Harris faces in her bid. Donald Trump, so ignorant of the past and so careless about the future, is a present-tense kind of candidate. The history he has brought to his fight for a second term—the attempt to overturn an election; the promises of deportations and retributions and violence; the racism; the misogyny; the incompetence, lies, and fraud; the assault; the boast that he has grabbed women “by the pussy”; the installation of judges who have grabbed away women’s rights—has imbued the 2024 contest with a sense of latent emergency. His flaws, as so often happens, have become someone else’s problem.

If the Democrats’ 2020 campaign was a “battle for the soul of America,” its 2024 counterpart has been a battle for the national body: the policies and practicalities that allow the country to function as a democracy. An opponent whose party is “Republican” but whose posture is “dictator” turns talk of history-making into a luxury. Harris rarely mentions her gender or race on the campaign trail. Her recent ads, MSNBC noted, have described her childhood primarily in terms of class. During the nomination speech she delivered at the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris briefly described her background—her South Asian mother, her Jamaican father—but focused on her career as a prosecutor. (The most conspicuous mention of history-making came from Hillary Clinton, whose speech acknowledged the structural integrity of “the highest, hardest glass ceiling.”) As Vox’s Constance Grady put it, “A woman is running for president and has decent odds of making it. She just seems to think her chances of being the first woman president are better as long as she never, ever talks about it.”

[Read: Kamala Harris’s ambition trap]

That reticence may well be good strategy. Clinton’s 2016 loss chastens strategists still: once bitten by the Electoral College, twice shy. And the brevity of Harris’s campaign—Joe Biden’s decision to step down in July left her just over three months at the top of the ticket—has required her to triage her messaging. “Well, I’m clearly a woman,” Harris told NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. Better, she suggested, to spend the time she had telling voters what they might not already know. “My challenge,” she said, “is the challenge of making sure I can talk with and listen to as many voters as possible and earn their vote.”

You could read Harris’s disinclination to talk about history-making as, in its own way, historic. She is campaigning to become the president, full stop, no other qualifier required. This doesn’t mean she has not focused on traditionally feminist priorities—reproductive freedom and care-related policies are at the center of her campaign messaging. She just hasn’t made her identity an explicit part of her pitch. This is a notable departure from the era of “I’m with her.” Progress can be exhilarating. It can also be condescending. (After Biden promised early in his 2020 campaign that he would name a woman as his running mate, the satirical website Reductress offered a headline that neatly captured the resulting discourse: “Biden Says VP Pick Is Between Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and a Beautiful Lady Ostrich.”)

The candidate who has most directly acknowledged the historical nature of Harris’s candidacy has been, instead, her opponent. After “Sleepy Joe” stepped aside, Trump began auditioning insults with the frenzy of a Hollywood casting agent, suggesting by turns that Harris “happened to turn Black”; that she is “mentally impaired”; that she has the “laugh of a crazy person”; that she will be seen by world leaders as a “play toy”; that she’d traded sexual favors to propel her rise to power. In a rally held shortly after Biden left the race, Trump made a great show of mispronouncing the name of a politician who has been nationally famous for years—butchering “Kamala” more than 40 times over the course of a single speech. J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, tried to denigrate Harris by accusing her of membership in that shadiest of cabals: “childless cat ladies.”

Americans tend to talk about history’s march as a matter of physics: movements, momentum, progress, resistance. The language can imply that the advancement is inevitable, an arc that moves ever forward as it bends toward something better. It can, as such, mislead. Susan Faludi’s 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against America’s Women, was premised on the fallacy, expressed repeatedly in the American media of the time, that feminism’s fights had by that point been, essentially, won. Clinton’s 2016 loss, and the many other kinds of losses that followed, served as a further rebuke: Gains can be ungained in an instant. Rights are inalienable, until they’re not.

Backlash was published the year before a record number of women ran for, and won, national office. Media outlets, in a fit of ahistorical optimism, dubbed it the “year of the woman.” What they might not have realized was that the “year of the woman” had already been proclaimed (as an analysis in Slate found) in 1966. And in 1968, 1984, and 1990. It would be declared again to describe the electoral results of 2008, 2010, 2016, 2018, and 2020.

History warns, in that way, against the easy comforts of “making history.” The progress and backlash that Faludi identified tend not to take turns—the one giving, the other taking away—but instead to crash together. The 2016 election failed to produce a woman president and in that sense preserved the status quo, but many more people voted for Clinton than for Trump, and this was its own bit of progress. Polls attempting to measure Americans’ opinions about a potential woman president have reflected a fairly steady increase in comfort since the idea was first tested, in the mid-1930s. But the endurance of such surveys—their treatment of a woman in the White House as a question to be debated, a disruption to be endured—is, itself, a concession.

[Read: Pop culture failed to imagine Kamala Harris]

Harris has had to contend with these tensions in her campaign. She has navigated them by emphasizing what her presidency might do rather than what it might mean. (“I am running,” she told CNN’s Dana Bash, “because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.”) Along the way, though, she has also navigated backlash in human form. Some of the enduring images of the 2016 debates captured Trump looming over Clinton, blithely and menacingly, belittling her not only with his words but with his movements. He has been attempting to do something similar to Harris, even from a distance: Take up her space. Get in her way. Put the whole thing on his terms. The moments when his campaign has seemed the most flummoxed, the most pessimistic, are the ones when everyone seems to be paying attention to her, not him.

Trump has a unique kind of gravitational pull—a way of forcing everything else into his orbit, however strongly it might resist. And he has brought those brute physics to the 2024 campaign. When Harris delivered her “closing argument” speech in Washington on October 29, the location chosen for the event was the same one Trump had used for the speech that preceded the January 6 insurrection. And the address did not merely evoke Trump; it discussed him. As she spoke, Harris emphasized the disparities between herself and her opponent. She warned of what a second Trump presidency could do to the country. She expressed her desire to “turn the page.” She emphasized the future she wants to prevent more than the history she herself wants to make.

This was the right speech, the rousing speech, the prudent speech—the speech Harris needed to deliver. In its message, though, the candidate who has argued that she is the “best person” for the presidency “regardless of race and gender” was consigned to the stereotypically feminine role: He acts, she responds. The man so accustomed to taking what he wants robbed her of her full moment, and the moment of its full meaning. Crises fix things to the present. They demand sacrifice for the sake of the future. In pursuing the presidency, Harris is “not concerned about being the first,” a campaign official said. “She’s concerned about making sure she’s not the last.”

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What happens when the owner of one of the most important news organizations in the country decides that the journalists are the problem? That’s the question I keep asking myself in response to Jeff Bezos’s op-ed explaining his decision to have his newspaper, The Washington Post, stop making presidential endorsements just days before it was reportedly set to formally back Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bezos argued that the press needs to accept reality about its unpopularity, and implied that journalists are to blame for our sinking reputation. He didn’t even acknowledge the concerted, multiyear campaign—led most recently by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel—to convince Americans that the free press is, to borrow a phrase, the “enemy of the people.” Bezos writes, “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased … It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”

Not once did Bezos even try to explain why it is that “most people believe the media is biased.”

The decision to get out of the presidential-endorsement game itself is not problematic to me. In fact, I’ve always felt sorry for any working journalist who has to cover a candidate’s campaign the day after its opinion page comes out against that candidate. As NBC’s political director, I had to deal with analogous situations over the years, when campaigns refused to grant interviews to or even interact with NBC journalists because they didn’t like an opinion that was aired on MSNBC’s more ideological or partisan programs. For reporters who are simply trying to do their job—covering a campaign, reporting what’s happening, and writing the most factually accurate account of the day that they can confirm by deadline—it’s not a comfortable position to be in.

[Ellen Cushing: Don’t cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime.]

For years, I pushed NBC to invest in a conservative talk-show lineup on CNBC. I wanted to be able to say: We have a red cable channel at night and a blue cable channel at night, but here at NBC, we are stuck covering politics as it is, not as we wish it was. Covering politics as it is continues to be my mantra. Those who want to push their own politics should leave reporting and become activists; there are plenty of places where they can do that.

The real problem with what Bezos did was not the decision he made, but its timing and execution—rolled out on the eve of an election with little explanation. And then, when he did publish an explanation, he somehow made things worse. There are many legitimate criticisms of contemporary journalism, but Bezos didn’t level any of them. Instead, he wrote that media outlets suffer from a “lack of credibility” because they “talk only to a certain elite.” He betrayed no awareness that he was parroting a right-wing talking point, revealing his ignorance of the 50-year campaign to delegitimize the mainstream press—which arguably began when conservative supporters of President Richard Nixon vowed revenge for the media’s exposure of the Watergate crimes.

What Bezos failed to acknowledge is that a legion of right-wing critics—most notably the longtime Fox News CEO, Roger Ailes—spent decades attacking media outlets, repeating the charge that they are irredeemably biased. For Ailes and others, it proved a lucrative approach—when you hear something over and over, you tend to believe it. Trump and his team have used the same strategy, building their appeal by attacking the press. Social-media algorithms have only made this repetitive, robotic attack on the press worse.

But instead of defending his reporters against such attacks, Bezos decided to blame the victim in his extremely defensive op-ed. He is right to note that “complaining is not a strategy.” But neither is surrender. Six years ago, I argued in The Atlantic that media outlets had made a mistake by failing to respond to their critics. Many journalists feared that fighting back against bad-faith attacks on our work would make us look partisan. So instead, we chose not to engage when partisan actors at Fox News or campaign operatives used the charge of media bias against working journalists. And I wrote that this needed to change.

I thought that if journalists defended their work, at a minimum, the owners of media institutions would have our back. Boy, was that naive. It turns out that Bezos himself has fallen victim to the campaign to convince the world that all media should be assumed to be biased politically unless proved otherwise. His op-ed must have felt like a gut punch to reporters at the Post. Only in its final lines did he say that the journalists he employs deserve to be believed.

To Bezos’s credit, he has at least put his name on an op-ed and attempted a defense of his actions. The leaders of the publicly traded companies that happen to own major news organizations have not had the guts to explain publicly—either to the employees they’ve laid off or the ones they’ve kept—why they’ve decided to either “Trump-proof” their companies or to shrink their commitment to the news-and-information business.

And if you haven’t been paying attention to the accelerating contraction of major news organizations, just wait until the first quarter of the coming year, when many publicly traded companies may decide that news divisions aren’t worth the headaches they cause their CEOs. These companies have plenty of cash to help sustain their news divisions while they find their footing in the new media landscape. The fact they are choosing not to do so says a lot.

Part of me understands the logic of much of corporate America. The idea that Trump could use the power of the government to punish companies for journalism he dislikes is not hypothetical. Amazon alleges that he did this once already—interfering with the award of a $10 billion defense contract—because the Post’s tough reporting made the president see Bezos as his “political enemy.” Executives have a fiduciary responsibility to protect their shareholders’ investment. If that means accepting the terms of coercion by Trump, apparently, so be it.

Bezos could have made the case that The Washington Post is not a partisan institution, but instead, he argued that journalists have to accept the perception of media bias as our reality. If that’s what we have to do, then perhaps Bezos should either sell the Post or put it in some sort of blind trust. Because he has created the perception—among both the public and his own employees—that his other business interests influenced his decision not to raise Trump’s ire with a Harris endorsement.

Bezos, who owns the space company Blue Origin, is in a rich-guy race with Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, to become the leader in commercial space exploration. That Musk has become Trump’s chief surrogate, and a leading financier of his campaign, must surely have made folks at Blue Origin nervous. Perhaps that’s why Blue Origin executives secured a meeting with Trump before the election. The timing of their meeting—the same day the Post made its no-more-endorsements announcement—only adds to the perception problem facing Bezos. But in the same op-ed in which he told his journalists that they needed to accept perceptions as reality, he insisted that the perception of a quid pro quo was wrong, and that he hadn’t known about the meeting beforehand.

[Robert Greene: Why major newspapers won’t endorse Kamala Harris]

By Bezos’s own logic, how are the journalists at the Post supposed to be able to get out from under the perception that Bezos is hopelessly biased? What about readers? Do they now have to assume that the Post’s politics are Bezos’s politics?

I’m sorry that Bezos has not brought the same energy, focus, and innovation to the Post that he brought to Amazon. The man who built the “everything store” could have developed the Post into an “everything portal,” a model for information sharing. If he wanted to foster ideological diversity, he could have purchased multiple publications, each with its own editorial board. Instead, he apparently decided he wanted a trophy. And now that trophy has gotten in the way of another ambition—becoming a commercial space pioneer.

What chance do journalists have to regain public confidence if the person who owns one of the most important media institutions in the world doesn’t have the first clue about the long-standing campaign to delegitimize the very publication he owns?

Whatever the public perception, the reality is that most journalists, across the country, show up at work each day determined to be fair, honest, and direct. That’s what their readers expect of one another, and they should expect the same of the people who report the news they consume.

If only Jeff Bezos understood that.