By Ross Douthat
For the first time since the night of Nov. 4, 2008, a presidential election unfolded precisely as I anticipated it would.
Having faced numerous surprises in the past, I can’t claim to possess remarkable foresight. However, I believe the outcome of the 2024 election was distinctly predictable. Regardless of the surprising factors — the candidate switch, assassination attempts, and Elon Musk’s involvement — there remained a consistency not only in the fundamentals, the issues at hand, and the national sentiment but also in the strategies that Democrats chose to employ or ignore throughout the process. Repeatedly, they facilitated Donald Trump’s return to the White House in ways that should have been apparent.
It was anticipated, first and foremost, that voters would hold the Biden administration accountable for not making a significant policy shift following the midterm elections, when despite the Democrats’ success in critical Senate races, they still lost control of the House and saw no substantial improvement in Joe Biden’s low approval ratings.
Triangulating after a midterm defeat is a well-proven strategy for enhancing an administration’s standing, yet the Biden Democrats largely ignored this approach: There was no sweeping legislative push akin to Clinton’s on deficit reduction, no substantial engagement on social issues, no reevaluation of aggressive regulations on gas-powered vehicles or measures to forgive student debt, and merely a belated attempt to restore order at the southern border.
Similarly, it was foreseeable that the accumulation of Trump’s legal troubles would provide him with political leverage and pose risks for the Democrats. A single prosecution, ideally stemming from the classified documents issue, would have told a different tale. However, multiple cases rooted in various inventive legal theories, two of which were pursued by evidently partisan prosecutors, made it easy for Trump to rally Republican voters around a narrative of victimization — while the fact that he only went to trial for a case related to falsehoods about sex diminished the attempts to hold him accountable.
Instead of affirming the rule of law, the entire endeavor of prosecuting a presidential candidate while he campaigned effectively made the rule of law a pawn in the political arena. It positioned the Democrats in the awkward situation of claiming that Trump posed a serious threat because of his potential to prosecute political adversaries — while he was simultaneously facing multiple prosecutions himself.
Moreover, it became painfully clear that Biden was not prepared for the demands of a reelection campaign, much less for an additional four years in office. This reality was something the Democratic Party eventually confronted — but at least a year too late and only when such acknowledgment was imposed upon its leadership.
This delay proved catastrophic, given another foreseeable factor: that Kamala Harris, despite the excitement of “Brat summer” and the politics of optimism, was simply not the candidate a political party would nominate if it genuinely regarded the existential nature of the election.
The Democrats did recognize this for a while, partially explaining the persistent denial surrounding Biden’s abilities. Nonetheless, there was a conscious effort to forget this awareness during the brief period when the nomination process could have been opened. It thereafter became politically inconvenient to express any criticism regarding Harris’s candidacy.
A certain partisan mentality often takes root in the final days of a close election. Harrismania reminded me of the fleeting burst of Republican enthusiasm for Mitt Romney after his initial debate performance against Barack Obama in 2012. It represented a passionate attachment that he had never earned as a candidate in the primaries and that evaporated the moment the election results favored the Democrats.
However, that election lacked the crucial element of 2024’s predictability: the repeated instances of witnessing Trump outperform his polling expectations.
Undoubtedly, the sample size is limited, and it was conceivable that pollsters had overcorrected this time given their previous errors (even if the pollsters themselves did not provide a cohesive explanation for those mistakes). Nonetheless, I still find it difficult to believe that anyone who experienced the elections of 2016 and 2020 could have been taken aback that a race where Trump achieved his highest polling figures would eventually be one he would claim victory in.
Coming to terms with this surprise should serve as a foundational step for the Democrats before delving into discussions about policy positioning or cultural conflicts. In recent years, liberalism has been engulfed by a frenzy over “misinformation,” an inclination towards managing online discourse and media narratives to shield the vulnerable public from the attractions of populism and conspiracy theories.
The lesson from 2024 is not that this managerial initiative failed to safeguard swing voters from disinformation. Rather, it succeeded in a more twisted sense: It shielded liberals from the stark reality, preventing them from recognizing all the ways their own decisions were leading toward a foreseeable loss.
