Your mirror after you clean it with CYA-brand vaseline.
Yep, let me say I’m surprised. Either the women of America are not as outraged at losing their rights to abortion as I thought, or other facets of the Democratic platform were sufficiently repellent to make them take their chances with the Republicans, or they were overwhelmed by the male vote.
I must say, when famed vote counter Rep Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) gets something like this wrong, you know the shared model of reality to which the Democrats subscribe needs to be reformulated. What should they do?
- Gather data. Fingerpointing is, of course, the natural first reaction. But that’s more of a strategy for climbing the social prestige ladder over the bodies of your fellows than it is problem-solving. Don’t get me wrong, some current Party leaders and theorists are best dealt with by expelling them, but picking and dumping scapegoats before analysis is complete is ineffective, and looks more like revenge than a considered judgment.
- Gather that data by surveys of the disaffected. While exit polls may point the way, sit down and talk to people. Don’t lead them to your preferred conclusion – if you’re not being surprised during the interview, you’re probably doing something wrong.
- During analysis, pay attention to CYA (Cover Your Ass) maneuvering. Long-time readers may remember when Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) won the Virginia governor’s seat, I wrote that the Democratic analysis of their failure in that election seemed to consist of CYA, and that made me uneasy. This is the category of result I’d expect from CYA that no one closely examined. CYA means less important sources of error are examined, leaving the big source as a festering wound in the flank. I, in fact, would recommend that those employing CYA strategies, at the end of error analysis, simply be expelled from the Party, if not outright, then if they dig in their heels in proclaiming their defense. If they run about in a frenzy claiming The voters are bigots!, so much the better. Blaming someone else for your mistake is the mark of an incompetent.
Of course, fingerpointing has already begun. This fellow, on Daily Kos, is a little hard to follow:
I guess at this point I have already lost my audience; I must be a Bernie Bro (I am not. I am French, remember?), a Progressive (that, yes), a crazy leftist (yes too). But as a purely professional issue, should not you at least wonder about, and try to measure, the possible electoral cost among at least some low-income groups when the candidate does no attack corporate dominance and wealth and income inequality? And while we are at it, did you know that Harris got her best numbers, according to exit polls, from people making at least $100,000 a year, while she lost up to 40% of the low-income groups making less than $30,000 a year? Your answer will probably be that high-income people are educated, low-income people are not, and it’s a matter of education. But then why would 45% of the rich and educated still vote for Trump?
Like any good leftist, he blames the problem on income inequalities. Harris didn’t promise to remedy those, thus she loses. Is that the real problem? Or is this everything-is-a-nail solution?
Erick Erickson’s already in on the fun, although strictly speaking, he’s not a Democrat. He has a number of Democratic foibles he’s going to point at, and while they’re all worth considering, I’ll pull out just one, as it seems to be connected to the aforementioned Youngkin incident:
Eighth, the progressive left has embraced intersectional politics and it is killing them. They cannot align with most voters on transgenderism. They have divided themselves over Israel and antisemitism due to their “colonizer” talking points. Harris could not pick Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania because of the anti-semitism in her party. He might have saved her. These intersectionally woke white Democrats cannot fathom that black voters might not relate to Kamala Harris because, to these white progressives, they share a skin color. Identity politics and intersectionalism will keep tripping up the Democrats. White Progressive Democrats openly fantasized about a Kamala Harris – Pete Buttigieg ticket. If Democrats conclude America isn’t ready for a black female president, good luck with your first gay presidential nominee.
I’ve been running across references to identitarian politics, on both the race and culture fronts, and how intersectionality plays into it for years, and I think that all ties into the analysis of the loss to Youngkin, with an analysis that leads to brushing the white voters with the BIGOT brush. A popular example is the dislike harbored by legal Latino immigrants for illegal Latino immigrants. In Erickson’s world, the Democrats of a certain stripe, upon identifying someone as Latino, would assign them a politics, whether they’re oppressed or not, and that’s about it. In the given example, that would be a mischaracterization of the Latino part of the United States – a misunderstanding of reality, and a causeway to mistakes and disaster.
Is Erickson right? I suspect he is.
He also echoes a point I’ve made a couple of times:
Finally, if you lose the presidency to a multiply indicted and once convicted felon as well as losing the popular vote, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, maybe stop accusing everyone else of being bigotted [sic], racist, transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, or whatever else and accept that you are out of touch, unable to relate, and lost to Donald Trump.
Actually, I believe he has 32 convictions to his name, although they’re on appeal. Does 32 make things worse for the Democrats? Don’t forget he’s demented and a few other terms of denigration.
Erickson has a very good point.
There’s a more subtle point here as well, having to do with how to play a game. All games are played through the mental model we construct of the game, whether we’re playing at the kitchen table or engaging with the real world. The good players connect evaluation methodologies to the game itself, meaning selecting the next tactic is based on how the tactic will affect the game.
Bad players mistake the mental model of the game for the game itself. Why they do this will be as varied as all the games themselves, from the sometimes insoluble nature of some games to, as I believe in this case, a combination of sloth, a desire to retain social prestige/position by acceding to dubious political models, and the bullying ways of transgender advocates who either do not understand the essence of liberal democracy, or have deliberately chosen to ignore it in service of their haste to embed transgenderism and its associated medical surgeries in American culture, even in the face of European withdrawal from same.
The result? The Daily Kos stream of popular posts was instructive, progressing from wild-eyed confidence to assertions that victory was still viable to the beginning of a post-mortem. Will they get to Erickson’s thoughts on the matter, or will they remain self-absorbed and disconnected from real people?
I’ve had a lot more thoughts, but I think I’ll stop this rant here. Maybe more later.
