If you’ve been reading much political analysis over the last couple of months, or reading any news at all over the last couple of days, you’re probably familiar with a narrative that has taken hold fairly consistently: The democratic party suffered a humiliating defeat last November, their traditional constituencies show signs of fragmenting, and party leaders are disorganized and demoralized. In short, the democratic brand is severely damaged, and the party brain-trust seems to have no game-plan for stanching the bleeding among the rank-and-file, beyond waiting in the wings and simply hoping that Trump will (again) start stepping on his own dick.
Indeed, even the Toteboard assigned a “bullet” to the party’s election performance.
So yes, the democrats endured a pretty shitty election cycle. They dithered far too long ignoring the reality of Biden’s cognitive decline, they anointed a presidential candidate who seriously under-performed both Biden’s and Clinton’s showings, and they lost four senate seats to boot. Clearly, not a good report card.
That said, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that the Trump-Harris contest was one of the closest presidential elections in the lifetime of any Toteboard reader, regardless of when that reader was born. In terms of the national popular vote, Harris’s 1.5% (actually, 1.48%) deficit made for the fourth closest race in the last seventeen presidential elections dating back to 1960, squeezed out only by Kennedy and Nixon in 1960 (0.2%), Nixon and Humphrey in 1968 (0.7%), and Bush and Gore in 2000 (0.5%). Phrased the other way, in terms of the national popular vote, Harris actually performed better than Barry Goldwater (1964), George McGovern (1972), Gerald Ford (1976), Jimmy Carter (1980), Walter Mondale (1984), Michael Dukakis (1988), George Bush (1992), Bob Dole (1996), John Kerry (2004), John McCain (2008), Mitt Romney (2012), and even Trump twice (2016 and 2020).
And just for fun, does anyone have any idea when the last election was before 1960 that had a margin closer than Harris’s? For that, you have to go all the way back to the three consecutive Gilded-Age era elections from 1880 to 1888, all of which were bitterly disputed and corruptly resolved. That means that this last election had the fourth closest popular vote over the last thirty-four presidential elections!
What’s more, Trump’s electoral college “cushion” over Harris amounted to only two states beyond the tipping point state, which is pretty average when compared to the results of every election since 2000.
In other words, whether we look at the popular vote or the electoral vote, this last election hardly qualified as a landslide. Unless, of course, we are now calling 1.5% a landslide.
But unfortunately, we are calling 1.5% a landslide. Or to be more precise, some rather unsavory political players are calling that a landslide, and behaving as though it was one. Trump has already begun to govern as though he won an overwhelming mandate, and his sycophantic congressional drones seem ready to fall in line and do his bidding.
The Toteboard isn’t alone in noting this peculiar dynamic. For one, the NYT’s Ezra Klein addressed it just a few of days ago with a piece entitled “Trump Barely Won the Popular Vote: Why Doesn’t It Feel That Way?” But where Klein attributes this to a diffuse “vibe,” i.e., things like the role of social media, a corporate turn to the right, and a widespread rejection of “wokeness,” the Toteboard recognizes this simply as the culmination of a corrosive trend that began well over a generation ago.
The short version is that the republicans simply refuse to engage in collaborative government, whether or not they control the White House.
It may seem like ancient history, but there once was a time when presidents of both parties who were elected by narrow margins (and even some who weren’t) recognized that they could govern more effectively, inspire a more harmonious citizenry, and leave behind a more positive historical legacy when they led more by building consensus than by strong-arming partisan goals. Such presidents deliberated with the other party and with Congress over domestic and economic policy, they sought bipartisan support before putting forth nominations to the courts, and they demonstrated accountability to more than just their own electoral coalitions. That’s why the historical record reveals presidential actions that seem incongruous by today’s partisan standards: It was republican Richard Nixon who created the Environmental Protection agency, while it was democrat Jimmy Carter who championed federal deregulation; it was John Kennedy who nominated the center-right Byron White to the Supreme Court, and republican Gerald Ford who nominated the moderate-turned-liberal champion John Paul Stevens. And Congress generally responded in kind to such attempts at enlightened leadership. Would anyone under, say, forty years old believe you if you told them that Stevens, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer were all confirmed to SCOTUS by unanimous or near unanimous margins, all within a period of barely two decades?
As the Toteboard noted three years ago: “Even a disparate hodgepodge of fifth graders on the playground have a natural instinct for employing ‘schoolyard rules’ to disarm the potential conflicts that may emerge from various divisions. It’s not rocket science to settle for compromising, or ‘taking turns,’ or finding a game that everyone can play.” When this ethos prevails, the playground functions better and is a demonstrably happier place.
But the republicans stopped playing by the rules with the advent of the George W. Bush administration in 2000, and they have essentially been fighting dirty ever since then. One would think that the first person in nearly a century-and-a-half to be elected president after losing the popular vote, a person who probably won because a few thousand Jewish Floridians brought the wrong glasses to their polling places, a person who for fuck’s sake needed the republican-dominated Supreme Court to stop a recount and gift-wrap the election for him – one would think that person would show a little humility in office and adopt an at least somewhat centrist posture. But no such luck. Bush governed by steamroller from the radical right, with the same sense of entitlement with which he had lived his whole life, effectively ending a nominally cooperative period in American political history.
Actually, a case could be made that the seeds were sewn for this even a few years earlier than that, when Newt Gingrich led the republican takeover of Congress. As you may recall, the Clinton administration ended twelve years of republican control of the White House, the longest stretch that a single party dominated the presidency since the days of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Consequently, in their apparent outrage that their party did not get to own the office in perpetuity, the republicans essentially threw a collective parliamentary tantrum. They adopted a completely obstructionist posture, began publicly vilifying the democrats (as opposed to regarding them as good-faith ideological opponents with whom they could occasionally compromise), and even impeached Bill Clinton for entirely prurient reasons (a move that ending up biting Gingrich in his own ample ass). Since then, republicans have treated government as a no-holds-barred blood-sport, i.e., abusing power when they have it, impeding effective administration when they don’t. And just in case you don’t get the point, that’s a pretty shitty formula for running a country.
Parenthetically, it should be noted that despite Bush’s and Trump’s despotism, Obama and Biden did both try to move to a place that transcended petty partisanship, and Obama even partially blamed himself for failing to reach that promised land: “I have no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide.” But as the Toteboard noted three years ago, “just as you can’t reason with someone who is unreasonable, you can’t deliberate with someone who won’t enter deliberations in good faith. You can’t compromise with someone who is planning their next coup.” The democrats really had no choice but to go it alone during the Obama and Biden years. And then the GOP had the balls to accuse them of acting unilaterally in bad-faith.
And so here we are again, back to four more “abusing power when they have it” years, and the results won’t be pretty. Bolstered by a phantom mandate from a phantom landslide, Trump is now beginning his unchecked exacerbation of economic inequality, abdication of environmental stewardship, normalization of sexism, perversion of the legal system, empowering of Christian theocrats, devaluation of the truth, inflaming of racism and xenophobia, enabling of global fascism, and undermining of government checks and balances. Unfortunately, the democrats have very few weapons at their disposal for blocking the implementation of this phony baloney mandate, as the republicans own a sanity-proof majority in the senate and have long since staged their successful takeover of the Supreme Court.
So hang on folks, it’s going to be a rough ride. Stay focused on what you know is right, hold on to your family and friends as tightly as you can, and take occasional solace that there are still some people out there fighting the good fight.
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