How Democrats helped Trump

On election night, Nov. 5, 2024, a television plays video of CNN calling Georgia for Donald Trump. (IOULEX/The New York Times).

By Ross Douthat

For the first time since the night of Nov. 4, 2008, a presidential election went exactly the way that I expected it to go.

Having been surprised so many times before, I can’t boast about my prescience. But I do think the 2024 election’s outcome was uniquely foreseeable. Despite all the wild elements — the candidate switch, the assassination attempts and the Elon Musk intervention — there was a consistency not just to the fundamentals, the issue landscape and the country’s mood, but also to the decisions that Democrats made and didn’t make throughout. Time and again, they smoothed Donald Trump’s path back to the White House in ways that should have been foreseeable.

It was foreseeable, first, that voters would punish the Biden administration for failing to make a major policy pivot after the midterm elections, when despite the Democrats’ overperformance in key Senate races, they still lost the House of Representatives and saw no meaningful improvement to Joe Biden’s dismal approval ratings.

Triangulating after a midterm loss is a tried-and-true tactic for improving an administration’s position, and yet it’s a tactic that the Biden Democrats largely eschewed: There was no Clintonian push for a sweeping legislative deal on deficit reduction, no serious outreach on social issues, no reconsideration of the aggressive efforts to regulate gas-powered cars or forgive student loans, and only a too-little-too-late effort to restore order to the southern border.

It was similarly foreseeable that the pileup of prosecutions of Trump would create political opportunities for Trump and dangers for the Democrats. A single prosecution, ideally in the classified documents case, would have been a different story. But having several cases based on a range of creative legal theories, two of them pursued by obviously partisan prosecutors, made it easy for Trump to bind Republicans voters back to him with a narrative of persecution — while the fact that he went to trial only for a case involving lying about sex trivialized the effort to hold him to account.

Far from vindicating the rule of law, the entire project of prosecuting a candidate for president while he ran for president foreseeably made the rule of law a hostage to the political process. And it left the Democrats in the difficult position of arguing that Trump was a grave danger because he might prosecute his political enemies — while he was being serially prosecuted himself.

Then it was foreseeable, indeed painfully obvious, that Biden was not equipped for the rigors of a reelection campaign, let alone the rigors of four more years in office. This reality the Democratic Party did get around to reckoning with — but at least a year too late, and only when the reckoning was forced upon its leadership.

And that delay was fatal, because of another foreseeability: that Kamala Harris, notwithstanding “Brat summer” and the politics of joy and all the other weird effusions that accompanied her sudden ascent to the nomination, was just not the candidate that a political party would put up if it took its own rhetoric about the existential stakes of the election seriously.

This was something that Democrats did foresee for a while, which was part of why denial about Biden’s capabilities persisted. But there was a deliberate forgetting of this foresight in the brief window when the nominating process might have been thrown open. And thereafter it became impolitic to say anything critical about the Harris sprint.

Some form of that partisan mindset always takes hold in the last days of the close election. Harrismania reminded me of the brief spasm of Republican enthusiasm for Mitt Romney that followed his first debate performance against Barack Obama in 2012. It was a form of passionate attachment that he’d never earned as a primary candidate and that dissolved the instant the election was called for the Democrats.

But that election didn’t have the final piece of 2024 foreseeability: the repeated past experience of watching Trump outperform his polls.

Obviously the sample size involved is small, and it was imaginable that pollsters had overcorrected this time around for their past failures (even if the pollsters themselves didn’t present a unified theory of those failures). But I still don’t see how anyone who lived through 2016 and 2020 could have been surprised that a race where Trump posted his best polling numbers ever was ultimately a race that he would win.

Reckoning with the surprise should be a starting place for the Democrats, before we get into debates about policy positioning or the culture war. In recent years liberalism has been consumed by a panic over “misinformation,” an impulse toward the management of online discourse and media coverage to protect the vulnerable public from the lure of populism and conspiracism.

The lesson of 2024 isn’t that this managerial effort failed to protect swing voters from fake news. It’s that it succeeded in a more perverse purpose: It protected liberals from reality, from seeing all the ways that their own choices were leading downward to a predictable defeat.