Today, despair is appropriate...
But the worm will turn
How do you think Donald Trump and Kamala Harris would have fared if they played the Anne Frank game? The game’s an idea from a 2011 short story by Nathan Englander, now dramatised by Patrick Marber at the Marylebone Theatre (you can catch it until the 23rd this month).
In the game each participant tells the others that their name is Anne, it’s June 1943 and she has been told she must go into hiding from the Nazis. She asks of each in turn whether they will hide her, albeit at great risk to themselves.
Who can doubt that an honest answer from Donald Trump would be a flat refusal? After all Anne was the very epitome of a grand historical loser. And wouldn’t most of us suspect that the response from Harris would usually be a “yes”?
Whatever else American voters were seeking to reward in the presidential election it wasn’t virtue. Even the more switched-off from politics voters were likely to be aware of Trump’s debate claim (remember how Harris “won” that?) that immigrants were eating the cats, dogs and other pets of ordinary Americans. So they either knew it was a lie and didn’t care or thought it was true and missed all the corrections that appeared in mainstream and social media. That’s just one example among so many.
The Anne Frank game won’t be played by many people. Unlike the myriad early takes on why the Democrats were so roundly defeated by a man and a party entirely lacking in moral compass or in achievement. Listening to some of my favourite US commentators, such as the NYT’s Ezra Klein, has been a dispiriting business because their analyses didn't make much sense to me. Klein for example is fixated on the Iraq war and the Bush administration as the ur-cause of US populism. Those of us who recall what happened to Republicanism in the days of Newt Gingrich and the literal demonisation of Bill Clinton by the US right, may rather see its recent origins in the defeat of the first Bush in 1992.
A large volume of the premature takes have been about a few demographics: Latinos, black men, suburban women. But US elections are gigantic affairs and the first samples from exit polls need to be treated with caution. One friend of mine took some tiny comfort from the fact that the most pro-Harris groups in the country appeared to be Black women and Jewish women.
But one factor stands out to me. Donald Trump is likely to end up with the same number of popular votes - 74 million - that he lost with in 2020; as we learned over here in July, landslides are often not quite what they seem.
Kamala Harris however will undershoot Joe Biden’s 81 million by as much as 10 million. She underperformed local Democrats in a series of key races, and where there were statewide ballots on abortion (almost all of which were win my the pro-choice side) this seems to have of no help to her at all.
What not to blame
Here’s a brief list of who and what wasn’t to blame for the loss.
1. Russia.
2. Elon Musk.
3. Gaza (sorry Owen Jones and Al Jazeera, but Michigan didn’t decide the election and there’s no evidence of this influencing many votes elsewhere).
4. Harris’s campaign. That pundit-pollster Frank Luntz blamed her campaign for “shining the spotlight more in Trump than Harris’s own ideas” in a pivot that cost them the election. In fact millions and millions of dollars were spent on ads about Harris plans for the economy. True, Harris did indeed talk about Trump, particularly in the wake of his former chief of staff explaining why he thought Trump was a species of fascist. But from what I could see from across the Atlantic it was just about every popular media source that continued to be transfixed throughout the campaign by Trump (often in ways you would imagine would damage him). If you bothered to look at them there was considerably more heft to Harris’s policy proposals than to Trump’s. They didn't set the terms of the debate. I wonder if promised policies as opposed to bombastic positions ever do.