Democrats

Republicans have, very foolishly, engaged in “autopsies” after recent election losses. This election, it’s the Democrats’ turn! The Democrats will engage in a circular firing squad for the next couple of years, with all factions doing their best to gain the upper hand by giving their rivals the shiv in the jailhouse shower. Allow me, a Republican political consultant without a dog in this fight, to answer the pressing question: who will Democrats blame for the campaign that inconceivably allowed the bad Orange Man to win and the obviously superior Kamala and Clooney and Oprah to fail? First, let’s start with the obvious — black voters. The people at DNC HQ will be furious that black voters did not obey instructions and vote 95 percent for Democrats.

Republicans and Democrats, who disagree so virulently on so much, at least agree on two things. Both say it is the most consequential election in US history. (They might want to check on 1860.) And both believe the other side’s triumph would be catastrophic. It would have dangerous consequences for decades, they say, and might be impossible to correct. They are half right, perhaps more, and what they are right about is scary. This election is the most consequential since Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover amid the Great Depression. That election was consequential because it and the following one, in 1936, locked in the Democratic Party coalition that effectively governed the country for the next seventy-five years.

Who has better lawyers: Donald Trump or the Syndicate? The fate of the election, and hence the fate of the country, may well come down to the answer to that question.  By “the Syndicate” (what I sometimes call “the Committee”), I of course mean the shadowy board of overseers that controls the Democratic Party and, by extension, the administrative apparatus that governs us. No one knows exactly who sits on this board. I suspect that even those who, in retrospect, we can see have occupied senior positions in its ranks are often uncertain about their place in the hierarchy.  Elsewhere, I have invoked C.S. Lewis’s idea of “The Inner Ring” to explain the dynamics of this phenomenon.

In the past two months, the Harris-Walz campaign has texted five times asking me to join its door-knocking efforts in Virginia. I am a young woman living in Northern Virginia, so I am statistically likely to be a Democrat. But a data file of reasonable quality would also tell you that I have voted in every Republican primary since 2012, that I am a weekly Mass-attending Catholic and that I am married: three signs that I am probably not going to spend my weekend pounding the pavement for Kamala. This is anecdotal evidence, but it suggests to me that contrary to mainstream media reports, the Harris-Walz campaign doesn’t have the most sophisticated ground-game operation. “In 2020 the DNC actually wrote a press release bragging about appending cell phone numbers to the voter file.

The Big Dog has returned to the campaign trail, and he’s up to his old tricks. No, not those tricks — the one where he offers a running commentary on the choices campaigns are making instead of just stumping for the Democratic candidate. Barack Obama does the same thing, of course, except he’s just perpetually disappointed in all Americans. Bill Clinton’s mistake is being too honest about what he thinks is really going on and warning Democrats why they might lose if they don’t shape up.

This Tuesday’s debate is the most consequential moment of the “second” campaign, just as Trump’s debate with Biden was the most consequential of the “first” campaign. Biden’s self-immolation ultimately forced his withdrawal. His withdrawal sets the stage for the current debate, and not just because it produced a new Democratic candidate. It produced her so quickly, with so little discussion or opposition, that Kamala Harris was not forced to persuade the party’s progressive voter base. A “primary” campaign would have damaged Harris, and the powers behind the Democratic throne, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, saved her from it. How would it have hurt her?