A Democratic coalition that excludes the trans community is not a Democratic coalition worth saving

As of the time that I wrote this sentence, Donald Trump was leading Kamala Harris by 2.2% in the United States popular vote, though with much of the outstanding vote being concentrated in the liberal state of California, this number is likely to contract to something close to a point-and-a-half victory for Trump nationwide. In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump with a 4.5% victory in the popular vote, and the margin was considered so narrow that Trump’s supporters stormed the United States Capitol to dispute the results. With a victory a third as narrow by the popular vote, Democrats have been asked to capitulate to what must be regarded as the true reflection of the will of the American people.

I have a few theories as to why this is. The perception of how much of a blowout a presidential election is seems to boil down to a combination of three factors: Who won the popular vote (Democrats lead 7-2 in elections since 1988), who won the electoral vote (Democrats hold a 5-4 lead), and which party’s share just looks bigger on a red and blue electoral map (more subjective, but with the possible exception of Bill Clinton’s Montana-including 1992 coalition, the map consistently looks more red than blue). With the current urban-rural divide in the United States, it is practically impossible for Democrats to look dominant. Another factor is that while Election Night coverage is treated as a first-past-the-post race to 270 electoral votes, there is effectively a predetermined outcome based on fifty-one separate races which have mostly concluded by the time results are projected. There is a bias in coverage towards states whose polls close earlier—the reason Kentucky is frequently the first state called is not because it is the most politically uncompetitive state (like many “red states”, its largest cities, Louisville and Lexington, tend to vote Democratic, but they are ultimately overwhelmed by elsewhere in the state) but because they process results fairly quickly. During the Trump era, two former swing states, Ohio and Florida, went red fairly early in the night because of how they tabulate votes, and this set a (sometimes misleading) pro-Trump tone.

But if 2004, the last time a party got the popular vote-Electoral College-map vibes trifecta, is any indication, the lesson will not simply be that Republicans did well in 2024; the lesson will be that they have asserted a truly remarkable, historic victory which constitutes a mandate for absolute rule. To be clear, it is much more healthy for a democracy for a political party to recalibrate itself following an electoral loss, so as to better address the needs of the American electorate, rather than, say, dressing up in audacious bear costumes and trying to defecate in Nancy Pelosi's office. But it seems almost inevitable that all of the wrong lessons will be learned.

There is an extremely obvious thesis statement for why the Democrats lost, one which does not forgive the party of its individual sins but which places the improbability of them emerging victorious in proper context. Democrats lost in 2024 for the same reason that every party in power in the western world in 2024 has lost a share of votes, whether the party was considerably to the left or right of the Democratic Party, because there was economic hardship around the world in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Functionally shutting down the economy for a year caused economic stress (while Donald Trump's handling of it, to put it lightly, left much to be desired, it's hard to deny that he faced a legitimate challenge with the emergence of the pandemic), and inflation devastated the middle-and-lower classes around the world.

Democrats could have handled this better. They could have explained (it may not have been easy, but it very much helps that it was true) that inflation was an unavoidable problem, but that Democratic policies would help to ease the tensions far more than Republican policies, to the extent that they have politics beyond yelling about Democrats. They could have noted that high grocery prices were not caused by some dial that the government turns but rather by increasingly powerful and unregulated semi-monopolies and that while Donald Trump is often called a populist, he is in reality a crotchety billionaire who does not even pretend to care about the struggles of everyday Americans anymore. It's possible that these things would not have worked, but in any election with a distinct winner and loser established regardless of margin of victory, whatever Democrats did must now be viewed as bad, even as Kamala Harris made a nearly-historic comeback from Joe Biden's low poll numbers early in the summer.

The party keeps searching for One Big Thing that can be reversed and change everything. Many have tried the ultimate self-congratulatory takeaway: Democrats lost because they nominated a woman of color. This is a theory which presents the Democrats as undeniably noble and makes any further self-reflection borderline offensive. Those who believed that Kamala Harris should have picked Josh Shapiro as her running mate made their argument, though there is little reason to believe that Tim Walz was particularly unpopular, and even if (and it's a big "if") Shapiro could have delivered Pennsylvania, this alone would not have been enough. 

But ultimately, some people would rather just blame a minority. This happened in 2004, when Republican opposition to same-sex marriage activated the conservative religious right. Democrats, by and large, weren't even campaigning on a pro-gay rights platform--same-sex marriage was already illegal in nearly every jurisdiction in the country, but Republicans largely supported a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. A few years later, that Democrats had been on the less-wrong side of history, when gay marriage became legal nationwide and its popularity skyrocketed, became a political advantage. But more importantly, it was the right thing to do.

I am not convinced that anti-trans panic had any meaningful impact on the presidential election. This does not mean that pro-trans politics are necessarily a strong political issue for the left, but rather that it does not seem to be of exceptionally high priority for most people. Republicans, of course, have framed these debates under their own terms, using language about protecting women's sports (every competitive women's sports organization in the country has strict rules regarding hormone levels to assure that, to use a particularly ludicrous suggestion, the league is not simply a bunch of men claiming that they are women) and protecting children, largely because Democrats mostly haven't talked about trans issues. In some ways, I think Democratic silence is instructive behavior--if trans people living their lives aren't a big deal, why should others try to make a big deal out of it?--but the more conservatives push anti-trans messaging, the more it becomes clearly that trans people need genuine allyship.

But while I don't think anti-trans panic had a meaningful impact on the 2024 election, it wouldn't matter if it had. Democrats have overwhelmingly popular positions on just about every issue as an organic result of their own worldviews--they should be allowed to have some positions based not on polling but on what is simply the right thing to do. The extreme shift on gay marriage--Barack Obama ran the most socially liberal campaign in a generation while still opposing gay marriage in 2008--demonstrates that our social views are not inevitable. And while opposition to gay marriage at least had some tenuous biblical backing (which, to be clear, should not inform national policy), opposition to trans rights largely comes down to an unarticulated sense of discomfort. This is the sense we are going to use to determine our future?

Democrats are consistently being asked to defend unpopular positions that their candidates have not actually taken. Liberals are ridiculed for advocating for defunding the police, a dead-on-arrival activist slogan. They are ridiculed for using the term "Latinx" or for being "too woke". If Democrats took an explicitly anti-trans stance, it would not stop Republicans from accusing them of whatever the most hateful stereotypes one could imagine. It would probably land much like the Biden's pro-Israel Middle Eastern posture: Republicans still call them anti-Israel. There is nothing Democrats could theoretically do to assuage fears of the most rabidly anti-trans corners of the political discourse.

Can Democrats force the issue and make trans rights viewed as a legitimate civil rights issue? I'm not sure, but whether it would work politically should not define the actions. Democrats should stand up for trans people because it's the right thing to do.

Repealing and replacing the American Dream

How could Missouri, a blood-red state so clearly aligned with the Republican Party that the major news networks declared it won by Donald Trump the minute that polls closed in the state, also vote to enshrine abortion rights in its state constitution? How did the state overwhelmingly approve a minimum wage increase that the people elected to positions of power have resoundingly, repeatedly rejected?

Missouri has had a wide chasm between how it votes for ballot measures and how it votes for candidates for a while now. The year that Missouri replaced its flawed but ultimately pro-labor senator Claire McCaskill with Josh Hawley was the year that voters resoundingly rejected Right to Work legislation that aligned with Hawley’s politics. 

It helps Republicans that they have largely avoided taking public stances on some of their less popular policies. When Donald Trump was asked how he would be voting on Florida’s abortion amendment this year, he evaded the question. Despite a pretty clearly anti-union voting record, Josh Hawley has adopted pro-labor posturing and claimed to be a representative of the working class.

Donald Trump, in nearly a decade as a public political candidate, has consistently run as an oppositional candidate, even when he was the incumbent president. By running as an agitator, it shielded Trump from the single most obvious criticism one could levy at him: a complete lack of actual ideas for how to improve the country. In 2024, his speeches were primarily an airing of personal grievances—anger at the media or at his political rivals, but to the extent that he discussed actual political issues, he criticized Democrats for being soft on border control (while simultaneously strong-arming the party into shutting down bipartisan legislation regarding the southern border), criticizing trans women in sports (while, mercifully, not offering any sort of plan to mitigate this—just kind of plastering photos of some of the most vulnerable people in the country on ads and pointing and laughing), and vaguely saying “The economy” and gesturing wildly with the seemingly correct understanding that this would be enough.

I was not alive the last time a president was replaced with a president of the same political party. The margins of victory in presidential elections have largely narrowed—that a presidential candidate in 1984 won just one state (plus the District of Columbia) seems impossible by modern standards—but the end result of the 1984 election was not a permanent Reagan Republican majority but rather enough of a wave for precisely one more electoral victory before a loss of power.

In 1984, in a story from the world of music but one which intersects more with politics than most, the Bruce Springsteen album Born in the USA was released. Although many of the edges from Springsteen’s previous album, Nebraska, had been sanded off and the production was considerably glossier, it was still a broadly cynical album, most famously through the album’s title track, a (fictional) first-person account of a disenchanted Vietnam War veteran. In the forty years since its release, the song “Born in the USA” has become infamous for its misappropriation in politics—despite Springsteen’s well-known liberal politics and perhaps now billions of “actually ‘Born in the USA’ is about how America is bad, not a lot of people realize that’” takes, it is still used by Republicans as a patriotic anthem. This is its ultimate legacy.

But just because “Born in the USA” is a critique of conservatives does not mean that it is a celebration of liberals—it was Democratic president Lyndon Johnson who escalated American participation in Vietnam, after all. The nameless protagonist of “Born in the USA”, if based loosely on Ron Kovic, almost certainly did not vote for Ronald Reagan, but he probably didn’t vote for Walter Mondale, either. The particulars of 1984 presidential politics were not the resonant theme of the song; cynicism was. A belief that the American Dream, the idyllic world where merely working hard would get one everything they could reasonably expect, was crumbling. Despite Ronald Reagan’s massive Electoral College margins, it wasn’t as though he was universally beloved—Mondale did receive over 40% of the vote—and his “it’s morning in America” optimism was never built to last.

Despite the persistent use of the word “Hope”, Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was, in the broad sense of American politics, cynical. Now, to be clear: I think that cynicism was completelyfounded—when the country has been ruled for eight years by a guy defined primarily by war crimes and a lack of responsiveness to the immediate needs of the American people, you should have a healthy dose of cynicism. Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016 was every bit as cynical, albeit in a way that I found off-putting. Joe Biden, even with all of his hopelessly naïve talk about healing the nation, was fundamentally running on an adversarial message—his primary selling point in the Democratic primaries was not his wealth of experience and certainly was not the specifics of his agenda: it was that he could beat Donald Trump. 

Americans take an odd sense of pride of being unaware of anything outside of our own borders. Single-payer health care or restrictions on individual citizens buying murder machines would not work and we must debate whether this would be the case rather than looking at the many actual, empirical examples around the world demonstrating that they would. But the signs pointed to a strong anti-incumbency sentiment all around the world, because inflation was not a uniquely American problem. Left-wing and right-wing governments were criticized for inflation, which existed no matter what fiscal policies specific governments implemented because inflation was not inherently caused by spending nor austerity but by the fact that the world spent over a year with minimal economic activity around the world because millions of people were dying in a global pandemic. A pandemic that was exacerbated by wildly disproportionate cases in the United States, where the right-wing federal government refused to take proper precautions because they wanted to keep short-term economic indicators looking good. It worked.

Donald Trump will likely get favorable marks on the economy once he takes office because the economy is doing well, just as he did in 2017. And if the second Trump term goes anything like the first one, the Republicans will almost certainly lose in 2028 because Donald Trump doesn’t have any plans. His primary motivation is to stay out of jail. But the ripple effect is going to be massive. Even if Trump’s laziness means that some of his worst plans never come to fruition, he will almost certainly appoint a majority of the United States Supreme Court. That is going to impede progress in the United States for generations.

We are already inundated with a bevvy of incredibly obtuse takes about how Democrats lost the election by capitulating to Never Trump Republicans—the reason Joe Biden dropped out is because he was on track to lose in a landslide, and the fundamentals that led to that never changed. Kamala Harris ran a pretty good, if imperfect, campaign. Donald Trump ran an absolutely terrible campaign, and it did not matter. And as deflating as it is that all sorts of unpopular collateral damage will come as a result of Trump’s re-election, this is simply a visceral reaction to our dissatisfaction less with Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or progressivism, but with the knowledge that the America we were promised is never going to be available for most of us. The result of this anger will be unpopular and destructive, but it’s the result on which we landed.

Until next time.