The Apollo 13 Election (Part I)

The Seeds of Trump's Re-Election were Sown Years Ago

The damaged Apollo 13 command module.

I called Donald Trump’s 2016 victory “America’s Primal Scream.” Unheeded and unheard, voters chose chaos, chicanery, and clownishness over the establishment. Tuesday night, they did it again, in a bigger way than many of us expected and I certainly couldn’t imagine.

Like Hillary Clinton’s loss eight years ago, Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss was forewarned, if not forordained. Similar to the doomed Apollo 13 service module, the faulty wiring in the system was installed many years ago. With Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, we thought maybe we’d solved for it.

We hadn’t. The fire grew and has now engulfed our body politic.

Below are some initial thoughts…

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

The fact that Donald Trump won the Electoral College was always a possibility. The fact that he’s likely to win the popular vote as well, is striking and damning. When I saw Florida called at 8:00 pm exactly, my ears perked up. As I watched the returns come into Virginia, that same creeping feeling from 2016 returned to the pit of my stomach.

All downhill from there.

Trump did something I didn’t believe, and often said, wasn’t possible: He outperformed his previous numbers. I assumed that his continuing unpopularity, a 15% lag among “Nikki Haley” voters and a strong economy would depress his numbers.

During the year I said I could quantify and qualify how first Joe Biden, then Kamala Harris won the election. I couldn’t figure the math for Trump, but his most important qualification was his name is Donald Trump. I assessed that his coaltion was older (wrong) whiter (wrong) more male (eh) and more extreme (maybe) than it had been in ‘16 or ‘20. On paper it made sense.

Campaigns aren’t run on paper. They can be lost there, though.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Back in September, when my Join the Union colleagues and I were chased around a Bucks County, Pennsylvania neighborhood by an angry, drunken Trump supporter, we were witnessing not one angry man, but decades’ worth of sustained, sophisticated, entertaining political communication.

As I recently wrote (too presciently) in Project Syndicate, that man and the tens of millions of voters who pulled the lever for Donald Trump had been fed a steady diet of anger, vitriol, anti-government propaganda starting with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, through 30 years of Fox News, and to all of the bro-casters that MMA honcho Dana White recognized on stage with Trump.

The mainstream media long ago gave up trying to counter the torrent. In fact, they accepted its insanity as good copy, thereby bringing right-wing messaging into the mainstream.

The left has never been able to match the MAGA media, and their few, attempts have been futile, pointy-headed, scoldy intellectual fodder that no one, not even Democrats, wants to listen to.

Already, Democratic social media is afire with “We have to build our own.” Pump the breaks. The issues the Democratic Party and the US are facing are much deeper and broader than simply not having a progressive radio network.

Come back for Part II for more on this.

We the People

H.L. Mencken wrote, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Americans have been telling everyone what they’re worried about; they always do. Whether it’s ‘fair’ or ‘accurate’ that voters cited the economy and inflation as their top concerns despite conflicting economic data doesn’t matter. The lived experience of tens of millions of Americans is that they’re upset and no one was listening.

In their anger, they turned, once again, to a man who validates that frustration, urges it along, nurtures the greivance into sedition on one end of the spectrum and an electoral middle finger to the elites on the other.

Kamala Harris didn’t lose the campaign based on policy or issues. Campaigns aren’t often won or lost on those things. She lost the campaign, as Joe Biden would have, because the Democratic Party has lost legitimacy with too many Americans, a sense of belonging with its core members, and any sense of emotional connection to its voters.

I spent most of the fall on the road. When a 40 year old Black man in Michigan says he’s voting for Harris because she’s ‘the lesser of two evils’ something in the state of Denmark is very, very rotten.

Wither the Elites

Trump’s victory didn’t occur in a vacuum. A couple of weeks ago I was in New York City for an event. After giving my remarks I took questions from the assembled, elite, Upper West Side audience. Why is it so close? How can so many people still want this guy? Why aren’t we breaking through? Why don’t voters understand what we’re telling them?

Voters absolutely understood what the Democratic Party was telling them, and they hated it. As I told the crowd, making college debt forgiveness a pillar of your policy and political program in a country where 68% of the country doesn’t attend a four year university is tin-eared (at best!)

Telling voters that if they don’t vote for your party’s nominee they are by definition racist and/or misogynist is not the basis for a conversation, let alone a relationship. They know Trump. They were getting to know Harris. They made their choice. By my measure, they don’t really care what we think of it.

I’m as guilty as anyone of pointing out Donald Trump’s fascistic words, deeds, and promises. I repeatedly asked my Republican friends if they understood that a vote for Trump was akin to sitting at the table with some of the worst people the country had to offer. The answer for most of them was '“Yes.”

Crest or Colgate?

Sitting in a focus group many years ago, one of the other attendees, a corporate marketing executive, asked about the difference between political advertising and commercial ads. I told him that in his business, they were making the case for toothpaste based on any number of factors.

In politics you’d say, “Use Crest. Colgate makes your teeth fall out.”

The Democratic Party has existed since nearly the founding of the Republic. Despite that longevity, too many party elites, operatives, and donors have forgotten the central tenet of campaigns: They’re emotional endeavors. We’re not selling toothpaste. We’re selling ideas, candidates, aspirations.

Too many Democratic organs have reduced voters data points. “Ad Testing” (I put it in quotes intentionally) is to me little more than a sophisticated and expensive Cover Your Ass (CYA) endeavor. Do a poll, conduct a focus group, spend a million dollars testing it to avoid any contreversey, and put $300 million behind it. If you win, “It worked!” If you lose, “Well, we tested it,” shrug.

Democratic test mavens utilize what they call a “Blowback Score.” Simply, this is how upset someone gets when they see an ad. The lower the blowback score, the better. Also, the shittier the ad. When I first learned of this metric, I laughed. In Republican politics, it’s all blowback all the time.

Why? Because you’re driving at an EMOTIONAL response! Serving up 250,000 bowls of vanilla ice cream doesn’t do the trick.

To the donors large and small that provided the billions of dollars to Democratic super PACs, you have every right to be pissed as hell at how they spent your money.

I’ll have more on this in Part II tomorrow.

Tomorrow, We Work

The three astronauts and hundreds of controllers and contractors that brought a crippled Apollo 13 home were said to have conducted a “Successful failure.” Everything that could go wrong, had gone wrong, and yet, the crew splashed down safely.

Like the engineers, astronauts, and others that studied that near-fatal accident, we that have spent years fighting Donald Trump and his movement, have a lot of work to do. We must study the outcome. We must devise new ideas. We must be honest about ourselves, our shortcomings, and our country. We must ask ourselves if what we’re selling is anything voters will ever want to buy.

These are hard questions and they should be. On Tuesday night, we didn’t just lose an election. For half the country, we again had our view of the United States shattered into a million little pieces. It’s time to get out the broom and the dustpan and clean up our mess.

Then, we go back to work.

Part II will appear tomorrow.

News and Notes

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