Trump Didn't Deserve to Win, But We Deserved to Lose

Some Democrats are mystified by how an increasingly diverse coalition of voters could choose Trump over four more years of us. I'm not.

Dear readers,

By electing Donald Trump again, the American electorate has made a bad decision, one that will expose our country to unreasonable risks in areas from foreign policy to public health. Fiscal policy will get worse — budget deficits will become even larger, keeping interest rates high, and programs that provide health care to the poor and elderly are likely to be trimmed back to finance tax cuts for rich people. Abortion rights are likely to be further restricted, with a hostile administration using the powers of the FDA and the DOJ to make abortion harder to provide. And we’ll have another four years under Trump’s exhausting, mercurial and divisive leadership, making our politics nastier and stupider.

I wish the election had gone the other way. I am annoyed.

That said, when Trump won eight years ago, I was much more than annoyed. I was really upset and shocked. This time is different, because we’ve been through this before and I expect we’ll get through it again. But it’s also different because there’s a big part of me that feels we deserved to lose this election, even if Trump did not deserve to win it.

I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them, because it costs four times as much per mile to build a subway line here as it does in France, and because union rules force the agency to overstaff itself, inflating operating costs. Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system — the other day, I was on an M34 bus where one shouted repeatedly at another passenger that he was a “faggot” — and even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don’t do much about it, and I can’t entirely blame them since our government lacks the legal authority to keep these people either in jail or in treatment. The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets. A judge recently said the city can’t even padlock the illegal cannabis stores that have popped up all over the place — that’s apparently unconstitutional, and so years into what was supposed to be the wokest legal cannabis regime in the country, our government still can’t figure out how to make sure people who sell weed have a license to do so, even though they’ve done that with regard to alcohol forever. Ever since the COVID shutdowns, Democrats here have stopped talking very much about the importance of investing in public education, but the schools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under state court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything — and it’s really expensive to travel here, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council literally made it illegal to build new hotels. And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population — we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy.

Meanwhile, the voters of New York have just adopted an equal rights amendment to the state constitution, which was put on the ballot by the Democrat-controlled state legislature. One effect of this amendment is to create a state constitutional right to abortion. Of course, abortion was already legal in New York, and a state constitutional provision will not override any new federal laws or regulations that Republicans might impose with their new control in Washington. This is exactly the sort of braindead symbolism that exemplifies the Democrats who rule our state: they pat themselves on the back for a formalistic, legal declaration of the rights of the people who live here, and meanwhile, people of all races and identities flee New York for other, officially less “inclusive” places where they can actually afford a decent quality of life.

I am unfortunately a Democrat, but as someone who lives in a place that is governed very badly by Democrats, I can easily understand why “can you imagine what incompetent, lunatic shit those people will do if they get control of the government?” would fall flat as an argument against Republicans. It doesn’t surprise me that the very largest swings away from Democrats in this post-COVID, post-George Floyd, post-inflation election occurred in blue states. The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem. So when Republicans made a pitch for change from all this (or even burn-it-all-down), it didn’t fall flat.

Now-President Elect Donald Trump arrived to speak during an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Center early Wednesday morning, November 6, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Right before Election Day, Ross Douthat wrote a column for The New York Times that left me quite uneasy. It’s about campaign signs he was seeing all over New Haven that read “Harris-Walz 2024: Obviously.” Douthat started with a point that’s almost tautological: Since the election is close, by definition neither candidate is the obvious choice. And he looked at why it would not be obvious to so many voters, writing:

[L]et’s take one last survey of why some waverers might not yet be sold on Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, by returning to where this all began: The world of 2016, when Americans normally disinclined to vote for liberals were first informed that there was no other reasonable choice… the promise was that even if you disagreed with liberalism’s elites on policy, you could trust them in three crucial ways: They would avoid insanity, they would maintain stability, and they would display far greater intelligence and competence than Trump and his hangers-on.

It is easy to see why voters would believe these promises were broken.

Of course, the most politically significant aspect of the instability has been post-COVID inflation — a global problem that has taken out incumbent governments of the right and left all over the world. The inflation is mostly not Democrats’ fault, though they did exacerbate it by overstimulating the economy with the American Rescue Plan, and then they failed to focus early enough on inflation as the key economic problem of this administration.¹

The other big instability is the migrant crisis, which was born out of this administration’s fecklessness — Biden rapidly reversing Trump’s immigration executive orders upon entering office without any plan for controlling the border and apparently without realizing that migrants are smart, and will be more likely to come if you make clear that coming very likely means they will get to stay. (A failure to consider incentives is a running theme when Democrats fail.) Democrats did not pivot to enforcement until far too late — and not until after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made the crisis a blue state issue by bussing migrants here en masse to fill our hotels and consume our budget.

On the “insanity” front, Douthat cites responses to COVID, the political movement in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, and trans youth medicine — all areas where liberals’ moral fervor has caused them to lose sight of whether the ideologically-driven courses they had taken were actually producing the intended positive effects.² Democrats know they paid a price for “defund the police” and I think they have mostly learned their lesson, or at least they definitely should now that several high-profile “progressive” prosecutors lost their blue-city posts this week. On the COVID restrictions, I think there’s been less of a reckoning with how off-putting a lot of the busybody moralizing was, but I also think this issue will simply fade with time. As for trans issues, I have been skeptical about their political salience — while I don’t believe Lia Thomas belonged on the Penn women’s swim team, I also can’t imagine casting a vote based on my views about that issue — but our nominee’s 2019 declaration to the ACLU that she would have the government pay for transgender surgeries for prisoners and people held in immigration detention became a major attack line against her in this campaign, I think because it highlights several problems with the Democratic Party’s image all at once: here is the Democratic nominee, bowing to pressure from The Groups to look for ways to spend your tax dollars on the most bespoke concern of a criminal, or of a non-citizen who isn’t even supposed to be here, before thinking about you and your interests.³

And all of this is why I think Democrats’ approach to the cost-of-living issues that have dominated this campaign has fallen so flat. The Democratic argument is, more or less, “look at all my programs” — all the things I’m going to have the government do to make life easier for you. In some cases, there is a clear track record to run on: the Affordable Care Act has gotten more popular over time, and the expanded subsidies that reduce the premiums most Americans pay to buy individual plans on the exchanges have increased enrollment. But mostly, I think Americans look around at how it goes when the government actually tries to help, and they have a healthy skepticism about how helpful the government is really going to be, and about whether the benefits are really going to flow to them. Democrats are making too many promises; they instead need to pick a few things for the government to do really well, with a focus on benefits to the broad public rather than to the people being paid to provide the services, instead of trying to do a zillion different things and doing them badly at great expense, as was the approach with the moribund Build Back Better Act.

As you know, I think Kamala Harris should have picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Having seen Tuesday’s results, I don’t think choosing him would have changed the outcome — he wouldn’t have gotten her two percentage points more in Michigan. But Shapiro is a popular swing-state governor — 57% approve / 23% disapprove, in a September New York Times/Siena poll — who will be a frontrunner for the 2028 nomination. And Shapiro’s signature policy achievement is rebuilding a highway underpass. There is a lesson here — when government focuses on its core responsibilities and delivers on them quickly, efficiently, and with a laser focus on making sure people can go about their lives as normal, the voters reward that. You don’t need a grand vision; you need to execute.

It is important that we win the next election. For that reason, it is important that we get the voters to believe we deserve to win the next election. We have two years to work on it before the midterms.

Very seriously,

Josh

Correction (November 7): An earlier version of this post said migrants housed in New York shelters "typically had no legal authorization to enter the country." This is incorrect. Many asylum-seeking migrants entered legally at ports of entry or by using the CBP One app. Others have sought asylum after entering the country illegally by crossing the border between ports of entry, in large part because the Biden administration has (controversially) limited opportunities to seek asylum at ports of entry. In either case, even if their asylum claims ultimately fail adjudication (as is likely) they are legally allowed to stay for the period the claims are pending, which is often years. This is a reflection of a broken asylum system that can be gamed by migrants without valid claims, but the gaming is not itself illegal.

1. The ARP, passed in early 2021, constituted an unnecessary $2 trillion stimulus that mostly produced inflation rather than real GDP growth. Then, throughout 2022, even as inflation started to bite, Democrats were still looking for every way they could find to spend as much money as possible to satisfy interest group constituencies. Even the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which was supposed to reduce inflation by reducing the deficit, is currently increasing the deficit by tens of billions of dollars a year and, if left unchanged, will continue to do so through 2027. The deficit reduction does not begin until 2028, far too late to be politically relevant for Joe Biden’s Democrats.

2. In the case of trans youth medicine, there has been an active campaign to get people not to look at effects, as seen with the coalition of gay NGOs that has tried, unsuccessfully, to bully The New York Times out of doing journalism on the topic.

3. One grim irony about the political cost of this promise is that, of course, the federal government that only got seven electric vehicle charging stations built in two years has performed zero transgender surgeries on detained migrants. That’s the Democrats in a nutshell: the party that promises trans surgeries for illegal immigrants but doesn’t deliver them.