One Swamp Person's Take on the 2024 Election

Democrats need to stop being polite and start getting real. And also forget the phrase "means testing" for the rest of eternity.

Well, Kamala Harris lost. There are many theories swirling around as to why, and many of them are very stupid. So stupid, in fact, that I was driven to start this very Substack to share my own very stupid theories as a coping mechanism as my mental health deteriorates ahead of another four years of Donald Trump and his weaselly little sidekick, J.D. “Gríma” Vance. Actually you know what? That's not fair to Wormtongue. He at least had a cute haircut.

Anyway, this is the inaugural post of my new Substack, which I’m calling SWAMP PERSON. This newsletter will be about the various goings-on in D.C., Congress, the Supreme Court, or maybe even a little dog I saw that I thought was cute. I’m doing this because I’m annoyed, I need to feel useful, and I have some experience trying to organize people towards a better democracy, even when it feels like we’re in a particularly dark corner of literal Hell. 

If you don’t know me, I’m a lawyer and democracy expert based in D.C. -- I’ve worked on the Hill (for D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton), fought the Kavanaugh nomination as a counsel for the advocacy group Demand Justice, and spent over four years running the democracy campaign at the national grassroots organization Indivisible. These days I consult for organizations who are fighting to reform the Supreme Court, and I host a comedy and politics podcast with my best friend, Lindy West. 

So I’m definitely smarter than Nicholas Kristof, is what I’m saying. 

And in the grand tradition of centrist opinion columnists who have never had a real job in their lives, here is my vibes-based analysis of what I think went wrong for the Harris campaign, followed by my vibes-based advice for what to do next. 

What the fuck just happened

Long story short, Donald Trump got our asses. It is crazy how comprehensively our asses were gotten, especially given the man’s rap sheet. And it wasn’t just the Let’s Go Brandon crowd who got him over the finish line -- Trump won over white men (you guys…please), white women (I’m so tired of y’all for real), and, alarmingly for Democrats, made in-roads with Black men and Latinos. I’m not here to blame the latter groups -- Trump’s election is mostly the fault of white people who were either genuinely distressed about the price of eggs or pretended to be as a justification to vote for a man who has never gone grocery shopping in his life but who represents a vision of old-school patriarchy that white people apparently like but don't want to admit they support. In any event, it’s clear that Democrats can no longer take the votes of their base for granted. You cannot claim to be the big tent party for people of color and the working class and then perennially refuse to deliver for those groups. But more on that later. 

First, let’s go through what I think contributed to this loss. (For what it’s worth, I don’t think “she wasn’t lefty enough for a certain subset of weirdos on Instagram who voted for Jill Stein” was the reason.)

1. Racism and misogyny

I believe that Kamala Harris, while not as far to the left as I consider myself to be, was a good candidate at her core. Her domestic policy proposals were good.¹ She was a tough senator who held Trump-era appointees accountable for their various misdeeds. She had a vision for our country that mostly aligned with my values. She was sharp, personable, and prepared. Unfortunately, that is illegal if you’re a woman and it’s double illegal if you’re a person of color also. 

This is basically a feminist cliché at this point, but characteristics that are considered admirable in men (toughness, discipline, laughing sometimes) are “annoying” in women. Kamala Harris -- an eminently qualified Black and South Asian woman with an unbeatable resume -- was cast as a villainous Tracy Flick in this tale. She was too ambitious. Her preparedness was “robotic.” Her laughter was “shrill.” Her toughness was “scary” and “militant.” Just by virtue of the fact that she was a woman and not white, she was branded a “socialist” (baby…I wish) -- a bogeyman label that seemed to be on voters’ minds at least to a degree. 

It’s unclear to me that Kamala tacking farther to the left would have somehow solved any of these problems, as much as I would have loved to see her do it. I think it is true that policies people consider lefty or at the very least consider to be core Democratic values are popular. That’s why we saw abortion rights codified across the country, even in red states, on election night, not to mention a big win for a minimum wage increase in Missouri. But those wins were decoupled from a candidate -- they were ballot initiatives not linked to any specific political party or movement. There’s certainly some tribalism going on here, but there is also a serious lack of trust between American voters and the political establishment that needs to be addressed, and any position Kamala took on any given policy proposal was not going to somehow magically rebuild that trust in the span of three months.

In any event, it is clear that voter attitudes about Kamala’s race and gender played a role in the outcome. In this version of the story of this election, there is nothing Kamala could have done to win over a populace that simply does not believe women are capable of leadership. Sure, the other guy apparently wanted to have sex with a chart, but a woman? I’ll go with the chart fucker.

2. The messaging wizards and out-of-touch pollsters

A couple of days ago while I was channeling my inner Facebook wine mom and commiserating about the shitty diaper we find ourselves in, I found myself reminiscing about the era of the Harris-Walz campaign that felt good, and made me feel excited to support it. At the absolute top of the list was Tim Walz going on television to call J.D. Vance, Donald Trump, and their crew of Project 2025 leeches “weird.” 

It was really funny. It was effective. And it cut through -- try to remember the last time you remember a Democrat going after the opposition disrespectfully. To be honest, I can’t. Democrats are obsessed with decorum and norms, and rarely level with people about the stakes. They yearn for bipartisanship, even when their Republican colleagues are giving them atomic wedgies and sticking their heads in the toilet. I’m not sure why they think they need to hand it to ‘em, but they do. They offer respect when absolutely none is deserved. It conveys to the American people that politics is just a game, and that the threats posed by a MAGA-captured party are overblown. It doesn’t help that Democrats bend over backwards to maintain decorum under completely unprecedented circumstances. The reality that Democrats need to understand is that it simply is not effective, either electorally or morally, to walk down to the Senate Floor and solemnly inform the 4 people watching C-Span that you “strongly but respectfully disagree with my good friend from Kentucky” or whatever. Fuck that!! Let ‘em have it!

GOP members of Congress don’t deserve respect! They are extremely weird! These guys want a national database of our menstruation cycles! The only people more obsessed with girls’ bathrooms than the New York Times op-ed page is the entire Republican caucus! One of them maybe fucked a couch, we don’t know! I mean, sure, the GOP is scary, too -- as a party they’ve already succeeded in implementing policies that are killing people, both  legislatively and by judicial fiat -- but fundamentally their vision for America is so fucking weird that most people, when confronted with the contents of their Weirdo Bible, Project 2025, were repulsed. And rightfully so!

And yet at some point between Walz’s selection as the vice presidential candidate and Election Day, all mention of the weirdos seemed to disappear. I sipped my wine and resolved, “Whatever fucking idiot muzzled my boy Tim deserves to be exiled from Democratic politics permanently.” And then, today, I logged on to my previously dormant Bluesky account to discover that his name is Geoff Garin, he had just joined the site, and he was being dragged within an inch of his life by thousands of users who had the same thought as me. 

If you’re unfamiliar with Geoff Garin’s game, he’s the president of Hart Research, a public opinion polling firm. He is not only largely responsible for ruining the vibes of the Harris campaign, he also has a rich history of helping Hillary Clinton lose campaigns, too. He will face exactly zero professional consequences for this.

I have no idea if this is true for the GOP, but Democrats are obsessed with public opinion polling and message testing. There’s an entire cottage industry dedicated to rejecting your own instincts and authenticity and going with whatever the gurus tell you to say instead. A sampling of white women in Philadelphia County don’t like it when you say “women could die,” so you stop saying it. You pivot to egg prices. No one believes you actually care about eggs. You are deemed disingenuous. You lose. 

So much faith is placed in the messaging industry and I really can’t understand why. Of course it’s good to know what messages resonate the most with voters, but so often it seems that hewing strictly and never deviating from those talking points takes precedence over authenticity, vulnerability, and real human interaction between the candidate and voters. And does discipline even matter anymore? Clearly Trump is undisciplined and has no coherent message to speak of. He won anyway, because that is who Trump is. He will never be anyone else. He’s afraid of sharks and thinks Hannibal Lecter is a real person. He will not be contained! 

But Democrats insist on containment! Even when they lose! Anyone with any sense would have known that there was no point in roping Liz Cheney into all of this, but the messaging! THE MESSAGING SAID!! Let’s be real, to the extent that anyone even knows who Liz Cheney is, they fucking hate her! Yet there she was, a chief surrogate for Kamala Harris, elevated by the messaging people and some random Obama pollster who is mentally stuck in the year 2012 as a surefire way to win over…who, exactly? In any event, it didn’t work. Liz Cheney moved the needle exactly zero percent. 

3. Democrats really did abandon the working class

The United States has not raised the minimum wage since 2009. It was really cool (sincere) that Joe Biden was the first president ever to walk the picket line, but moral solidarity alone isn’t enough. Democrats held a trifecta from 2021-2023 -- and while they did do some good things that you probably haven’t heard of, and probably did not feel in any real way, they did not raise the minimum wage during this time. The vote to add Bernie Sanders’s Raise the Wage Act as an amendment to the American Rescue Plan ultimately failed. It’s possible that your instinct is to read that sentence and think, but Meagan, I’m sure that’s because Republicans blocked it! And while you wouldn’t be wholly wrong about that, you should also know that four Democrats² also voted to reject this measure, which would have raised the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $17 by 2028.

When people’s material conditions are poor, they seek change at the ballot box. Right now, many Americans are suffering due to poverty wages and a labor movement that has been weakened both by the GOP and their hand-selected Supreme Court justices, and no one is throwing them a lifeline. The idea that Republicans are “better” on the economy has gone unchallenged for so long (by the media and frankly by Democrats themselves) that it has become conventional wisdom. Democrats have not offered a compelling counter-narrative to this claim in words or action, and so this farce continues.

It seems obvious to me that this was one of the key failures not just of this campaign but of the Democratic party as a whole, over a historical period. And at least at this stage of grief, the party seems unwilling to grapple with it. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, a woman worth $240 million who has never had a job besides being a Democratic politician (as far as I’m aware), argued in one of the most out-of-touch interviews I have read in some time that: “I do have a discomfort level with some of the Democrats right now who are saying, ‘Oh, we abandoned the working class.’ No, we didn’t. That’s who we are. We are the kitchen table, working-class party of America.”

Nancy! Voters don’t seem to think so! Right now, Democrats should be going hard on economic messaging and offer a real vision for prosperity. They should name and shame the villains on the other side of the aisle who will block their efforts, and they should issue real consequences to squishy Democrats in the caucus who refuse to be bold on raising wages, protecting workers, and delivering big in ways that people can actually feel. But already, the centrists and the pundit class are now coalescing around the idea that it was actually woke-ism and pronouns that cost the Democrats the election.

It wasn’t, and we cannot let this disgusting point of view take root. Throwing trans people under the bus is both morally repugnant and strategically stupid -- trans people spent this entire election cycle, and every previous election cycle, and every other day, firmly under the bus. It did nothing to help anyone. It wasn’t the fucking pronouns.

What the fuck do we do next

This is going to be hard. This isn’t like 2016. Donald Trump won the popular vote this time! Resistance 2.0 probably won’t be measured by crowd sizes at protests, and we shouldn’t try to. This is our chance to think about what we want an enduring movement aimed at resisting fascism to look like. Here are two starter ideas that have emerged for me, some from my own brain and some formed based on good ideas I’ve seen bubbling up elsewhere:

1. Non-electoral volunteering/community outreach

Exerting pressure on our legislators and working to elect better Democrats will be a necessary step over the next 2-4-6-infinity years, but before we can get there I think we need to think of ways to repair the tattered fabric of our society?? And it seems the best way to do that is to not isolate ourselves and instead venture out into our communities to do some good. Not to get people elected, or to evangelize about the Democratic party, but to help our neighbors. 

At this point I’m sure everyone’s seen Rachel Maddow’s viral segment laying out ways to stay involved and fight back. To me, her most compelling piece of advice was to “join something.” I used to work for Indivisible, and there are local chapters in every state in this country and in nearly every congressional district. Maybe there’s a climate or abortion or workers’ rights organization in your town or county or state that aligns with your values, or maybe you start your own thing! As individuals or as a chapter, consider delivering meals to seniors, walking adoptable dogs around the neighborhood, go ahead and say good morning to your block’s Karen. Unionize your workplace! I don’t know. But I do know that it’s a lot harder to be a bogeyman for someone when you’re standing right in front of them, and that might make a difference to people who haven’t been completely MAGA-pilled yet.

I realize this particular call to action won’t be feasible or safe for those of you who are marginalized or at risk because of your race, gender presentation, or because you’re a member of a community that is under existential attack by this incoming administration -- but for those of us with the privilege to do so, I think joining something is a good place to start. 

2. Get involved with your state or county Democratic Party 

State party structures have outsized influence in choosing and promoting candidates up and down the ballot. And currently, we have a lot of weenies who end up getting chosen and promoted. While I think it’s important to foster viable third-parties and candidates, the reality is that the Democratic Party has both broad influence and the infrastructure to get people elected. To me it’s a choice between co-opting the structure that already exists and using it as an organizing vehicle to get what we want, or starting from scratch or close to it and potentially languishing outside of the rooms where electoral decisions are being made. For me, the former is preferable to the latter. We can repair old structures that are inclusive of Working Families or DSA candidates. Let’s re-organize this thing from the inside out and the outside in.

I say we stop letting the weenies prevail. Let’s use our influence to transform what’s possible in the Democratic party. Unfortunately, yes, I am suggesting you go to a Bucks County Dems-or-wherever-you-live meeting and STAY INVOLVED. 

This is our chance to push for candidates who will do what needs to be done: Go big, be bold, and take credit. Remember when Trump sent out those covid checks in 2020 and the payments we briefly delayed because he insisted that his personal signature be on them? I’m so sorry, but that was smart and correct! Democrats need to pass good shit that people can see and feel, even if it’s politically risky. I am sick of hearing from Members of Congress that they don’t want to take a favorable vote on an objectively good policy because they might face political consequences. So what? If the choice is between raising the minimum wage and losing your job in Congress, the worst place in the world, LOSE YOUR JOB. Do the right thing and go out a hero, dude!

Above all else, Democrats need to take borderline-megalomaniacal credit for every single legislative win they bank. One day I want to see big ass billboards with Hakeem Jeffries or whoever’s face on them that say “I REBUILT THAT BRIDGE FOR YOU. IT WAS ME!!!” 

We have to make people’s lives better, and that means forgetting the words “means tested,” “temporary,” or “relief in the form of a tax break.” It’s not 1992 anymore. We can do it, but we have to insist on a better party, at every level.

I have many other thoughts, especially about how completely stupid it was that the Supreme Court wasn’t a centerpiece of this election, and also how you all need to get your sons up off of YouTube immediately, but that will be for a future Swamp Person. I hope you enjoyed this! Please share, subscribe, etc., and I’ll keep sending you my bad opinions!

Meagan

1. Obviously I was and continue to be horrified with the ongoing brutalization of Palestinians in Gaza perpetrated by the government of Israel and subsidized by American tax dollars. I am disgusted by the current administration’s refusal to issue consequences to Netanyahu or his cabinet for their role in an ongoing genocide. I still voted for Harris because it is my strong belief that we cannot work towards peace if we ourselves are under the thumb of a violent authoritarian. I don’t know if Harris could have been persuaded toward a ceasefire and an arms embargo; I am sure that Trump cannot be. I am terrified at what we will witness next year in Gaza when he is sworn in. 

2.  It’s technically slightly more nuanced than this -- all four Senators referenced here caucus/caucused with the Democrats although not all of them identify as such. They were: Angus King (Independent, Maine); Joe Manchin (Billionaire, WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (Insane Person, AZ) (both Democrats at the time but now self-styled “independents,” and blessedly both gone from the Senate entirely); and Jeanne Shaheen (NH), who is fully a Democrat and I guess just a hater?