Swing Voters
I do not understand "swing voters". I have no "theory of mind" regarding anyone who approaches a presidential election saying, "Gee, I wonder who I'll vote for this year. I'll have to weigh their records carefully and pick the best candidate." I'm not even sure these people exist in any numbers, but if they do, they are an alien species to me. This is not to say that people never switch parties. On the contrary, I know several people who have come to the realization that the party they've historically supported no longer supports their interests and values. But they do not swing.
Marginal Voters
I DO understand "marginal voters". I am one. A voter can be marginal in two senses. In the first sense, they are marginal because they are are generally disengaged. They are lazy or busy or unmotivated by politics. According to the NYT, the emerging Republican majority on which Trump specifically has capitalized has an outsized number of these people, which is why Democrats will be expected to do much better in off-year elections than presidential elections. Candidly, this is a mentally healthy way of living your life.
In the second sense, a voter is marginal because "Republican" or "Democrat" are in themselves insufficient. It is in this sense that I count myself as marginal: I have specific policy objectives, and I regularly bail on candidates who do not have credible commitments, including in the recent cycle. I do not swing, but I will hunt up third party candidates or write-ins when necessary. There is some nuance to this. I can be persuaded to choose pathetic (Jeb Bush) when the alternative is sufficiently scary (Janet Reno). But Obama was never a scary enough candidate to drive me to choose McCain or Romney.
Lessons Learned
Do parties learn? Parties evolve, yes, in the Darwinian sense: old voters die, new voters with new values turn 18, new candidates win elections with new messaging and coalitions (Reagan, Trump) and use their power to remake their parties. But learn from defeat?
I was trying to think of an example, and I finally came up with one: when John Kerry lost the popular vote to Bush, the Democrats collectively realized that being anti-war was an electoral loser. This left some people as political orphans (Glenn Greenwald) but American voters in general love them some wars (for a while, when we win). So anti-war messaging was absent from Democrat party messaging (Obama, Clinton, Biden, Harris) going forward.
This carried a couple of corollaries. The Left realized there was more profit in taking over the military, a project that had already started in 2004 and was complete by the time I left; the military no longer has the right-leaning internal culture it did when I started in the 80s, and now actively purges anyone it catches with heterodox ideas. The Left also has improved its messaging since the Kerry debacle; they can spin all manner of deviance as "supporting the troops", and any Right pushback as "a distraction". For a taste of what this looks like, see most articles at Military.com. Part of where the massive funding advantage the Left enjoys now allows them to spin up instant advocacy groups with a "veteran" patina whom Military.com writers can then quote when they are, for instance, demanding that 100+ thousand "Afghan Allies" be given un-vetted admission to the U.S.
But that's the only example I could come up with. What about now? We'll see.
One of the features of the regime media messaging in the aftermath of prior Democrat losses has been something along the lines of, "Well, sure, the Republicans SAID they were going to do thus and so, but really that was never practical, so look for them to pivot towards a more moderate approach." In an environment where Republicans regarded media favor as advantageous, this obviously created for them a path of retreat, and also carried the covert message that betraying their base would get them invited to all the cool parties. As of this writing, however, I'm not seeing that messaging. The NYT and AP post-election stories have been exactly the same hyperbolic end-democracy-as-we-know-it that they've been running with for almost a decade and already failed spectacularly.
But then, why should they learn? They will begin 2025 with vast institutional power, including the Senate fillibuster. 2026 will be better for them (how could it not?). Trump can't possibly live up to the hype. There will inevitably be a black criminal who breaks the law, resists arrest, and gets himself shot, and the whole circus can begin again.
Takes:
Dumb take: "Kamala was a good candidate" (Kristol, et al.)
In early 2019, when we sat around speculating on who the Democrats would put up against Trump, Kamala Harris seemed like a reasonable Obama second act: a People-Of-Color-ish senator who cleaned up nice and was ready to fulfill the progressive wish list. But what we discovered during the debates was that she had exactly zero ability to parry a thrust, and Tulsi Gabbard sank her candidacy in 20 seconds. She then got VP as a DEI hire and spent four years spouting nonsense, alienating her own staff, and policing intel reports for "sexist language". The first two of these were abundantly reported in regime media until this year, and the last tells you what you need to know about Biden's opinion of her: even if you think it's right and necessary, it's still HR-level make-work that is NEVER assigned to C-suite quality people.
In this respect, Kamala's 2024 personal performance fully met my expectations.
Dumb take: "Kamala ran a terrible campaign" (most Right-leaning commentators)
Kamala lost, so everyone who said "do something else" looks like a genius (as Scott Alexander predicted). But the NYT had it right: every potential strategy has its upsides and downsides. "Do more podcasts" only works if your candidate has something to say and say well, and Kamala had neither of those things. Further, Kamala was trying to both simultaneously cleave to the Biden administration to lay claim to executive experience while at the same time running away from the Biden administration because its consequences were massively unpopular among the marginal voters she needed. At most, only one of those things could be true, and the marginal voters knew that once you opened the box, the cat was either alive or its was dead. So her campaign's appeal was to abortion and Nazis under the bed, and that wasn't enough, not this time. But losing this gamble doesn't mean some other gamble would have had better chances.
Dumb take: "Kamala the Leftist". (most Right-leaning commentators)
Kamala was never anything other than a basic sorority girl. Her "leadership" consisted in figuring out which way the crowd was moving and rushing to the front of it. In the 2019 Democrat primary, that meant trans surgeries for illegal aliens. In the 2024 general election that meant . . . well, not THAT anymore, but her calculation was that openly repudiating 2019-2023 would be worse than not (see above). So she gestured at her campaign website and relied on her media surrogates to assure us that she was now a moderate, and what about abortions and Nazis . . .
Dumb take: "Biden the Centrist". (most Left-leaning commentators)
Biden has spent his political career staying as close as possible to the middle of the Democrat party. The center of that party has moved Leftward dramatically since 2012, and in particular began 2021 with an outsized appetite for revenge against its cultural enemies. Most Democrat politicians -- Biden, Tim Ryan in Ohio, Tim Walz in Minnesota -- moved Left right along with it. I've read any number of commentators mystified by Biden's behavior, because in 80s and 90s blah blah blah; who cares? In 2020, Biden promised his party maximum cultural Leftism, and his regime delivered it in spades, only backing off under this year's electoral pressure. In this respect, Biden's administration fully met my expectations.
Dumb take: "Biden was senile, so therefore . . . " (the NYT; most everybody)
Yes, Biden was senile. In fact, he was visibly declining as early as 2020. But so what? Whatever its electoral liability (probably overstated), Biden's cognitive incapacity should have been, if anything, a net-positive from the perspective of the median Democrat voter. A more vigorous president might have steered his policies more towards the marginal voter earlier; as it was, his administration delivered on his party's core priorities more than any other president since Reagan: trillions of dollars printed for green boondogles; political opponents jailed; alternative media censored; DEI/CT demands institutionalized at every level; tens of thousands of dissenters purged from government service (including me); and (count them) 6-10 million illegal aliens dumped on America's small towns. In general, Democrats have always been more willing than Republicans to actually spend their political capital, but Biden took this to the next level while eating ice cream and shaking hands with invisible people. Gimme some of that sweet-@ss cognitive decline!
Which I might get, by the way. Trump's victory speech in the wee hours of Wednesday morning showed a man much diminished from 2015. But it likely doesn't matter. Trump has re-made much of the Republican party since then; he re-enters office with a team, starting with his impressive VP, that share his vision; and the marginal voters that propelled his victory actually share his core priority of stopping the illegal immigration.
We may vote for a person, but we elect a party.
Smart take: "We shouldn't have put our pronouns in our emails." (MSNBC commentator, I think)
For most people, most of the time, politics is something they just read about. I had (until late 2021) a front row seat for the Leftist take-over of the military, but there just aren't enough AGPs to, by themselves, bother many people directly. As I said, this is a mentally healthy way of going through life.
The pronouns business served the Leftist desire to bully and humiliate their cultural enemies, but it also kept the Transanity in the constant view of the normies, and a lot of those normies are marginal voters. Trump was able to detect and capitalize on their widespread distaste for gender ideology as it was playing out in athletics especially, but the pronouns gave it a personal resonance it would not have otherwise had.
Smart take: "America / men / brown men are migogynist" (Al Sharpton; that guy next to Mika)
There are factions in the elites of both parties eager to put women in leadership positions above not just competence (Haley, Palin, Harris) but their electibility as well (those + Clinton). Disentangling the strength of male distaste for female bumbling from that of female authority as such is hard, but it is certainly plausible that there is a critical margin of male voters for whom, when they get a say in it, women in executive leadership is toxic. Note to Republican elites (especially in Arizona): just stop. Women candidates are not the key to women votes, and actively repel male votes. Note to Democrat elites: nah, brah, you keep doing you. Looking forward to your Ilhan Omar nomination in 2028 . . . .
What to expect: more of the same.
My median expecation of Trump 47 is that he picks up where he left off in March of 2020. Now, the ball is much further down the field than it was then, and the Democrats should be expected to defend those gains inch by bloody inch. On the other hand, the Biden "executive actions" are an easy trail of breadcrumbs to follow backwards. Trump by March 2020 had learned how to control the border and build his wall. The deportations are another matter: the regime has spent decades building the processes that make this extraordinarily hard, expensive and time consuming. But he and his team seem motivated, so . . . we'll see.
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