US Presidential election aftershocks
Richard Nixon won the 1972 Presidential election in a landslide against Democratic nominee George McGovern, who we could describe today as a 68er, pro-peace candidate. Nixon’s popular vote margin of victory was 62% to McGovern’s 38%.
Eight months later, a certain level of buyer’s remorse had set in:
President Nixon's margin of victory over Senator George McGovern in the 1972 Presidential election would have been “far smaller” if the contest had been held in late June this year, a Gallup Poll released yesterday indicates.
Fifty‐three per cent of 1,451 adults interviewed from June 22 to 25 [1973] said they would now vote for Mr. Nixon and 47 per cent said they would support Senator McGovern. …
The “possibility exists,” the Gallup organization said, that Mr. Nixon's popularity, mired in the Watergate affair, might have been lower at the time of the survey had it not been for the American visit by the Soviet Communist party leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev. Such meetings typically have raised … a President's popularity.1
Yes, a Russian leader was giving a Republican President a popularity boost then, too. In that case, it was because Nixon was pursuing a policy of détente to improve relations with the Soviet Union, including having approved a major nuclear-arms control treaty. But Nixon, for all his faults, was capable of pursuing a pragmatic and complicated foreign policy. The same cannot be said for President Biden’s elected successor.
Trump the celebrity was able to win two Presidential elections now by adapting a political “professional wrestling” act into national political success.
To borrow a favorite conservative phrase to blame everyone who’s not a billionaire for their own problems, part of democracy is that people are free to make “bad choices.” And this one is potentially Mussolini 1922 or Hitler 1933 bad. It’s likely there will be some buyer’s remorse from Trump voters. It’s happened before.
The Rev. William Barber looks at the significance of this particular instance of a bad choice2:
I actually think Harris ran a good campaign. And pulling together her own campaign while basically having to rely on Biden’s campaign organization was an impressive feat in itself. Tim Walz was an inspired choice for the VP nomination. The gamble of making Liz Cheney a campaign mascot to attract Republican crossover voters doesn’t seem to have worked, although deep dives into the numbers may show some benefit down-ballot. But the Democrats seriously need to expunge the word “bipartisanship” from their vocabulary and political strategy.
Mass delusion is A Thing, and there’s no magic cure for it. Trump was the beneficiary this time.
In retrospect, it would have been better for Biden to forego a re-election campaign early on so that the Democrats could have had a real primary. Kamala would probably have been the winner. The “name recognition” factor turned out to be important, strange as that may seem to us political-junkie types. Biden kept Harris in a notably low profile, among other things defending Biden’s Republican-lite border policy which only reinforced the Republicans’ nativist narrative on that issue.
The Democrats seriously, seriously need to confront the anti-immigrant demagoguery with a reality-based pushback. As the experience of the last decade have in EU countries including Britain, France, and Italy have shown, trying to pander to xenophobic rhetoric is a losing strategy for parties who seriously want to defend democracy and the rule of law.
Inflation has a psychological effect on people that not everyone filters through “real income” framing. The macroeconomic trends on employment, inflation, and real income in the last two years were remarkably solid for the US, thanks to Biden’s surprising embrace of evidence-based Keynesian economics. Inflation in home prices have been particularly notable, in large part because hedge funds and private-equity funds have been allowed to buy up large tracts of residential housing. Add that to the high mortgage rates, and it contributes to a throw-the-bums-out mentality. Even when the alternative is an orange, deranged catastrophe-in-motion.
Emma Vigeland and Mehdi Hasan also had a worthwhile discussion on the results3:
The effects of the Ukraine War and of Israel’s war against ever-expanding portions of the Middle East will be hard to measure. But, aside from the initial rally-round-the-flag effect at the start of one, most people just don’t like wars. Americans are used to paying attention to Israel’s wars. And this current one has been far and away the longest period of sustained combat in which Israel has ever engaged with no end in sight. The spectacle of Biden repeatedly issuing demands for restrain on Israel and Netanyahu flipping him off every time and getting away with it surely didn’t help.
This election also provided more evidence for the “authoritarian personality” theory that modern societies produce a non-trivial number of people who want to identify with a Strong Leader.
I once read an autobiographical essay in what is known as the Abel Collection4 from the 1930 by a Nazi Brownshirt who described being in the Army during World War I and thinking it was great. After the war he became a cop. Later he give up the police to become a street-fighting Communist. Then he switched to be a street-fighting Nazi. Not a typical biographical path for Nazis. But this guy wanted be in a structure where he would be told what to do and also be able to tell other people what to do. And beat them up if they didn’t comply.
Obviously, a Führer like Trump is just the kind an authoritarian like that guy would be likely to support.
Gallup Finds More Would Now Back Bid by McGovern. New York Times 07/05/1973. <https://www.nytimes.com/1973/07/05/archives/gallup-finds-more-would-now-backbid-by-mcgovern.html> (Accessed: 2024-08-11).
Democrats Deserted Working Poor: Bishop William Barber on Healthcare, Living Wages, Voting Rights. Democracy Now! 11/08/2024. (Accessed: 2024-08-11).
Harris/Walz Autopsy; Biden’s Role In Trump’s Win; What Do Americans Want? w/ Mehdi Hasan. The Majority Report YouTube channel 11/08/2024. (Accessed: 2024-08-11).
Theodore Fred Abel papers. Hoover Institution <https://digitalcollections.hoover.org/objects/58225/theodore-fred-abel-papers> (Accessed: 2024-08-11).
This is so sad though. People are going to be so badly off they won’t be able to dig themselves out. EVER. Nobody will dig them out either. Even if the worst hasn’t happened and the GOP hasn’t taken control for decades—people will be so poor, so sick, so beaten down. And their kids will be.
There’s no way to get the white people to vote for any program if it doesn’t involve white supremacy though. Even if there’s no wholesale destruction of democracy, America is probably doomed.