Harris
226
For the first time since the night of Nov. 4, 2008, a presidential election went exactly the way that I expected it to go.
Having been surprised so many times before, I can’t boast about my prescience. But I do think the 2024 election’s outcome was uniquely foreseeable. Despite all the wild elements — the candidate switch, the assassination attempts and the Elon Musk intervention — there was a consistency not just to the fundamentals, the issue landscape and the country’s mood, but also to the decisions that Democrats made and didn’t make throughout. Time and again, they smoothed Donald Trump’s path back to the White House in ways that should have been foreseeable.
It was foreseeable, first, that voters would punish the Biden administration for failing to make a major policy pivot after the midterm elections, when despite the Democrats’ overperformance in key Senate races, they still lost the House of Representatives and saw no meaningful improvement to Joe Biden’s dismal approval ratings.
Triangulating after a midterm loss is a tried-and-true tactic for improving an administration’s position, and yet it’s a tactic that the Biden Democrats largely eschewed: There was no Clintonian push for a sweeping legislative deal on deficit reduction, no serious outreach on social issues, no reconsideration of the aggressive efforts to regulate gas-powered cars or forgive student loans, and only a too-little-too-late effort to restore order to the southern border.
It was similarly foreseeable that the pileup of prosecutions of Trump would create political opportunities for Trump and dangers for the Democrats. A single prosecution, ideally in the classified documents case, would have been a different story. But having several cases based on a range of creative legal theories, two of them pursued by obviously partisan prosecutors, made it easy for Trump to bind Republicans voters back to him with a narrative of persecution — while the fact that he went to trial only for a case involving lying about sex trivialized the effort to hold him to account.
Far from vindicating the rule of law, the entire project of prosecuting a candidate for president while he ran for president foreseeably made the rule of law a hostage to the political process. And it left the Democrats in the difficult position of arguing that Trump was a grave danger because he might prosecute his political enemies — while he was being serially prosecuted himself.
