The Democrats threw away a winnable election

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In retrospect, the US election of 2024 was settled on August 12 2020. It was on that day that Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his presidential running mate. Given his age, this put her in a strong position to lead the Democrats in the medium term. Expressing doubts about the pick at the time was lonely and thankless work in liberal company. Four years on, perhaps the argument is easier to make.

Harris hasn’t had a bad campaign against Donald Trump. There was no definitive gaffe. Her two big tests — the Democratic convention address and the head-to-head debate — were passed. But she was ambiguous in thought and sometimes mystifying in speech. She was also tied to a radioactively unpopular White House. High inflation is more or less unsurvivable for incumbents. (Ask Rishi Sunak.) This is doubly true when the incumbent chose to spray money around despite warnings that it might push up prices. The Democrats needed a candidate less tainted through association with Biden and Bidenomics.

If this were one bad personnel choice, Democrats might rue it and move on. But it is typical. Fielding Hillary Clinton in 2016. Pretending that Biden had a second term in him until a televised debate exploded that conceit. Not choosing as Harris’s running mate Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor with high approval ratings in that crucial state. There is always a clever-clever reason why the choice is unavoidable in the circumstances. In truth, the “reason” is bad judgment, verging on dereliction. The Democrats are unserious about power, and others have to live with the consequences.

What are those consequences? What might the new-old president do in office?

There are reasons to believe that Trump Redux will also be Trump Unbound. For one, this will be his last term. The 22nd amendment, assuming it holds, bars him from running in 2028. During his first administration, what constrained Trump’s behaviour — somewhat — was the goal of re-election. Now, there is little incentive for him to mind the future, except perhaps a desire to launch his children on the political stage.

Also, Trump’s first administration brimmed with individuals, such as Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn, who wouldn’t have been out of place in a George W Bush cabinet. He is now likelier to have a team in his own image. There are Trumpian cadres and apparatchiks in a way there weren’t in 2016. If he wants to stint Ukraine, or undermine Nato, or interfere with legal processes, who will be the internal counterforce? When a president takes lots of “executive time”, the vice-president gains influence. That used to be Mike Pence: a rightwing but also conventional politician. It is now JD Vance. Throw in a Republican Congress, and the next two years at least could be fraught.

Of course, a plurality of Americans don’t find him scary in the first place. Trump is selective and focused in his antipathies: undocumented migrants, media critics, courts that take him on. This might be grim stuff, but most voters feel they will be OK. The generalised all-society repressiveness of a Franco or a Mussolini is another thing altogether. The fascism of the 1930s was never the right lens through which to understand Trump, but it is still used by a commentariat that knows almost too much about the second world war and its causes.

Other voters, plus much of the outside world, won’t feel so relaxed today. What consoling thoughts might they cling to? Well, Trump is 78, and the populist movement in the US might find him irreplaceable. He has a unique knack for saying outrageous things without seeming, for want of a better phrase, low status. Vance, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy: his heirs tend to have something of the internet chatroom about them.

A Trump-led US might also spur other democratic countries to look after themselves. The shrewdest remark about this election came from a minister in the French government. We cannot let the voters of Wisconsin decide the security of Europe every four years, said Benjamin Haddad. Trump is right that, a human lifetime after the second world war, it is bizarre that Europe and much of the free world relies on America for ultimate protection. From Germany to Japan, this has started to change. There is now a new impetus. (Incidentally, for Britain, what little hope there was of a free-trading world to dive into outside Europe is in all likelihood gone. Trump favours a general tariff, not just anti-China ones.)

One last consolation of the election result is that Democrats might now wake up. The party has long had some of the characteristics of an aristocratic court. There is the same deference to seniority over merit. There is the same dancing around difficult subjects. It might be a quirk of the left-liberal temperament: Britain’s Labour party wasted a decade on Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, for example. But it matters more when the party is one of two in the world’s most important country. The Democrats’ indulgence of electoral underperformers has consequences in Ukraine, the Middle East and beyond.

The most important controllable variable in politics is the candidate. (Ideas matter, no doubt, but flow from the individual.) When Harris essentially finished last in the 2020 primaries, history was telling the Democrats to look elsewhere for a future leader. Their failure to do so has amounted to forfeiting a winnable election. And perhaps rather more than that. The 250th anniversary of the American Revolution will take place under a Trump presidency. How better to honour a republic of exquisite constitutional design than to subject it to a stress test.

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