The New Yorker:

For years, Democrats have sought to win elections by micro-targeting communities with detailed facts. What if the secret is big, sloppy notions seeded nationwide?

By Nathan Heller

Dawn had not yet broken on the election results last week when Democrats began their favored ritual of falling out of love. Reasons were enumerated why Kamala Harris, the candidate who weeks earlier had been a magnet for enthusiasm, was an obvious poor choice to run for President. She was too coastal, it was suggested, too centrist, too un-primaried, too woke, too female. What were they thinking? The remorse is familiar, regardless of the outcome. When Joe Biden ran for President in 2020, many Democrats lamented that the Party hadn’t produced a stronger option—but Biden went on to receive more votes than any candidate in American history. Hillary Clinton transformed, in the Party’s view, from a historic nominee to a terrible candidate almost overnight. Barack Obama was widely acknowledged as a great candidate—even a once-in-a-generation one—who barely made it to a second term. John Kerry, a “legitimate, good candidate,” lost the popular vote; Al Gore, almost universally considered to be a terrible candidate, won it. One might conclude that the Democrats’ ability to hold the heart of the American public has amazingly little to do with the ideal dimensions of the candidate they put forth, and that their perennial trying and failing to find the perfect figure, followed by rites of self-flagellation, is a weird misappropriation of concern. The Republicans don’t lament the inadequacies of their candidates, clearly. The Republicans have thrice sent Donald Trump.

If the problem this year wasn’t the person, was it policy? Our distance from the close of the polls is still measurable in days, and yet voices have settled into hot debate about which issues Harris undersold, at the cost of the election. She leaned too much on reproductive freedom, we hear, or gave fatally little attention to concerns about immigration or the Palestinian cause or the Israeli cause. The campaign missed what spoke to men, perhaps particularly Black men, or Latino men—or was it women? Also, not enough about the kitchen-table economy.

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