By David Wallace-Wells
Escritor de opinião
The New York Times
1. Não foi uma vitória esmagadora.
2. Talvez devêssemos falar menos sobre polarização e mais sobre paridade.
3. Em lugares muito azuis, a tão comentada mudança para o vermelho refletiu as perdas de Harris em vez dos ganhos de Trump.
4. Demograficamente, os partidos estão começando a parecer cada vez mais semelhantes.
Much has been made of the recent class inversion of the two parties, with Democrats increasingly a party of affluent and especially well-educated voters and Republicans gaining support among the poor and working class. In this election, at least to trust the exit polls, Harris won voters making over $100,000 and lost those making less than $50,000 and $50,000 to $100,000 — making Trump’s coalition by some measures a closer match for Barack Obama’s 2008 coalition. (Of recent coalitions, Harris’s may most closely resemble Bob Dole’s.)
But while the shifts are real, the end result gives a bit of a different picture, as Tim Barker emphasized in a powerful and persuasive post-mortem for The New Left Review, in which he argues that the election did not signal a realignment so much as a “dealignment.” In none of the three broad income categories captured by exit polls did either side win voters by more than five percentage points. When pollsters slice the electorate more thinly, into five income categories, neither candidate appears to have won more than 53 percent of any of the five groups. In 2008, The Financial Times recently calculated, the richest third of Americans were more than 20 percentage points more likely to vote Republican than Democratic, and the poorest third more than 20 percentage points more likely to vote Democratic; in 2024, it estimated, each was within a few points of an even split.
There are a few demographics that aren’t moving toward 50-50 — rural voters got more Republican, and Black voters didn’t shift much at all. Hispanic voters got much less Democratic, as did youth and women. But the white vote got a little less red, and education polarization a little less sizable, too. This is not any real comfort to liberals, whose coalition looks much less distinct as a result. But all told, it is less a true inversion than a flattening: It’s not just the country as a whole that is balanced so close to 50/50; most demographic subgroups are trending that way, too.
5. Harris não fez uma campanha consciente.
This case has been made quite often on cable television and social media and in strategy sessions in recent weeks — by Philippe Reines, Seth Moulton and Elissa Slotkin, among others. But the counterargument has been made memorably by, among others, Jon Stewart and John Oliver: On the campaign trail, Harris emphasized her past as a prosecutor, her gun ownership, her solidarity with Israel, her administration’s role in record-setting oil and gas production and her party’s pursuit of a harsh border-crackdown bill that was spiked by Republicans for political advantage. Her campaign seemed to highlight Mark Cuban and Liz Cheney more than Shawn Fain or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and her swing-state advertising skewed heavily toward bread-and-butter issues rather than social justice or identity politics.
In down-ballot races, Democrats did not toss around the term “Latinx” or make arguments about affirmative action or gender medicine, either. For the most part, they were too busy talking tough about crime and the border, too, and even those who didn’t need to be so careful chose to keep their distance from all the social-justice flash points. Whenever I read election post-mortems advising Democrats to ditch social-justice language, disavow activists and distance themselves from advocacy organizations often derisively referred to as the groups, I think: Isn’t that, broadly speaking, the campaign we all just watched?
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| Ibrahim Rayintakath |
A eleição presidencial foi há duas semanas, e os liberais do país já estão profundamente na fase de culpa. Embora ainda não tenhamos dados precisos sobre como vários grupos demográficos votaram e não teremos por meses, entramos em uma rodada preliminar de explicações e recriminações — um menu de lições para aprender e ajustes a fazer na ideologia, visão de mundo e estratégia dos liberais, que, se a história servir de guia, se mostrarão extremamente influentes e provavelmente, em grande parte, errados. Antes que essas autópsias prematuras sejam totalmente incorporadas à sabedoria convencional, no entanto, eu queria sinalizar um punhado de observações sobre a corrida e como ela já está sendo interpretada — algumas ressalvas, alguns contrapontos, algum contexto que pode nos ajudar a entender o significado de uma grande eleição confusa em um grande país confuso, pelo menos até obtermos dados eleitorais realmente confiáveis.
OK, talvez mais do que um punhado.
1. Não foi uma vitória esmagadora.
No final, ao que parece, a margem de Donald Trump no voto popular nacional será de cerca de 1,6 pontos percentuais — a vitória mais estreita desde 2000. Sua margem nos três estados decisivos do alto Centro-Oeste será de cerca de 232.000 votos — uma vitória maior do que em 2016, mas um pouco menor do que Joe Biden garantiu em sua famosa vitória estreita de 2020 nesses mesmos estados. Parece improvável que Trump tenha conquistado a maioria dos votos.
A eleição marcou uma mudança decisiva: um movimento amplo e uniforme para a direita, até o nível do condado, que levou um republicano a uma vitória no voto popular pela primeira vez em 20 anos. Mas esta não foi uma derrota nem como a de 2008 (muito menos 1932, 1972 ou 1984). E se a história recente servir de guia — o controle da presidência agora mudou em três ciclos consecutivos — pode não ser uma maioria duradoura também.
Foi uma vitória inegavelmente consequente, dada a transformação trumpista do poder estatal que ela promete. Mas é de uma escala que exige uma ruptura epistemológica nacional, produzindo um novo conjunto de histórias sobre o país e sua direção, a natureza da expertise e o curso da história social? Estamos prestes a ver.
2. Talvez devêssemos falar menos sobre polarização e mais sobre paridade.
A eleição de 2024 foi a quarta disputa consecutiva em que a margem do voto popular foi inferior a cinco pontos percentuais; o último trecho como esse terminou em 1896. Ainda na década de 1990, os democratas mantiveram o controle contínuo da Câmara dos Representantes por quatro décadas; desde 2008, o controle mudou de um lado para o outro três vezes.
Como Ruy Teixeira e Yuval Levin escreveram em um relatório para o American Enterprise Institute intitulado “Política sem vencedores” em outubro, “o sistema partidário americano está em um impasse prolongado incomum”, no qual “eleições apertadas e maiorias estreitas dominam a política eleitoral mais do que em qualquer outro ponto da história americana”. Você pode escolher ver isso como enlouquecedor ou saudável ou talvez ambos.
Mas mesmo em um contexto político global historicamente brutal para os titulares e partidos titulares, Kamala Harris ainda ganhou 48,3% dos votos. Este é um país em notável equilíbrio eleitoral, no qual nenhum dos partidos está realmente a mais do que alguns centímetros do poder.
3. Em lugares muito azuis, a tão comentada mudança para o vermelho refletiu as perdas de Harris em vez dos ganhos de Trump.
Em nível nacional, Trump adicionou mais de dois milhões de votos aos seus totais de 2020 e Harris teve desempenho inferior aos benchmarks de Biden em 2020 em mais de sete milhões. Em estados indecisos, onde concentrou seus recursos e mensagens, Harris fez o melhor que pôde (embora Trump também tenha se saído bem). Mas nos lugares mais democratas, onde margens decrescentes produziram uma espécie de vertigem liberal, Trump não obteve muito apoio; o tão alardeado aumento da direita entre os eleitores urbanos foi impulsionado principalmente por um colapso de Harris.
Em Nova Jersey, por exemplo, Trump ganhou quase 80.000 votos a mais do que em 2020; Harris quase 400.000 votos a menos do que Biden. Em Massachusetts, Trump obteve quase 68.000 votos e Harris perdeu mais de 300.000. Em Nova York, Trump obteve cerca de 223.000 votos a mais do que na última rodada; Harris obteve quase 850.000 a menos. E na cidade de Nova York, onde a mudança para o vermelho produziu muita conversa sobre a virada reacionária das cidades azuis, Trump ganhou mais de 90.000 votos a mais do que em 2020, enquanto Harris ganhou mais de 570.000 a menos do que Biden. As eleições são vencidas por margens, é claro, mas se você está tentando medir a temperatura política de um lugar, os totais brutos de votos também importam. Nas ruas de Nova York, provavelmente não há muito mais Trumpers do que você pensava — apenas menos democratas leais e comprometidos.
4. Demograficamente, os partidos estão começando a parecer cada vez mais semelhantes.
Much has been made of the recent class inversion of the two parties, with Democrats increasingly a party of affluent and especially well-educated voters and Republicans gaining support among the poor and working class. In this election, at least to trust the exit polls, Harris won voters making over $100,000 and lost those making less than $50,000 and $50,000 to $100,000 — making Trump’s coalition by some measures a closer match for Barack Obama’s 2008 coalition. (Of recent coalitions, Harris’s may most closely resemble Bob Dole’s.)
But while the shifts are real, the end result gives a bit of a different picture, as Tim Barker emphasized in a powerful and persuasive post-mortem for The New Left Review, in which he argues that the election did not signal a realignment so much as a “dealignment.” In none of the three broad income categories captured by exit polls did either side win voters by more than five percentage points. When pollsters slice the electorate more thinly, into five income categories, neither candidate appears to have won more than 53 percent of any of the five groups. In 2008, The Financial Times recently calculated, the richest third of Americans were more than 20 percentage points more likely to vote Republican than Democratic, and the poorest third more than 20 percentage points more likely to vote Democratic; in 2024, it estimated, each was within a few points of an even split.
There are a few demographics that aren’t moving toward 50-50 — rural voters got more Republican, and Black voters didn’t shift much at all. Hispanic voters got much less Democratic, as did youth and women. But the white vote got a little less red, and education polarization a little less sizable, too. This is not any real comfort to liberals, whose coalition looks much less distinct as a result. But all told, it is less a true inversion than a flattening: It’s not just the country as a whole that is balanced so close to 50/50; most demographic subgroups are trending that way, too.
5. Harris não fez uma campanha consciente.
This case has been made quite often on cable television and social media and in strategy sessions in recent weeks — by Philippe Reines, Seth Moulton and Elissa Slotkin, among others. But the counterargument has been made memorably by, among others, Jon Stewart and John Oliver: On the campaign trail, Harris emphasized her past as a prosecutor, her gun ownership, her solidarity with Israel, her administration’s role in record-setting oil and gas production and her party’s pursuit of a harsh border-crackdown bill that was spiked by Republicans for political advantage. Her campaign seemed to highlight Mark Cuban and Liz Cheney more than Shawn Fain or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and her swing-state advertising skewed heavily toward bread-and-butter issues rather than social justice or identity politics.
In down-ballot races, Democrats did not toss around the term “Latinx” or make arguments about affirmative action or gender medicine, either. For the most part, they were too busy talking tough about crime and the border, too, and even those who didn’t need to be so careful chose to keep their distance from all the social-justice flash points. Whenever I read election post-mortems advising Democrats to ditch social-justice language, disavow activists and distance themselves from advocacy organizations often derisively referred to as the groups, I think: Isn’t that, broadly speaking, the campaign we all just watched?
Did Harris suffer from stances she and other Democrats had taken in earlier cycles? Probably at least to some degree. Trump certainly emphasized her 2019 support for transgender medical care for prisoners in the campaign’s closing weeks, and there are obviously ways she might have chosen to more explicitly disavow positions she’d previously taken (perhaps to electoral benefit but also perhaps not). But looking not just at this campaign but also the four years of Democratic positioning and policymaking it follows, it is really hard to see which if any supposedly toxic left-wing positions made their way into public policy or even campaign ads or speeches on the trail. (Check out this 2020 Axios interview with Jon Ossoff, for instance, in which he pointedly disavows the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, defunding the police, abolishing ICE and expanding the Supreme Court.) You may think left-wingers are pushing electoral albatrosses on the party, but Democrats as a party have already been running away from them for quite a while. In this cycle, for instance, their message on the border was that Republicans had gotten in the way of a crackdown; at his 2022 State of the Union speech, Joe Biden chanted “Fund the police! Fund them! Fund them!” And Democrats in the chamber gave him a standing ovation for it.
6. O problema da guerra cultural da esquerda pode ter menos a ver com os políticos democratas do que com os eleitores democratas.
So why have Americans continued to associate a social-justice agenda with Democrats, if so few of them have been publicly pushing those positions over the past five years? One answer is that the memory of some of those positions still lingers, no matter the positioning of elected officials. But another possibility is that to the extent Americans are feeling alienated by progressives, they aren’t really voting to reject Democratic politicians so much as Democratic voters, many of whom much more closely resemble the stereotype of professional-class bureaucrats and corporate middle managers wielding D.E.I. agendas than anyone actually running for office.
Large shares of Democratic voters remain quite left-wing, and to many Americans they are more visible figures than any politician — their co-workers, their neighbors, those they see on social media. It may well be the case that to the extent that the progressivism of the groups is a problem for Democrats, this is a more straightforward and direct social effect — not mediated by elected officials or their policy positions. And if the conflict is a matter of the broader culture war rather than a partisan dispute, that isn’t exactly something that’s easy for the party to solve. It’s one thing for Democrats to prune their public messaging of anything that might strike the median voter as woke excess — for the most part, they’ve already done that. But appointing Rahm Emanuel to head the Democratic National Committee won’t change the makeup of your H.R. department or the kinds of T-shirts or yard signs you see. At least not overnight.
7. O argumento final de Trump foi uma reclamação de guerra cultural sobre algo incrivelmente raro.
The anti-trans ads that dominated Trump campaign spending in the fall, and that highlighted Harris’s 2019 support for gender surgeries for prison inmates, may loom as large in political memories as the Willie Horton ads of 1988. In the closing weeks of the campaign, this messaging blitz eclipsed ads concerning the economy, inflation and immigration, and both Republican consultants and Democratic candidates credited it in retrospect with moving an awful lot of undecided voters to Trump.
In the weeks since, it has been tempting for many self-critical liberals to attribute this effect to the political vulnerabilities of a social-justice coalition that includes advocates of gender medicine. Perhaps Harris might’ve benefited electorally from a more emphatic Sister Souljah moment on trans issues, explicitly disavowing her earlier position, however morally grotesque and personally uncomfortable that might have been. But what is perhaps most remarkable to me is that throughout the Biden administration, the total number of such surgeries performed in federal prisons was two.
8. A invisibilidade de Biden como presidente pode ter sido mais custosa do que sua demora em desistir.
At the start of Biden’s term, administration officials often talked about the need to make their legislative gains concrete to voters — an approach to governance that came to be called deliverism — often presented as a lesson learned from the Obama years, when voters were often unaware of what the government was doing on their behalf.
But to the extent that the Biden administration did deliver concrete wins for voters, chiefly through the expanded social-welfare spending allocated as pandemic stimulus, it also allowed much of those gains, including those first rolled out under Trump, to disappear and expire, resulting in a sudden collapse in many measures of voters’ well-being. The more enduring investments the administration made — in infrastructure, manufacturing and clean energy — are longer-timeline policies, designed to play out over many years. In the meantime, there is a pretty acute need for salesmanship — of which, over the past four years, there was a pretty acute void in the White House. Perhaps constant speechifying on the state of the economy by the president would have felt as hectoring to voters as the chart-posting of neoliberal economists did on social media. But when you don’t really have a lead messenger, it gets a lot easier for the other side to shape the story.
9. A administração mais pró-trabalhista da memória não comoveu os sindicatos ou seus eleitores.
Biden resgatou o fundo de pensão dos Teamsters e se tornou o primeiro presidente americano na história a fazer piquete quando se juntou à greve dos United Auto Workers de Shawn Fain em 2023. Mas os Teamsters não apoiaram Harris, citando posteriormente sua simpatia pelas grandes empresas de tecnologia e seu aparente apoio a um futuro de economia de bicos; seu presidente discursou na Convenção Nacional Republicana. No geral, de acordo com pesquisas de boca de urna, as famílias sindicalizadas votaram nos democratas por uma margem menor do que em 2020. Em outras partes do eleitorado, é plausível dizer que o partido entendeu mal os desafios materiais dos eleitores ou não respondeu adequadamente a eles. Mas quando se trata de eleitores sindicalizados, especialmente, a lição parece ser mais que as considerações materiais foram superadas por fatores pós-materiais. Isso deveria ser uma surpresa? Já se passaram duas décadas desde "O que há de errado com o Kansas?" e muitos democratas abastados também têm votado um pouco contra seus próprios interesses materiais durante todo esse tempo.
10. Os democratas realmente se esqueceram de como dizer não?
This has been the contention of several post-election post-mortems, including one much passed-around and thoughtful guest essay in The Times by Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to John Fetterman. He argued that Democrats should be much more strategic in stiff-arming progressive interest groups in order to pursue a centrist supermajority.
But here is a short list of things the Democrats have effectively said no to, in this campaign and over the past couple of years: Medicare for All; free community college; free child care and universal pre-K; a true Green New Deal, of the kind Bernie Sanders campaigned on; major investments in the care economy, as was once promised as the core of Build Back Better; an empathic approach to migration; and a hard line on Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
So why have Americans continued to associate a social-justice agenda with Democrats, if so few of them have been publicly pushing those positions over the past five years? One answer is that the memory of some of those positions still lingers, no matter the positioning of elected officials. But another possibility is that to the extent Americans are feeling alienated by progressives, they aren’t really voting to reject Democratic politicians so much as Democratic voters, many of whom much more closely resemble the stereotype of professional-class bureaucrats and corporate middle managers wielding D.E.I. agendas than anyone actually running for office.
Large shares of Democratic voters remain quite left-wing, and to many Americans they are more visible figures than any politician — their co-workers, their neighbors, those they see on social media. It may well be the case that to the extent that the progressivism of the groups is a problem for Democrats, this is a more straightforward and direct social effect — not mediated by elected officials or their policy positions. And if the conflict is a matter of the broader culture war rather than a partisan dispute, that isn’t exactly something that’s easy for the party to solve. It’s one thing for Democrats to prune their public messaging of anything that might strike the median voter as woke excess — for the most part, they’ve already done that. But appointing Rahm Emanuel to head the Democratic National Committee won’t change the makeup of your H.R. department or the kinds of T-shirts or yard signs you see. At least not overnight.
7. O argumento final de Trump foi uma reclamação de guerra cultural sobre algo incrivelmente raro.
The anti-trans ads that dominated Trump campaign spending in the fall, and that highlighted Harris’s 2019 support for gender surgeries for prison inmates, may loom as large in political memories as the Willie Horton ads of 1988. In the closing weeks of the campaign, this messaging blitz eclipsed ads concerning the economy, inflation and immigration, and both Republican consultants and Democratic candidates credited it in retrospect with moving an awful lot of undecided voters to Trump.
In the weeks since, it has been tempting for many self-critical liberals to attribute this effect to the political vulnerabilities of a social-justice coalition that includes advocates of gender medicine. Perhaps Harris might’ve benefited electorally from a more emphatic Sister Souljah moment on trans issues, explicitly disavowing her earlier position, however morally grotesque and personally uncomfortable that might have been. But what is perhaps most remarkable to me is that throughout the Biden administration, the total number of such surgeries performed in federal prisons was two.
8. A invisibilidade de Biden como presidente pode ter sido mais custosa do que sua demora em desistir.
At the start of Biden’s term, administration officials often talked about the need to make their legislative gains concrete to voters — an approach to governance that came to be called deliverism — often presented as a lesson learned from the Obama years, when voters were often unaware of what the government was doing on their behalf.
But to the extent that the Biden administration did deliver concrete wins for voters, chiefly through the expanded social-welfare spending allocated as pandemic stimulus, it also allowed much of those gains, including those first rolled out under Trump, to disappear and expire, resulting in a sudden collapse in many measures of voters’ well-being. The more enduring investments the administration made — in infrastructure, manufacturing and clean energy — are longer-timeline policies, designed to play out over many years. In the meantime, there is a pretty acute need for salesmanship — of which, over the past four years, there was a pretty acute void in the White House. Perhaps constant speechifying on the state of the economy by the president would have felt as hectoring to voters as the chart-posting of neoliberal economists did on social media. But when you don’t really have a lead messenger, it gets a lot easier for the other side to shape the story.
9. A administração mais pró-trabalhista da memória não comoveu os sindicatos ou seus eleitores.
Biden resgatou o fundo de pensão dos Teamsters e se tornou o primeiro presidente americano na história a fazer piquete quando se juntou à greve dos United Auto Workers de Shawn Fain em 2023. Mas os Teamsters não apoiaram Harris, citando posteriormente sua simpatia pelas grandes empresas de tecnologia e seu aparente apoio a um futuro de economia de bicos; seu presidente discursou na Convenção Nacional Republicana. No geral, de acordo com pesquisas de boca de urna, as famílias sindicalizadas votaram nos democratas por uma margem menor do que em 2020. Em outras partes do eleitorado, é plausível dizer que o partido entendeu mal os desafios materiais dos eleitores ou não respondeu adequadamente a eles. Mas quando se trata de eleitores sindicalizados, especialmente, a lição parece ser mais que as considerações materiais foram superadas por fatores pós-materiais. Isso deveria ser uma surpresa? Já se passaram duas décadas desde "O que há de errado com o Kansas?" e muitos democratas abastados também têm votado um pouco contra seus próprios interesses materiais durante todo esse tempo.
10. Os democratas realmente se esqueceram de como dizer não?
This has been the contention of several post-election post-mortems, including one much passed-around and thoughtful guest essay in The Times by Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to John Fetterman. He argued that Democrats should be much more strategic in stiff-arming progressive interest groups in order to pursue a centrist supermajority.
But here is a short list of things the Democrats have effectively said no to, in this campaign and over the past couple of years: Medicare for All; free community college; free child care and universal pre-K; a true Green New Deal, of the kind Bernie Sanders campaigned on; major investments in the care economy, as was once promised as the core of Build Back Better; an empathic approach to migration; and a hard line on Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
And what is the list of things the campaign and the party has emphatically said yes to since the 2022 midterms? In the closing days of the presidential race, as the establishment-and-outsiders theme came ever more into focus, I found myself wondering what the Harris campaign or the Democratic Party really stood for, beyond the status quo. Harris proposed a surprisingly ambitious national elder-care plan, but it did not appear to have a major effect on the race. She floated tax credits for first-time home buyers and talked up the need to build more housing. She floated the idea of some price controls to limit inflation, then walked back the proposal. In a time of vague if widespread discontent, it’s hard to win when you look like the embodiment of the system and sell yourself as its defender.
11. Ainda não temos uma imagem muito clara do estado da economia, o que é um pouco estranho dada a sua centralidade na nossa política.
Voters told exit pollsters that the economy was one of the top determinants of their vote, and in the two weeks since the election, scores of soul-searching Democrats have acknowledged that in the end, the public had been at least as right as the experts over the past couple of years — that the country’s much-touted economic miracle wasn’t actually all that it was cracked up to be, that far too many Americans felt they’d fallen farther behind and that those insisting otherwise were missing the big picture.
Does this mean that the conventional top-line metrics we’ve used now for generations to measure the health of the economy are no good? Or perhaps, even, that they never were? In the immediate aftermath of the election, Annie Lowrey published an incisive account of all the things the top-line measures missed. Kyla Scanlon, who coined the term “vibe-cession,” has touched on the subject, too, and J. Zachary Mazlish has also offered a thorough rundown whose upshot is that yes, the economy was in worse shape than the conventional measures suggested. But while some metrics do suggest conditions closer to the perceptions of voters, it’s also the case that those living in swing states believed local economic conditions were improving rather than worsening, almost three-quarters of Americans steadily reported their own finances were at least OK, and partisan views of the state of the economy flipped almost immediately after Election Day. What, exactly, are we meant to learn from all this? In another vibe-cession, are we going to trust the vibe and hunt for the metrics to match?
12. Mas, dado o que sabemos, talvez seja notável quão pouco a introspecção democrata se concentrou no problema da inflação e em como administrá-la melhor na próxima vez.
The first inflation post-mortem was really a pre-mortem, the one-man campaign by Larry Summers against the wisdom of Biden’s major pandemic stimulus. In the years that have followed, a remarkable string of credentialed, orthodox economists — including Ben Bernanke, Olivier Blanchard and Peter Orszag — have demonstrated that the inflation that voters found so punishing in 2021 and 2022 was not a creation of American fiscal policy but of the underlying conditions of the pandemic recovery.
But if that is the case — if the biggest political challenge of this election cycle was a problem of how we responded to a crisis rather than how we created one — where does that leave us? Some analysts have floated the possibility that higher interest rates, designed to curb inflation, actually worsened the problem; Summers himself has suggested that properly accounting for the higher cost of borrowing could explain three-quarters of the mysterious gap between official inflation figures and public perceptions of the economy. One serious forward-looking proposal was put forward in The Times by the heterodox economist Isabella Weber: much more aggressive interventions on price surges when they start. And it is perhaps notable that the political economies of several countries that have defied the global anti-incumbency trend — Switzerland and Mexico, to name two prominent ones — are defined in part by much more pervasive price controls and much more aggressive price interventions. Spain has also done well to forestall inflation recently, though it hasn’t exactly made its prime minister a national hero — it only helped him win a tight re-election in late 2023.
13. Forjar um Joe Rogan "liberal" provavelmente não é a resposta.
Provavelmente, Harris deveria ter ido ao podcast de Rogan. Mas ela foi ao "Call Her Daddy", "Club Shay Shay" e "The Breakfast Club". E aqueles que responderam à vitória de Trump com apelos para construir um equivalente liberal de Joe Rogan não entenderam apenas seu apelo, mas também o cenário do podcast como ele já é.
Os 10 melhores podcasts do ano da Apple incluíram dois ou três programas de notícias com codificação liberal e dois programas de estilo de vida com uma valência liberal e apenas Joe Rogan com alguma reputação conservadora. Os gráficos mudam um pouco de dia para dia, mas folheie os 50 melhores, e o equilíbrio entre programas de esquerda e codificados de esquerda e programas de direita e codificados de direita tende a ser bem equilibrado.
Isso não quer dizer que não haja nada na ideia de que o ambiente da mídia pós-legado se inclina para o conservadorismo no momento. Esses gráficos oscilam muito; O Spotify tem uma inclinação mais para a direita no topo, podcasts exclusivos para assinantes provavelmente contam uma história diferente, e o mesmo provavelmente é verdade para o YouTube (no Substack, frequentemente citado como um foco de contrarianismo antiliberal, uma parcela bastante significativa dos principais boletins políticos na verdade se inclina para a esquerda). É para dizer que a questão é menos um desequilíbrio no ecossistema de novas mídias do que o fato de que em uma cultura dominada de muitas maneiras por liberais, as vozes progressistas vão soar um pouco mais estabelecidas, e as vozes contraculturais geralmente virão de — ou se desviarão para — a direita. Na era George W. Bush, lembre-se, os conservadores tinham a mesma reclamação sobre os liberais, que eles acreditavam que comandavam a cultura, mas a resposta não era dar a Dennis Miller seu próprio "Daily Show".
O que me leva de volta à metanarrativa política que enfatizei na manhã seguinte à eleição: que a eleição representa uma reação cultural ampla, mas relativamente vaga, ao establishment liberal; que o establishment é maior que o Partido Democrata, embora por razões antigas e ressaltadas na pandemia o partido esteja muito identificado com ele; e que retornar ao poder político provavelmente não requer uma grande mudança no humor básico do país, mas provavelmente significa que os liberais precisam encontrar algumas maneiras de parecerem outsiders e novatos novamente (em vez de simplesmente sugerir novamente que um voto nos democratas é um voto pela unidade nacional pós-tribal e um fim efetivo para as batalhas da guerra cultural). Como Ted Gioia memoravelmente colocou, o conflito cultural agora é frequentemente menos uma questão de esquerda e direita do que de cima para baixo e de baixo para cima. Provavelmente, todos nós faríamos bem em considerar muito menos assuntos em termos tão estreitamente partidários.
11. Ainda não temos uma imagem muito clara do estado da economia, o que é um pouco estranho dada a sua centralidade na nossa política.
Voters told exit pollsters that the economy was one of the top determinants of their vote, and in the two weeks since the election, scores of soul-searching Democrats have acknowledged that in the end, the public had been at least as right as the experts over the past couple of years — that the country’s much-touted economic miracle wasn’t actually all that it was cracked up to be, that far too many Americans felt they’d fallen farther behind and that those insisting otherwise were missing the big picture.
Does this mean that the conventional top-line metrics we’ve used now for generations to measure the health of the economy are no good? Or perhaps, even, that they never were? In the immediate aftermath of the election, Annie Lowrey published an incisive account of all the things the top-line measures missed. Kyla Scanlon, who coined the term “vibe-cession,” has touched on the subject, too, and J. Zachary Mazlish has also offered a thorough rundown whose upshot is that yes, the economy was in worse shape than the conventional measures suggested. But while some metrics do suggest conditions closer to the perceptions of voters, it’s also the case that those living in swing states believed local economic conditions were improving rather than worsening, almost three-quarters of Americans steadily reported their own finances were at least OK, and partisan views of the state of the economy flipped almost immediately after Election Day. What, exactly, are we meant to learn from all this? In another vibe-cession, are we going to trust the vibe and hunt for the metrics to match?
12. Mas, dado o que sabemos, talvez seja notável quão pouco a introspecção democrata se concentrou no problema da inflação e em como administrá-la melhor na próxima vez.
The first inflation post-mortem was really a pre-mortem, the one-man campaign by Larry Summers against the wisdom of Biden’s major pandemic stimulus. In the years that have followed, a remarkable string of credentialed, orthodox economists — including Ben Bernanke, Olivier Blanchard and Peter Orszag — have demonstrated that the inflation that voters found so punishing in 2021 and 2022 was not a creation of American fiscal policy but of the underlying conditions of the pandemic recovery.
But if that is the case — if the biggest political challenge of this election cycle was a problem of how we responded to a crisis rather than how we created one — where does that leave us? Some analysts have floated the possibility that higher interest rates, designed to curb inflation, actually worsened the problem; Summers himself has suggested that properly accounting for the higher cost of borrowing could explain three-quarters of the mysterious gap between official inflation figures and public perceptions of the economy. One serious forward-looking proposal was put forward in The Times by the heterodox economist Isabella Weber: much more aggressive interventions on price surges when they start. And it is perhaps notable that the political economies of several countries that have defied the global anti-incumbency trend — Switzerland and Mexico, to name two prominent ones — are defined in part by much more pervasive price controls and much more aggressive price interventions. Spain has also done well to forestall inflation recently, though it hasn’t exactly made its prime minister a national hero — it only helped him win a tight re-election in late 2023.
13. Forjar um Joe Rogan "liberal" provavelmente não é a resposta.
Provavelmente, Harris deveria ter ido ao podcast de Rogan. Mas ela foi ao "Call Her Daddy", "Club Shay Shay" e "The Breakfast Club". E aqueles que responderam à vitória de Trump com apelos para construir um equivalente liberal de Joe Rogan não entenderam apenas seu apelo, mas também o cenário do podcast como ele já é.
Os 10 melhores podcasts do ano da Apple incluíram dois ou três programas de notícias com codificação liberal e dois programas de estilo de vida com uma valência liberal e apenas Joe Rogan com alguma reputação conservadora. Os gráficos mudam um pouco de dia para dia, mas folheie os 50 melhores, e o equilíbrio entre programas de esquerda e codificados de esquerda e programas de direita e codificados de direita tende a ser bem equilibrado.
Isso não quer dizer que não haja nada na ideia de que o ambiente da mídia pós-legado se inclina para o conservadorismo no momento. Esses gráficos oscilam muito; O Spotify tem uma inclinação mais para a direita no topo, podcasts exclusivos para assinantes provavelmente contam uma história diferente, e o mesmo provavelmente é verdade para o YouTube (no Substack, frequentemente citado como um foco de contrarianismo antiliberal, uma parcela bastante significativa dos principais boletins políticos na verdade se inclina para a esquerda). É para dizer que a questão é menos um desequilíbrio no ecossistema de novas mídias do que o fato de que em uma cultura dominada de muitas maneiras por liberais, as vozes progressistas vão soar um pouco mais estabelecidas, e as vozes contraculturais geralmente virão de — ou se desviarão para — a direita. Na era George W. Bush, lembre-se, os conservadores tinham a mesma reclamação sobre os liberais, que eles acreditavam que comandavam a cultura, mas a resposta não era dar a Dennis Miller seu próprio "Daily Show".
O que me leva de volta à metanarrativa política que enfatizei na manhã seguinte à eleição: que a eleição representa uma reação cultural ampla, mas relativamente vaga, ao establishment liberal; que o establishment é maior que o Partido Democrata, embora por razões antigas e ressaltadas na pandemia o partido esteja muito identificado com ele; e que retornar ao poder político provavelmente não requer uma grande mudança no humor básico do país, mas provavelmente significa que os liberais precisam encontrar algumas maneiras de parecerem outsiders e novatos novamente (em vez de simplesmente sugerir novamente que um voto nos democratas é um voto pela unidade nacional pós-tribal e um fim efetivo para as batalhas da guerra cultural). Como Ted Gioia memoravelmente colocou, o conflito cultural agora é frequentemente menos uma questão de esquerda e direita do que de cima para baixo e de baixo para cima. Provavelmente, todos nós faríamos bem em considerar muito menos assuntos em termos tão estreitamente partidários.
David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells), escritor da Opinion e colunista da The New York Times Magazine, é autor de “The Uninhabitable Earth”. Inscreva-se para receber sua newsletter aqui.
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