The Paul Wells Show - Trump won. So how did the Democrats lose?

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

With Trump’s decisive win in the U.S. election, American writer Ross Barkan argues his country has finally reached the end of the "Obama era" of politics. Barkan talks about what went wrong for Democrats, why he was early to say Harris was the wrong candidate, what he expects to come from Trump’s return to the White House, and why he sees an opportunity for the American left.  Ross Barkan is a journalist and novelist, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation and many other outlets. His Substack is called Political Currents. Season 3 of The Paul Wells Show is sponsored by McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.

I want to take a moment to thank the people who support this show. Tackling the complexity of global challenges demands a different approach to public policy. The Max Bell School of Public Policy's teaching, research, policy engagement, and public outreach develops the skills and understanding to solve the most important issues facing Canada and the world today. They offer several public lectures and conferences throughout the year on current policy conversations and provide an 11-month intensive master's program to prepare the next generation of policy leaders. Learn more at mcgill.ca max bell school What on earth just happened? When this election ended and Harris had lost decisively,

to me it felt like the end of the Obama era. Today, Ross Barkin, one of the brightest young political analysts in the United States, on the end of an era and the return of that other era. I'm Paul Wells, the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. So I don't know whether you've heard, but apparently Donald Trump is going to be the President of the United States again. It was in all the papers. One thing that means is that if Trump serves his entire second term,

he'll have dominated the American political conversation for a decade and a half. I believe that fits the technical definition of an epoch. We're going to be unpacking these results for years to come. I'll probably come back to U.S. politics here on the podcast a few times over the next several months. I wanted to start by inviting a rising star of political commentary, a guy named Ross Barkin. He's been writing smart stuff everywhere lately, including the New York Times Magazine, where he's a contributing writer, and also The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly and New York Magazine. He's a novelist. He teaches journalism at NYU. But like a lot of people, I noticed him on Substack, where he has a newsletter, Political Currents.

Barkin started telling people the Harris campaign was faltering long before that was a popular observation. He was actually saying it when it took some guts to say it. He wrote a piece in early September entitled, Brat Summer is Over. His subscribers hated it. Some cancelled their subscriptions. But it's not as though Brat Summer ever made a comeback afterward. And now we've got all the time in the world to contemplate how the Trump comeback happened. I think you'll be hearing more from Ross Barkin in the future. I'm glad you're able to hear him today. Hi, can you hear me? I can. How are you?

Hi, I'm good. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah, it's really great to have someone who, like, we're really good at having Canadians speculate about what's happening in American politics or getting Davidid from and so yeah i'm neither of those things so there you go check i'll check a new bot uh tell me how your election night went um it was busy as all election nights are i for the first time in a while I didn't actually go to any campaign headquarters because there were no really interesting races within New York City. They're all in the suburbs. And I wasn't traveling to D.C. for Kamala's or to West Palm Beach for Trump's. So I just took it in.

There's the Nation magazine hosted a watch party in Manhattan. So I went there for a bit and saw some people I knew and then went back home and started writing. Were you surprised? I've got friends who should know what's happening in US politics who were astonished that Trump won. And then I had friends who were predicting a couple days before that it's over, he's got it. I was not surprised at all. I mean, at all. No. In my own sub stack, I said multiple times sort of leading into the race that it was a coin flip election. It was 50-50. Either side had a really good argument for winning. I was surprised he won the popular vote. I will say that. I did

not think he would come out ahead in the popular vote. I thought he would win the electoral college. It seemed like a strong possibility. His victory was larger than I thought it would be. It's certainly much more of a mandate than 2016 ever was. So that did surprise me. But Trump being victorious, no. And I think if you were watching the election closely, you could see the polls had narrowed quite a bit. Polls actually were fairly accurate. All was said and done. Underestimated Trump a bit again, but if you go to the state by state swing state polls, all these

elections in the states were quite close, and kind of the seven big ones. Trump came out ahead in all of them. That was, I suppose, surprising that he'd go seven for seven. He figured he'd go four for seven, five for seven, go seven for seven. But overall, no, not shocked.

Okay. Now let's do what we're really here to do, which is to apply hindsight. Was it winnable for Harris in your estimation? I think, yes, it was going to be tough. I'll say this looking at the macro picture, every incumbent party across the world in almost maybe the exception of Mexico has had a very hard time winning elections. You pick a country now, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada now will be in that boat. Incumbent parties are getting hammered by inflation and then to an extent immigration as well. I mean, that seems like now it's a real global issue. Ironically, for America's reputation as being backward or xenophobic, what have you, I think Americans actually were more progressive than Europeans in immigration,

but now are kind of catching up. You're seeing the anti-immigrant fervor that you have seen in Europe for a long time now in the U.S. And Trump certainly understood that in the electorate. I think he's understood that for years and exploited that. What could have Harris done? I would say she was in a very difficult position given how she became the nominee and given the tight timelines. I think she could have had a real argument, message, and vision for her campaign. I don't know if that was enough to win. I think everyone gets a bit too cynical about campaigns and assume nothing really matters

except macro conditions, Trump had a very succinct message. The irony of Trump versus Harris is Trump was more of the policy candidate. That doesn't mean Trump cares about policy or knows policy. It doesn't mean he can explain anything. What it means is when Donald Trump was running for president this year, it was very obvious to the average person what he wanted to do. It was close the border, tariffs, fight inflation somehow. Certainly, he talked in the past also about being very critical of free trade agreements. So this sort of isolationist,

protectionist view was very much hardened. And there was no debate as to what Trump would be about. Kamala Harris was this void. And unlike every other Democratic candidate I can remember in my lifetime, had no real affirmative argument for why she should be elected. She would say things like, we're not going back. She offered very few policy proposals. They were quite vague. And it wasn't really clear what you were voting for other than she wasn't Trump. And she still almost won. So not being Trump certainly can get you close to half the electorate. But when you don't have any message, you don't have any argument, it's very hard to win. She also had just the limitations of who she is as a political talent. She's not in the A-list of the Democratic Party in terms of someone

who has been battle-tested, won in difficult states, shown she can really appeal to different parts of the electorate. Democratic Party, ironically, has a pretty large bench. She should not have been part of that bench. She lost very badly in the 2020 primaries. And she was brought back to life because Joe Biden made her the vice president or the running mate, and she became the vice president. And I think that was politically a big mistake. I think not enough nominees give thought to that when you're picking a VP, you're picking someone who's going to be by default a leader of the party. Harris became the nominee when Biden dropped out because she was the vice president. It was simple as that.

There was no brief, you know, contested convention to choose someone else. It was no, she's the vice president, the party lined up behind her, and that was it. It was decided. So she had just never been tested to any real degree in her political life. She had underperformed in a California statewide election, which ran for attorney general, and she had performed quite badly in the primary in 2019, going into 2020. And then she was handed the nomination without a single primary vote, which hasn't happened since the 1950s. So you take all that together. Perhaps if you were handing the nomination to a real strong political talent, it could have been a race the Democrats won, but she's not very talented. She has no future in the Democratic Party now. And that's how it went. be kind of refreshing to be able to say that now and secure the knowledge that fewer people will yell at you than if you had said it in August or September. I know because I watched the reaction

to your Brad Summer is over piece that there was a substantial palace guard around the Democratic Party that said, essentially, no, no, no, it's going fantastic. It is a wonderful campaign. America is swept up in this and fuck you if you say something different. I was fascinated by the reactions to that piece. I wrote this piece for the listeners in early September. So I'd given it time. Harris became the de facto nominee on July 21st. I remember that day very well. I never thought highly of her as a politician, but I gave her the month of August to kind of see how this would all go here. The convention is very well received. I was at the convention. I thought it was fine,

but I just don't think conventions matter all that much. So I do this piece in the beginning of September, basically criticizing her and her media strategy, which was non-existent from the time she became the nominee in the end of July until September. She conducted a single interview. And that's one interview. That's not like, oh, she did like four podcasts and turned down 60 Minutes. It's like, no, she sat down once with CNN in a joint interview with Tim Walls, her running mate. And that was it. And it was truly shocking that someone running for president of the United States was completely

seeding the entire media landscape to her opponent. When I wrote this piece, and I made sure to include these caveats that people don't always see caveats. I was saying it doesn't have to be the mainstream media. Liberals now in America developed a fascinating hatred of mainstream media, which was not true in the 2010s. So they feel like CNN's out to get them now and the New York Times is out to get them now. And they're normalizing Trump or doing these other things that I don't think they're actually doing. But I said to them, it's fine if she doesn't want to sit down at the New York Times editorial board. I think she should, but it's fine if she doesn't. She wants to not go on CBS or do Face the Nation or do any of these morning shows, talk to the podcast, do the alternative media rounds.

She eventually did belatedly. But by then Trump and Vance, too, to his credit, J.D. Vance, they'd flooded the zone. J.D. Vance had a very interesting strategy of doing the podcast, the right wing media, and also the sort of dissident media. But then also he did a lot of mainstream stuff, J.D. Vance. He sat down with the New York Times, something Harris never did. He was on the Sunday morning shows, the establishment Sunday shows, if you're in Washington. So he did all of it. And she did almost none of it. And I was pointing this out in September. And like what you said, the palace guard, this kind of closing of the ranks it was really interesting to see from like a sociological cultural perspective this real like blue guard come out in in full force in a way

i was completely taken aback by because i i'm i write things that are sometimes controversial i have my values and i will speak out on issues and people don't agree with me. So I've developed a thick skin over the years. This was not something I imagined would be getting the unsubscribes and furious comments and really frothing denunciations. You don't know what you're talking about. She's running a great campaign. She doesn't have to talk to you anymore.

The media is over. Don't you understand that? She's doing campaign rallies, Ross. That's enough campaign rallies. And I very gently pushed back and said, well, a campaign rally is something 99% of Americans will never attend. So going to a town in Pennsylvania is nice and rallying in front of a thousand people or 5,000 people, but it's not just that. It's not just reading off your script and going home. It's doing all the other stuff too. Yeah. So I've got these rules of

politics that I cobbled together earlier in my career. And one of them is that voters are efficient casting directors. And if you apply for the job of opposition leader, you're going to get it. And it comes from just observation. I used to watch a lot of debates, and there'd be someone up on stage who'd be talking about themself. And there'd be someone else on the stage who'd be talking about what a horrible person the other person was. And I'm like, that's who's going to win. And I think the contrast with Biden is instructive, because he was never a huge talent that blazed across the firmament, but he had stuff he wanted to do when he became president. It was,

it was bundled out in packages of a trillion dollars each for like three initiatives. And he was pretty eager to talk about that. And she eventually had a tax cut. And then the fact that she was not the kind of lurid mess that Donald Trump was, but it turns out people weren't that interested in who she wasn't. No. And I do in who she wasn't.

No. And I do think politically she lacks substance. I felt that before you can say it now, no one's going to disagree with you really because she lost except for a few diehards. I think she, she didn't know what to campaign on because the Biden administration had accomplishments. She wasn't really sure to campaign on because the Biden administration had accomplishments. She wasn't really sure how to tout them. She wasn't sure how to break from them. I think more importantly, though, she just had no argument for what you want to do with your four years.

I mean, simple questions. She would be asked, like, why do you want to be president? She couldn't just say, these are the things I want to do. I have power. I mean, you are running for the most powerful position on earth, perhaps the most powerful position in human history. If you factor in the nuclear weapons that are at the disposal of the US government, you got to be about something. And Trump is about something. You can hate it, but it's something. And I think Obama was about something. I think Joe Biden, as president, was certainly about something. And I think if Joe Biden had not been senile, for lack of a better word, and really had this mental slippage, it would have been an interesting race, Biden running for re-election against the headwinds. But let's say he had like Bernie Sanders cognition, not talking about the politics, just the cognition. I was been been going through as Kamala Harris did not do that the podcast circuit. I just been listening lately to those who did Bernie Sanders is going on these comedian podcasts that Harris ran away from. comedian podcast that Harris ran away from. And, you know, you listen to him, he's 83 years old,

he sounds great. I'm not saying he should be president, that that is an advanced age, but he sounds undiminished from 10 years ago, or 30 years ago. So if Joe Biden had that cognition, that energy, which both Trump and Bernie have still in their advanced ages, it would have been an interesting race because Biden would have been barnstorming across America saying, I did this, I did this, I did that. Might not have worked anyway, just with the macro currents, with inflation, with immigration, he might have lost anyway, but that would have been interesting. But honestly, I in 2022 wrote a piece that Biden shouldn't run again. And that was based on my own view of his slipping performance and cognition that we don't have to dive too into that. That was another fascinating mainstream

media utter failure to completely not communicate to the public and also the democratic establishment as well covering up that if you actually consume media and watch and not just listen to pundits, you can see these things. So as everybody rolls out their rogues gallery after the 5th of November, you surprised me by writing a piece about Barack Obama. Why Barack Obama? I'm fascinated by Obama. You know, Obama is a politician, of course, of great historical import. I think he will go down in history as one of America's most important presidents. And given his ability to make history, given his talents, he built this multiracial coalition. He was the first Black president. He dominated the culture and really loomed over America for eight years. He dominated the culture and really loomed over America for eight years. I've been very interested to view this era through those lens and something I felt that when this election ended and Harris had lost decisively, to me, it felt like the end of the liberal left. And Obama had very much loomed over the Democratic Party post-2016. He supported Hillary very aggressively. Joe Biden, of course, was his vice president. Michelle Obama was always called down to give these very stirring speeches. She gave another one at the 2024 convention everyone loved. And of course, the Obamas were out there for Harris.

And one of their tasks seemed to be keeping Black voters, especially Black men, overwhelmingly in the Democratic coalition. Of course, Latino men and women have moved very quickly out of the Democratic coalition, Asians as well, to the point where the Latino vote, we'll have to go into deeper data, but really you're seeing something close to a 50-50 election there, which is just striking. So, you know, I was thinking about all this and thinking about the Obamas and their surrogate work for Harris, and certainly it's not their fault that Harris couldn't win. But I think the conclusion you can draw is that Obama has no influence on this culture. Young people today don't care. Gen Z was too young. The millennials always like him, but I was on a different podcast and the host made this

analogy that resonated with me. I mean, I'm sure in Canada, everyone knows Michael Jordan, you know, still the greatest basketball player of all time, I would say, and, you know, forever a symbol of the 1990s and sort of this dominance. But, you know, Michael Jordan himself doesn't have much to do with today's basketball. And I think Obama is the Michael Jordan of American politics. You could say for what he did, how he won. I mean, his, his majorities were much greater than Trump's in this election, even his 2012 win, you know, you have to really respect that, but he himself just doesn't matter anymore. And I think he is going to matter less as we move towards 2028, as the Democratic Party now confronts this very uncertain future in terms of

where they're going to go, and really has to, in some form, at least message wise and psychically rebuild itself. Obama is not going to have a great role in that, and his people are not going to have a great role in that. I mean, American politics is very much driven by these operatives and powerful advisors and people who've now been on the political scene for decades. There's David Clough, David Axelrod, and this jen o'malley dylan people that in canada are not should shouldn't be well known but a lot of us listen to axelrod uh yeah and i think you know naxalrod's fine and has good things to say and contribute but this whole era it's just done this whole kind of i'd say almost like, technocratic, liberal left that was going to lead America into this glorious multiracial future where everyone would vote Democrat.

It just hasn't happened. And I wouldn't argue today the Trump coalition is permanent, that this is the permanent realignment. I think American politics is very fickle. I think people now are less aligned to political parties than ever before. And I think we've just seen a lot of switching back and forth over the last 20 years. But I will say the Obama era, which I think in some form was able to continue past 2016, just because he was still lingering over the party and people were still thinking about him a lot. And he as a surrogate was so prized. I just think that's done. I'm not saying Obama won't campaign in the future. I'm not saying Michelle Obama won't excite people. I'm not saying their books won't sell a lot of copies. What I'm saying is for the politics of today

and for tomorrow, he's got nothing to do with it. It's going to be Trump. It's going to be post-Trump. And it's going to be whatever the American left and the center left looks like. And then the almost exciting thing I'll say, I mean, it can be demoralizing, but exciting too. It's wide open. I mean, American politics, certainly on the left of center is more open than it's ever been in my lifetime. And you could probably go back further, where maybe you can say the closest analogy would be 2004 and the defeat of John Kerry, which led to the rise of Obama. You can compare that era to this one. This one, in a way, it feels even more thorough, because George W. Bush himself was coming out of a vaunted position as an incumbent. You had 9-11, even with the disaster of Iraq, he was still a popular figure. So George

Bush winning, I think it stunned some people, but it wasn't Donald Trump winning, right? So the American left, the broad left, not just leftists and socialists, but the whole massive tent. There's reckoning. And then there's going to be contesting the future. And no one's got a hold on it. I think that's the interesting thing. There really is no one person who can stand up and say, I've got the magic trick. I've got the message. Listen to me. But it seems to me that the sort of Democratic Party and the constellation around it has gone from this couple months of forced triumphalism to just an abject despair now, they say, between the right wing mediascape, between social media, between Russian bot farms, between low education. A lot of that's loser talk to me, I'll say. I'm not saying that you're giving their talking points. Yeah.

To me, yeah. And a Democratic Party that is essentially wholly owned by consultants and has nothing to say to middle America. I got to say that last part sounds pretty right and pretty correct. I think so. I'll say in defense of the party writ large, the down ballot candidates did better. Democrats lost the Senate, but several of their candidates won tough races and swing states that Trump actually carried. So it's not as if the Democratic

Party has been blown off the face of the earth. There are candidates that are running well and kind of running on sharp economic messages. But I think broadly, yes, you're not wrong. I mean, the Democratic Party really has lost its hold on the working class and the poor and even in the middle class to a degree, which was not true in the Obama years. And you're really seeing a working class movement into the Republican Party and around cultural issues and the perception of economics because they are upset about inflation and Democrats never really had a message for that. I think in terms of the information landscape, I get very exhausted by those conversations because first of all, the left has media in America as the mainstream media largely is center left. I mean, that's just how it is. I'm not saying they're diehard of the Democrats the way Fox News are. They're not.

But, you know, you get a fair hearing in the New York Times. This sort of whining about alternative media in the podcast space and YouTube, it's very funny to me because if you, you know, listen to Rogan, or now there's this comedian Theo Vaughn, Lex Friedman's another big podcaster. These are all people Bernie Sanders has spoken with, by the way, some quite recently. If you listen to them, they're not doctrinaire. The big podcasters today, they're not these frothing MAGA people. There are MAGA people in the podcast, in the right-wing space.

But Bernie Sanders got Joe Rogan's endorsement in 2020. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezez and this was my most recent piece on substack really stopped campaigning for him after he touted that uh interview he did this interview with rogan but there were any people understood this was something you know you kind of have to do now and aoc you know who's playing purity politics did not stomach this so democrats did this to themselves they They ignored these spaces. They could have been there. They could have been going on these shows. And they still can. These shows are all there. The thing about a lot of these podcast hosts is they'll speak to anyone,

especially if you're prominent. They're happy to have you on for two hours. Even Fox, you've seen a select number of Democrats do Fox. Pete Buttigieg was one who did. Bernie was another. But for the most part, the Democratic Party took this very, to me, ignorant, cloistered strategy of we only talk to our people and we hope for the best. Whereas Trump himself, yes, you know, Trump's kind of more in the conservative media space. But, you know, he gave Rogan a lot of time in this election. Harris could have. She did not.

I'm not saying that would decide the election. I do think one thing that's clarifying about this defeat with Trump winning a popular vote and winning a real electoral college victory, like a strong one, all the excuses go out the window. So you were reading off kind of like the classic Democratic, the Russians, the bots, Jill Stein, Comey. Sometime, you know, this election is over the Gaza people, the Palestine people. There are so many excuses to be lined up last time when Trump won that. Democrats could take solace in it and then they could fight amongst themselves.

No, it was the Comey letter. No, it was Bernie running the primary. No, it was the Russians. That's all gone. It's completely gone. And I think that's healthier, to be frank. Yeah. What are your expectations for a Trump government? I mean, look, on paper, he's going to What are your expectations for Trump government? I mean, look, on paper, he's going to pardon 900 yahoos and perhaps himself. He's going to deport between 2 and 20 million people, which is a really fun thing to contemplate for those of us who live in a country that borders on the United States. And it's going to be open season for cronies and swindlers. Yeah, I think the Trump government, it'll be more confident, I think, this time around

in that he comes in more experienced and his people come in more experienced. But yes, I agree. I think on the immigration front, he's very serious about deporting many millions of people and ending asylum as much as possible, closing the border. I think conservative economic policy, I mean, that's what I pay attention to. So a corporate tax cut, anti-labor appointments at the NLRB. His Federal Trade Commission is very interesting because you have populists like Vance who actually like some of the antitrust work that Joe Biden was doing.

But you have like traditional fiscal conservatives who are going to want kind of pro-corporate right wing people at like the FTC. I think if you look at Trump's first term broadly, it was a conventional Republican administration. When you go down to the policy, he gutted the EPA, environmental regulations and out the window. He gave a corporate tax cut. He appointed right wing Supreme Court justices and federal judges as well. So in that sense, it was an administration that a Ted Cruz could have run, right? I think what's interesting about Trump now is I do think that the, I'm cynical in that I think the fiscal conservatives will win the fight because that's where the donor base is and these billionaires are going to come in. And you have the Vance wing and kind of like the Josh Hawley wing, and they are a bit more populist, but are they going to win the fight against the Koch brothers and every other billionaire that now kind

of wants their peace? I don't think so. You know, so I think it'll be a conservative administration, I believe, on immigration. I think the fears about a national abortion ban have no basis. There will not be a national abortion ban. The votes are not there in Congress, and Trump doesn't want to do one anyway. So I think that just defaults to where it is. Obviously, there are ways the federal government can make it more difficult to get certain drugs, and I don't sell that short. But I expect a conservative administration, I expect chaos. I think foreign policy will be fascinating. Certainly, Israel and Ukraine, you know, being two major hotspots where U.S. in essence has two client states and is going to have to decide what to do with each of them. So, you know, I do think the fascist talk has died down.

There's much more of it going into the election. I think now people understand that, you know, Trump can be a bad president and it's enough to say he'll be a bad president, but there are going to be elections in 2026. There'll be elections in 2028. He has majorities in Congress, but they're not massive majorities. The House will probably be plus five, maybe plus six. Senate, he's got 53 plus Vance's vote, which is good. It's not filibuster proof. So everyone who wanted to bomb the filibuster when Democrats in the Senate now, thankful the filibuster is there. So that means the Republicans will govern through reconciliation, which is the process the Democrats and their Biden like to follow where if you don't have the 60 votes, you can do budgetary legislation in these sort of massive omnibus packages and they call it reconciliation that's

how all the biden investments happen so i think trump world will do a reconciliation package and i expect that to be giveaways to wealthy people and in large corporations i don't really have any other expectations of that i think if you work in a federal bureaucracy you should be worried i mean trump's gonna maybe try to fire you or try to really damage what you do. So I take that very seriously. Of course, the Justice Department, that is a wild card, is Trump's weaponized Justice Department to chase his enemies, right? Maybe, right? Who are his enemies? Who's it going to be? He's not going to lock up Hillary Clinton. He had four years to do it when the first time he was president. So I don't quite buy that.

So I don't underrate the damage he can do. For me, I think as we're talking here, focusing on policy is much more important than these kind of grander narratives from Timothy Snyder and those types of thinkers about America descending into XYZ. America is a flawed 200 plus year old republic. It's not going anywhere. The republic's not going anywhere. Trump is a product of the system. And he is not eternal. And now, you know, he'll get a chance to govern. He got a mandate. That's what democracy is. I think sometimes some of the liberal elites forget that, you know, you can't just treat voters like your students and hope they do exactly what you want. It's a messy process.

You've given us a lot to think about. I really appreciate you taking the time, Ross Bark, and thanks for joining us. Yeah, thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica. My producer is Kevin Sextonica. My producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producer is Stuart Cox. Laura Reguerre is Antica's head of audio. Thanks to the Max Bell Foundation for their support and to all of my new colleagues at the Max Bell School

of Public Policy at McGill. If you subscribe to my Substack, you can get bonus content for this show as well as access to my newsletter. You can do that at paulwells.substack.com. If you're enjoying the show, give us a good rating on your podcast app. It helps spread the word. We'll be back next Wednesday.