Response to The Birthering of the Democrats
Let us accept from the outset that partisan Democrats and I will never agree on the substance of the particular claims they have made about the election. Let’s simply try to find common ground on what they’re alleging. Conventional post-election debate among Democrats has involved…
Freddie claims that "conventional post-election debate among Democrats" is made up of a number of characteristics. I don't think the debate has been nearly as homogenous as he implies, and the bullets are full of misleading hyperbole that further amps up the emotion of the piece.
Blaming the media for their ills, insistent that it is the reporting on Democratic candidates and messaging that is to blame, not the candidates and messaging themselves
Josh Marshall (the editor of TalkingPointsMemo, a liberal outlet), in the aftermath of the election:
There is a huge amount that a president whose party controls Congress can do and do quickly. So I don't for a moment second guess the potential consequences of this election, which look dire. I also think Democrats need to think seriously about how to reshape their party around an agenda that more directly addresses the economic prospects of middle class voters and finds ways to combat rising economic inequality. So the consequences of this defeat are potentially vast. It's a good time to give a lot of thought to what went wrong, why and how Democrats can do better.
Developing elaborate conspiracy theories involving foreign powers, non-state actors, and our own intelligence services working together to oppose their interests, without a single piece of credible, verifiable evidence that does not stem from hearsay or anonymous sources
This is conflating a few different partisan arguments:
- "It is likely that Russians were involved in some kind of messaging manipulation intended to influence the outcome of the election. This is problematic." Josh Marshall, for example, has made this argument (he covered it extensively during the election, and has not particularly ratcheted up his level of urgency after the election). There is some credible evidence that this has happened, including a Crowdstrike report from back in June. It's indeed not verified.
- "Russia definitely manipulated the media during the election, including by flooding America with fake news." This is a sloppy version of the previous claim, and is false exactly in the sense that it's claiming unverified things as verified. These kinds of claims also usually toss in addition du-jour claims (like "fake news") that lack credible evidence and are often not very likely.
- "Russia hacked the election and Jill Stein's recount will prove it. Donate!" This is making a completely unverified and uncredible claim, and is almost always made with a level of certitude that is inappropriate. Occasionally people are making a weaker claim about what technical people believe is problematic about election machines (these claims are by and large true) but those claims are usually retweeted by people making the much stronger claim.
TL;DR don't conflate (1) with (2) or (3).
Claiming that the leaked Clinton emails were uniquely damaging to her campaign after months of insisting that there was nothing meaningful or important in said emails
There's a difference between claiming that there isn't anything substantive in the emails and claiming that the emails aren't damaging to her. For example, the Clinton campaign and Clinton loyalists described the Comey email revelation in the final weeks of the election as both completely lacking in substance and extremely damaging. And this was at a point where partisans largely believed Hillary was headed to a win.
Agitating for renewed hostilities with Russia, which hold’s the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, after years of reduced risk of a uniquely destructive war
That's not particularly specific to partisan Democrats.
27 Senators—12 Republican—Call On Trump To Aid Ukraine Against Russia
Relevant portion of the letter:
In light of Russia’s continued aggression and repeated refusal to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereign right to choose its own destiny, we also renew our call for the United States to increase political, economic, and military support for Ukraine. This includes defensive lethal assistance as part of a broader effort to help Ukrainians better defend themselves, deter future aggression, and implement key structural reforms. Similarly, we believe that Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea should never be accepted, nor should we lift sanctions imposed on Russia for its behavior in eastern Ukraine until key provisions of the Minsk Agreement are met. Accordingly, U.S. leadership on maintaining such transatlantic sanctions should remain a priority.
Josh Marshall, November 25:
A more Russia friendly policy toward Syria is a legitimate policy choice.
There are a number of people who are serious about the Russia concern who haven't agitated for renewed hostilies, as far as I can tell.
Suddenly espousing an aggressive nationalism and militarism that they have long accused the GOP of engaging in, with loose talk of treason and aiding our enemies for those who question the idea that the Russians and the FBI conspired to elect a Republican the When this is meant seriously, it's at least silly and quite often dangerous.
In some cases, this is an ironic "how you like dem apples" kind of argument ("look! now it's the GOP who aren't patriotic!") more than a serious nationalistic argument. It's certainly a minority perspective among liberal pundits, and not a part of "conventional post-election debate among Democrats."
Insisting that Wikileaks is a partisan pro-Republican organization despite the fact that the largest and most prominent leaks in the organization’s history were directly damaging to the GOP’s efforts to justify and defend the war in Iraq
During the election, it's pretty clear that Wikileaks was uniquely focused on Hillary Clinton.
From November 8:
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Clinton: out of touch, cronyistic, didn't drive a car in 35 years, flew all over the world but accomplished nothing https://t.co/dc2OjdPIII pic.twitter.com/P8yiYkD6bO
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 8, 2016
On November 4, Wikileaks tweeted detailed claims from Breitbart that the Weiner emails were full of unmentionable content ("They see how disgusting it is.") and that further arrests were imminent.
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Astounding claims from Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater on Clinton & NYPD https://t.co/oB3xTndfI0
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 5, 2016
From the article:
“But the fact is, you know that if the Left had emails pointing to Donald Trump visiting, multiple times, an island with underage sex slaves basically, emails, you know they’d be talking about it. They’d be shouting it from the rooftops.”
During this election, it's uncontroversial to say that Wikileaks had a singular focus on Hillary Clinton, despite the fact that they have indeed had bipartisan targets in the past (those two things aren't in conflict).
The day after the election, Wikileaks retweeted:
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Even after election, #WikiLeaks is not letting up on Hillary Clinton https://t.co/fTEuM312Yk pic.twitter.com/hYxBm32A7l
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) November 10, 2016
The belief that Wikileaks was more active in attacking Hillary's campaign than Trump's campaign during the 2016 election is widely believed in conventional post-election debate among Democrats. It's also true.
Fixating on the popular vote and the Electoral College, insisting suddenly that these structures are to blame for their loss even though they were well aware of our system before the election, and despite the fact that they were completely silent on this dynamic before their loss
To the extent that people are whining about the electoral college or claiming that the election results are illegitimate because of the election results, they fit the critique in this article.
But many people on the left are pointing out that the PV/EV split is significant (it is). In most cases, it's to defuse arguments that "The American people rebuked Donald Trump" or "Donald Trump won one of the most stunning victories in American history."
Josh Marshall in the immediate aftermath expressing concern:
Obviously this doesn't matter for the result. But I think it's worrisome for the country as a general matter. It's bad for everyone when these two counts diverge just for basic democratic legitimacy reasons. Even more so when they diverge so significantly.
This is an expression of concern, but not a fixation on the Electoral College.
In terms of what was known and understood before the election, at the end of October, fivethirtyeight (part of the lefty punditocracy) talked about the likelihood of a PV/EC split.
On November 1, Nate did a more detailed analysis ("Election Update: Yes, Donald Trump Has A Path To Victory "). The article argued that Trump probably had no paths to victory if he lost the popular vote by 3-5 percent, but could win if he lost by only 2%.
This isn’t a secure map for Clinton at all. In a race where the popular vote is roughly tied nationally, Colorado and New Hampshire are toss-ups, and Clinton’s chances are only 60 to 65 percent in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. She has quite a gauntlet to run through to hold her firewall, and she doesn’t have a lot of good backup options. While she could still hold on to Nevada, it doesn’t have enough electoral votes to make up for the loss of Michigan or Pennsylvania. And while she could win North Carolina or Florida if polls hold where they are now, they’d verge on being lost causes if the race shifts by another few points toward Trump. In fact, Clinton would probably lose the Electoral College in the event of a very close national popular vote.
In the same article:
But that’s why it’s not only reasonable but 100 percent strategically correct for Trump to be campaigning in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin. ... If you want to debate a campaign’s geographic planning, Hillary Clinton spending time in Arizona is a much worse decision than Trump hanging out in Michigan or Wisconsin. Sure, she could win the state — but probably only if she’s having a strong night nationally. If the results are tight next Tuesday instead, Michigan and Wisconsin are much more likely to swing the election.
Liberals (including me, mea culpa) didn't always agree with Nate's numbers before the election, but there were plenty of signals that a PV/EV split was possible, and that in the event of a close popular vote, that outcome could occur.
TL;DR there are some liberals who are heaping scorn on the electoral college, but plenty others who are just expressing legitimate frustration about the split. The idea that the electoral college is "to blame for their loss" is both trivially true and also largely accepted in "conventional post-election debate among Democrats" as an understood part of the process, resulting in legitimate election results according to American election rules.
Waving away the severe deficiencies of the Democratic ground game, lashing out at anyone who points out its problems, and completely failing to subject the people responsible to the harsh assessments that this loss would seem to require
An article a few weeks ago on Vox (another part of the lefty punditocracy) had a blunt assessment about the ground game (in The radically simple reason Hillary Clinton didn’t run a different campaign: she thought she was winning (emphasis mine):
As exit polls, however fallible, began confirming a too-familiar narrative of Clinton’s unfavorability, so began the endless stream of valid critiques from the left: How was Clinton’s campaign so tone-deaf to a growing populist movement among the white working class? Why did she ignore Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin? Why didn’t she campaign where it mattered?
In Obama's post-election post-mortem (cited in this article), he said:
I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa. It was because I spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and VFW Hall, and there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points. There's some counties maybe I won, that people didn't expect, because people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for and who you were fighting for.
I could go on and on, but there have been plenty of articles from prominent people on the left raising issues about the mistakes of the Hillary campaign. This is especially true among Bernie supporters who reluctantly went along with Hillary.
TL;DR There seem to be as many people willing to blame Hillary's campaign as people lashing out at those blaming the campaign.
Developing all of these conspiratorial and blame-shifting excuses despite the fact that the party has suffered almost unprecedented losses at the state and Congressional level for at least six years
Before the election, during the same time period where people expected a big win by Hillary, FiveThirtyEight predicted a 44% chance that Republicans would win the Senate outright (with a 61% chance of a 50-50 result, which would have meant Republican control in the case of a Trump victory).
Republicans went into the election with 54 seats in the Senate and ended the election with 52 seats in the Senate. This year's election was a re-run of the 2010 elections, in which Democrats lost 6 seats (57 down to 51).
In 2010, Republicans won the Senate popular vote by 32.6 million to 29.1 million. In 2016, with the same states in play, Democrats won the popular vote by 51.1 million to 40.2 million. 34 Senate seats were up for election, and there were only two changes in party composition: Maine and Illinois flipped from GOP to Democratic.
This is not a good result for Democrats (2010 was a wave year for Republicans and Democrats are expected to do better in Presidential years), but this hardly seems like an unprecedented result in the Senate.
We can do better looking at the House because the whole House is up every year.
| Year | Democrats (Seats / Votes / Vote %) | Republicans (Seats / Votes / Vote %) |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 194 / 58.2M / 47.3% | 241 / 61.5M / 49.9% |
| 2014 | 188 / 35.6M / 45.5% | 247 / 40.1M / 51.2% |
| 2012 | 201 / 59.6M / 48.8% | 234 / 58.2M / 47.6% |
| 2010 | 192 / 39.0M / 44.9% | 242 / 44.8M / 51.7% |
| 2008 | 257 / 65.2M / 53.2% | 178 / 52.2M / 42.6% |
2016 was a bad presidential year for Democrats, but hardly unprecedented. Democrats got a larger vote share in 2016 than 2014 or 2010, and came within striking distance of their 2012 election-year vote count. They're 7 seats shy of their 2012 seat total, but ahead of their 2010 and 2014 seat total. You have to go back to 2008 to find a year where Democrats significantly out-performed their 2016 results in the House.
Again, 2016 was a bad year for Democrats in the House, very bad for a Presidential year.
But the original claim was that Democrats have suffered unprecedented losses for the past 6 years. It's more like Democrats suffered big losses in 2010 that were on par with 1994, when Democrats also lost the House popular vote by 52-45. Democrats hovered around the 47-48% share of the House popular vote from 1996 to 2000, lost 50-45 in 2002, and 49-47 in 2004. They then won 52-44 in 2006 and 53-42 in 2008.
There's really nothing in this account that indicates that the Democratic losses in the House between 2010 and 2016 are unprecedented. Republicans have controlled the House after every election since 1994 with the exception of 2006 and 2008. The election of 2012, (which is part of the last six years), was also a year in which Democrats won the popular House vote, but (uncontroversially) lost due to a combination of geographic factors and gerrymandering (gerrymandering alone probably didn't swing the election).
TL;DR 2016 was a bad, bad night for Democrats, especially for a presidential year. But it wasn't unprecedentedly bad in Congress. There are plenty of excuses being thrown around, but there's also quite a bit of introspection about the bad loss (some covered earlier, including by President Obama, who did not make excuses).
Generally doing anything and everything possible to avoid engaging in real, serious, genuine self-criticism and self-reflection.
I have been genuinely surprised at how much self-reflection there has been since the election. Vox.com, which owes some mea culpas for pre-election coverage, and is largely Lefty Central, has had a slew of reflective articles:
- For years, I've been watching anti-elite fury build in Wisconsin. Then came Trump., which closes "The last thing many people want to do in the near future is listen more closely to Trump voters in the heartland of America. But it is clear that our failure to do so has left us blindsided."
- Progressive fundamentalism: how Hollywood and the media fortify the bubbles we all live in, which says "The online multicultural left is too often intent on making sure our entertainment, our news sources, and our political heroes send the “right” messages, that everybody learns the right things. But we’re increasingly only talking to ourselves.", and which positively cites The Smug Style in American Liberalism as a very similar argument (which was also on Vox).
- Research says there are ways to reduce racial bias. Calling people racist isn’t one of them., which contains the headline "We need to develop a way to have this conversation that doesn’t make some people feel condemned".
There have also been plenty of articles that fit the mold of Freddie's article, but quite a few more that are long, detailed and reflective pieces about how liberals can do better (and importantly, should have done better) in this election.
When Freddie says "Conventional post-election debate among Democrats has involved," he's tarring a large group of people with a single brush, and then proceeds to describe a number of (indeed, very) problematic attitudes as "conventional post-election debate."
In reality, the intersection of all of the represented attitudes apply to a handful of liberal pundits, and flow around certain quarters of Twitter. The doom-and-gloom statements about how poorly Democrats did that accompany the claims of Democrats ignoring their problems are frequently extremely hyperbolic, which allows Freddie to present a portrait of "conventional debate" gone mad: the election was an unprecedented disaster and nobody is talking about it. Sounds real bad.
The "conventional post-election debate among Democrats" has instead been far more nuanced, including perspectives that closely match his point of view. Mainstream liberal pundits have written articles critiquing Hillary's campaign, her messaging, the tactics that liberals have used lately, and especially the Democratic complacency around the idea that demographics assure victory in Presidential elections.
It has also included a number of serious looks at the divide between the mainstream liberal discourse before the election and the kind of voter who voted twice for Obama and then for Donald Trump in 2016.
Acting like the people who are spending their time writing up long-form introspective pieces about the election (like Todd VanDerWerff, who wrote the 7,500 word article about Progressive Fundamentalism I cited above) don't exist is not a great way to spread the message.