You Have To Kill The 2016 Election In Your Head
By all accounts things are going better for the Democrats right now that anyone could have possibly expected. The Harris campaign raised over $300 million with the help of well over a million small donors, the polls are breaking in Harris’s way, and if you want to talk about the vibes, well, by all accounts the vibes are better than they’ve ever been. But there’s a little voice in the back of all of our heads it seems, telling us that we shouldn’t believe it. That voice is the ghost of the 2016 election, the past you who is still shocked by what happened on election night, who thought we had it in the bag. For the good of yourself and your understanding of the current election, you have to kill that ghost.
Look, I get it. I walked into my friend’s party on election night fully believing that Hillary was going to win, and had my worldview rocked by the results. There’s so much trauma from the disorienting period of November 2016 through 2018 built up in our brains — all the interviews with Trump supporters in the diners, the executive actions, the marches and the searching for what went wrong. We all tried to process it, and now that we’re over half a decade away from that terrifying time, it’s worth noting that all of the panic didn’t lead to better understanding. We wrung our hands about white rural rage and what to do about it, and then over-performed in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Hell, a good chunk of the country read Hillbilly Elegy, written by a certain historically unpopular VP candidate. If we were wiling to listen to that guy in a moment of desperation, that’s a sign that maybe we weren’t all thinking clearly.
And it seems like we still aren’t thinking clearly to this day. Whenever something happens, like Trump’s disastrous showing at the NABJ conference in Chicago, people fall back on the same analysis that they’ve used since 2017 — “This is bad, but it won’t mean anything to his base. In fact, they’ll like it!”. Sure, there’s no denying that there’s a base that is completely in the bag for Trump, and that they love it when he does incredibly grotesque things, but that base is not nearly enough people to win a presidential election. Trump’s strength in 2016 was that he could turn non-voters into voters, and the jury’s kind of out on if he can still do that, because he didn’t do it as well in 2020 and it lost him the election.
I’ve thought about Trump’s ability to do that, dogged by how I missed the signs in 2016, and I realized some time ago that it’s because I thought about Trump as a Republican and not as former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura. Ventura managed to win his election in 1998 by running as a political outsider, just like Trump did, by capturing people who were sick of politicians on both sides. The problem that Ventura found is that trick only really works once, and when you have a record in politics, people are going to start judging you for that record. We saw that happen with Trump in 2020. He was no longer a blank slate for people to project their hopes on, he was a man who had failed to achieve his policy goals and had bungled the US’s COVID response so badly that he became arguably the only President to do such a bad job that we all had to cancel Christmas.
Ventura was a charismatic outsider, but unlike Trump he never became a powerful insider, nor did he want to be. He stepped aside after his single term, and gets to continue to be a goofy outsider. Trump’s transformation of the GOP into his personal organization has probably done significantly more to hurt his reelection chances than anything. I’m not talking about how all the state parties are broke, or that he’s using party money for his legal bills, it’s that him and his unshakeable base have started doing very clear harm to regular Americans. Not to hammer on COVID, but the biggest impact of politics on American life during the Biden administration was arguably the rise of the anti-vaccine movement, and how disruptive everyone having to accommodate the people who wouldn’t do their part to protect other people was to American life. People remember that, among a long list of other disruptions, and they’re not going to be willing to give Trump a try to see if he’s different than all the other politicians this time.
I also think about this in the context of my own anxiety disorder, because it works in similar ways in the brain. There’s a line from an old Craig Finn song that goes “Anxiety’s persistent/It’s an ambitious politician/It keeps knocking on your door/Until you come and let it in”, and beyond the allusion to politics, this is a useful way to think about mental health if you’re not someone like me who has to think about it every day. Anxiety about something, like a presidential election, is something that will eventually enter your brain, and once it does you’re going to have to do a lot of work to try to get it out. If you aren’t used to talking back to your anxiety, it’s very easy to let it take control of how you think about something. I’m not trying to diagnose you over the internet of course, but it’s something to be on guard about if you aren’t used to it.
And who knows, maybe I’m wrong about this and Trump is going to win in November. You know what’s not going to help beat him? Believing that. Thinking that there’s nothing you can do is a trap that you set for yourself to keep you from doing something. That’s what’s going to keep you on the couch in September watching regular season football instead of making phone calls or knocking on doors. You have to kill the 2016 election in your head because if you don’t, it’s only going to stand in your way.
