Previewing the loss narratives

One of these candidates is going to lose; here are tomorrow's rationales, today

One week from now, we’ll likely know who won the 2024 presidential election. Judging from polling, this is going to be one of the closest elections on record, and that makes the next-day quarterbacking all the more bitter; if they’d just done this, they might have moved the 30,000 or so voters that would have made all the difference.

Below, I’d like to outline what we’re likely to hear given a loss for each of the major party candidates.

If Harris Loses

There’s a history to the Democratic Party on this. A substantial chunk of partisans and pundits are quick to blame “identity politics,” or some version of it, every time the party loses a big election. In this case, the version of that would be the suggestion that Harris’ race and sex made the election more difficult for her.

Yet, for a number important reasons, this kind of narrative is not likely to go far. For one thing, Harris took over the campaign after the party pressured its moderate straight white male president to drop out of the contest, precisely because they believed her to be more electable. And it’s pretty tough to argue she blew it; she’s run an impressively disciplined campaign, including strong debate and convention appearances and a good range of interviews. Democrats would be crushed that she lost, but largely not blame her specifically for it; she’s probably run about as good a campaign as could be run, but the fundamentals of the political environment (or at least what people believed those fundamentals to be) just weren’t in the Democrats’ favor.

Democrats might instead blame the media (Fox News, sure, but also the NY Times, the Washington Post, and others) for helping foster a set of beliefs about the economy and crime that were far more dour than the actual data called for, for “sane-washing” Donald Trump’s statements and setting an incredibly low bar for his performances, for pulling endorsements at the last minute, etc.

As usual, there will be the set of recriminations about how Democrats lost the white working class and what they have to do to win them back, a thing the party has been fighting itself over for half a century. Some will suggest the party needs to distance itself from trans activists, from “woke” politics, etc.

If it turns out that, as some polling has suggested in recent months, younger Black men and Latino men started voting Republican in strong numbers this year, they’ll definitely get some of the blame for a Harris loss. Although a lot of the media narrative will focus on how to win back whites while blaming people of color.

One thing that I’ll be curious to see: It seems likely that Harris will win the popular vote. If she wins the popular vote while losing the White House, that will make the third election in the past seven that this has happened to Democrats. It remains shocking to me that Electoral College reform or abolition has not become a core component of Democrats’ agenda thus far, but perhaps a third such loss would change that.

If Trump Loses

The complicating factor of a Trump loss is that, of course, he will never concede. He will immediately claim fraud — indeed, he’s already doing this — he’ll file all manner of lawsuits to throw out Democratic ballots or keep them from being counted, he’ll spread conspiracy theories, he’ll organize rallies to intimidate ballot counters and state legislators, he’ll demand that Republicans in Congress challenge swing states where Harris won, and more. This is simply how he operates. This doesn’t mean he can turn a loss into a win, it just means that he will make his loss very costly and painful for a lot of people.

But after that, Republican activists and the media will be trying to come up with stories about just why he lost. Some will blame the Dobbs decision, which has cost Republicans a considerable number of votes in 2022 and 2023. At least some will concede that the party under-performs when Trump is involved. Quite a few Republicans were willing to say this in 2022 after the party performed poorly in those elections, at least for a little while. And this would be a fourth straight election in which Trump has exacted a tax on his party and kept them out of power. After all, if the out party can’t take back the White House when less than 30% of the country thinks things are on the right track, what are they doing exactly?

Yet a substantial number of Trump supporters within the party will echo his claims of election fraud and insist that he has been unjustly deprived of the presidency yet again.

Here’s the thing: Trump will immediately be the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. Some prominent Republicans will urge someone else to run and publicly argue that Trump needs to stand down for the benefit of the party. But as long as he is interested in running (and he will be, claiming that he was treated poorly and needs to avenge his loss to make things right), people in the party will not know how to nudge him out. The bulk of Republican primary voters will support him, and they’ll vote against anyone who challenges him too harshly in the next primaries.

The Republican Party has had numerous opportunities to be done with Donald Trump — after unnecessary election losses, impeachments, convictions, insurrections, and more. They have neither the desire nor ability to do it. It’s safe to assume that he’s their presidential nominee until he dies or loses interest.