The bitterness of Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat and Donald Trump’s victories in two of the past three presidential races have Democrats seriously questioning their policies and their message.
They’ll be re-examining their messengers, too, and 2024 will haunt 2028, determining who’s in contention for the party’s presidential nomination and upending the Democratic bench as it existed before Nov. 5.
Trump beat two women — Harris this time, Hillary Clinton before — and many Democrats partly blame sexism. That could make them reluctant to pick another woman, even one as compelling as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
The party’s struggles with working-class voters could point it toward someone positioned to attract them. Keep an eye on a comer like U.S. Representative Ruben Gallego, a former Marine who just won his Senate race in Arizona as Trump beat Harris there by more than five percentage points.
But I think an even bigger dynamic should — and could — come into play. The party ought to rethink its allegiance to tradition and etiquette, creating opportunities for candidates who aren’t obvious choices, who don’t fit any mold, whose résumés (here a lawyer, there a lawyer) don’t read like anagrams of one another’s.
Clinton was a proper choice, her long history with the party and her formidable C.V. overriding concerns about how well she connected with voters. That didn’t pay off.
Democratic leaders let President Biden’s re-election dreams go unchallenged for so long because that was the respectful, decent course. It was also the foolish one.
By the time Biden bowed out, a real primary was impossible, and Democrats once again traveled the polite path, anointing Harris because she was next in line and her selection promised to ruffle the fewest feathers. That didn’t end well.
And she lost to someone who blithely junks tradition, gleefully jettisons etiquette and went through none of the usual paces en route to the presidency. While her failure was chiefly a function of many Americans’ economic frustrations, overall discontent and impulse to punish the party in power, Trump’s triumph nonetheless demonstrated the degree to which many voters feel that institutions aren’t working and business as usual no longer cuts it. Perhaps conventionally polished institutionalists aren’t the best candidates for this angry age.
“Trump has fundamentally changed the way that we campaign and govern in America,” said Rebecca Katz, the chief strategist for the successful Senate campaigns of Gallego and, before him, John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat. She told me that a candidate’s ability to communicate with voters on their own terms, in relatable language, is crucially important. And that skill and sensibility have nothing to do with how much political experience the person has.
State Auditor Rob Sand of Iowa, where he’s the only elected Democrat who holds statewide office, told me: “Our party has been too deferential to its establishment, and the establishment has been too deferential to its own wisdom. We should be more open.”
Other young Democratic officeholders — Sand is 42 — expressed similar views. “There’s a possibility that folks who have been in the inner circles and the backrooms are too tainted to be able to speak with any authenticity about what’s next and what’s new and what’s different,” Illinois State Representative Kam Buckner, 39, told me.
It’s worth remembering that the Democratic Party’s last two-term president, Barack Obama, wasn’t at the center of its conversations four years before his commanding victory over Senator John McCain, a longtime fixture on Capitol Hill, in the 2008 presidential race. And by nominating Obama that year, Democrats bypassed the politician who was “owed” — Clinton. Obama wasn’t the heir apparent. He was the insurgent.
“It is no coincidence that two outsiders as different as Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump have dominated politics for 20 years,” Ben Rhodes, who was deputy national security adviser for President Obama, wrote in Times Opinion last week.
So the main question for the long list of accomplished Democrats who are routinely mentioned as potential presidents or have shown interest in the job isn’t who can claim the shiniest bona fides. It’s who has an aura of freshness and forges a genuine connection to Americans outside as well as inside cities and in the middle of the country, not just the coasts.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, whose flurry of post-Nov. 5 activity looks a whole lot like a White House bid in the making, is a telegenic political gladiator. But is another candidate from Harris’s state — one who was previously mayor of San Francisco — his party’s wisest pick?
Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania is getting a P.R. bounce from some political analysts’ second-guessing about whether he would have been a better addition to the Democratic ticket than Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, and Shapiro, in his own state, has proved his appeal to voters beyond Democratic strongholds. But would the party turn, after Harris, to another lawyer and former state attorney general? Startling fact: The last Democratic presidential nominee who didn’t go to law school was Jimmy Carter. That was half a century ago.
All of the Democratic politicians who were prominently mentioned as possible running mates for Harris could mount credible campaigns for the party’s 2028 nomination. That includes not only Whitmer, Walz and Shapiro but also Governors Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Wes Moore of Maryland, along with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. And such tested leaders may be precisely what the electorate wants if Trump creates chaos in the nation’s capital — his selection of U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida to be attorney general is a provocative lurch in that direction — and the country fares poorly over the next few years.
But given the scattered and fickle attention of voters today, candidates’ seasoning arguably matters less than their sizzle. The perfect nominee “needs to be someone who is able to break through the fractured and spoiled media environment in a way that Democrats have really, really struggled to do,” Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University, told me. Buttigieg has accomplished that, she said. She also singled out Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who turned 35 — the minimum age for a U.S. president — last month.
Faiz Shakir, who managed Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, also mentioned Ocasio-Cortez. “What we need first and foremost is a candidate who has a relatability to working-class people,” Shakir told me, adding that despite Trump’s gilded station and ways, he gives many of those people the sense that he’s having a real conversation with them.
Gallego’s admirers credit him with that gift; Rebecca Katz noted that during his campaign, he comfortably visited the rodeo, hosted a boxing night, made tamales with grandmothers. “And he was just being himself,” she said. Shakir named Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers, as someone else with a talent for connecting with working-class Americans. And he said there’s no reason to count out someone from the worlds of labor or business or religion as a legitimate contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.
That’s where 2028 gets so unpredictable. A climate much more potentially receptive to atypical candidates could translate into more candidacies like Andrew Yang’s in 2020. (I wouldn’t be surprised to see him and his pitch for universal basic income return in 2028.) It could attract first-timers we don’t expect. Who’s to say that a prominent podcaster wouldn’t catch fire? Or a star athlete like LeBron James, whose charitable foundation has opened a public school, a medical center and more in Akron, Ohio?
Or an entrepreneur like Mark Cuban, whose name has been bandied about before? Or a trailblazing corporate figure like Mary Barra, who became the first female chief executive of one of the “big three” automakers in Michigan when she took the wheel at General Motors a decade ago? Just don’t say Michelle Obama. Everybody’s always saying Michelle Obama, but she has never signaled a skosh of interest in moving back to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
“It’s not a person we can decide on today,” Katz said. “I don’t know where our superstars are, but there has to be a way that people can get to bat. We can’t stifle anyone before they start.”
For the Love of Sentences
In The Times, James Poniewozik evaluated television news coverage of election night: “A CNN map showed in shades of brown which areas of the country had suffered most from recent inflation, a vista of amber waves of pain.” (Thanks to Susan Milord of Rome and Neal Goldberg of Bethesda, Md., among others, for nominating this.)
Also in The Times, Michelle Cottle marveled at House Speaker Mike Johnson’s desire to stay in that job: “With a Republican conference like this one, well, things have a tendency to fall apart. The center cannot hold, because there is no meaningful center: just Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert scrapping in the women’s room while Jim Jordan barks threats at the Justice Department and a sprinkling of suburban moderates struggles to avoid the flaming vortex of chaos.” (Michael Silk, Laguna Woods, Calif.)
In The New Yorker, Jill Lepore took issue with what she saw as a condescending Democratic message to female voters that they could secretly defy their husbands’ wishes: “Trump liked to say that he will, as president, protect women, whether they want him to or not. The Harris campaign said the same thing, only with more celebrity endorsements.” (John Jacoby, Cambridge, Mass.)
In Town & Country, Isiah Magsino marveled at the gutsiness of an election night party: “Hosting a soiree of this nature in 2024 is like setting up a game of croquet on a field of land mines.” (Julie Brookbank, Alexandria, S.D.)
In his newsletter on Substack, Timothy Snyder justified his mock pitch for a sitcom tweak on “Gilligan’s Island” called “Oligarchs’ Island”: “No matter how dark the evil, there is always a corner for ridicule’s little lantern.” (Elizabeth Tenney, Reno, Nev.)
For the USA Today Network, Nate Monroe appraised the fitness of Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, for a high-level job alongside Robert Kennedy Jr. in the coming Trump administration: “If we’re returning to a pre-fluoridated world where apothecaries hawk elixirs, potions and tonics to cure break-bone and king’s evil, Ladapo’s your man. And he would add the patina of professional legitimacy to Kennedy’s rumpled conspiracism and sordid past.” (Bob Clark, Venice, Fla.)
In The Dispatch, Kevin D. Williamson explained one chamber of Congress: “With its democratic character and elections every other year, the House was intended to be the receptacle of democratic energy, one part town hall meeting and one part constitutional drunk tank.” (Michael Smith, Georgetown, Ky.)
In The Washington Post, Charles Lane diagnosed a chastened party’s problem: “Democrats have been acting like the proverbial American tourist in France, trying to get their point across by shouting louder in a language only they understand.” (Chuck Isaacson, Oshkosh, Wis., and Linda Litowsky, Austin, Texas)
And in The Atlantic, Ian Bogost credited one enterprising company with a certain accessory’s current ubiquity: “Until JanSport evolved the design, a backpack was a bulky, specialized thing for hiking, used only by smelly people on mountain trailheads or European gap years.” (Judy Greiman, Mount Sinai, N.Y.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Watching
I was reasonably engrossed in “Woman of the Hour,” on Netflix, as I watched it, but came to think even more highly of it afterward. It stayed with me because of the particular way in which it places men who commit the most horrific violence against women on a spectrum of sexism and misogyny. Starring and directed by Anna Kendrick, the movie tells the true story of an aspiring actress and a serial killer who came to share the stage of — and exchange witty repartee on — the 1970s television show “The Dating Game.” It’s strangely funny, it’s plenty creepy and it’s smart, using a slice of obscure history as a whopper of a metaphor about women’s vulnerability. This review by Ty Burr in The Washington Post gets it exactly right.
The enormous acclaim for the director Sean Baker’s 2017 movie “The Florida Project” puzzled me; I found “Florida” needlessly slow going. But the even greater acclaim he’s receiving for “Anora,” which was released in theaters last month? I’m onboard. While “Anora” also indulges Baker’s tendency to linger at length in the milieus he visits (here that means the strip club where the title character works and the gaudy Brooklyn mansion of sorts where she holes up with a Russian oligarch’s son), it’s so wildly funny when it means to be, so poignant in the end and such a showcase for splendid performances — by Mikey Madison and Yura Borisov in particular — that I left the theater sated and elated. This review by Alissa Wilkinson in The Times captured what I found so moving about “Anora,” though a word of caution: If you bristle at nudity and sex, this isn’t for you.
On a Personal (by Which I Mean Regan) Note
More than a few of you have chided me for not updating you about Regan’s health — I mentioned a few weeks ago that she had arthritis — and others protested her absence in the newsletter after Election Day on other grounds, saying that a dose of Regan would have been especially welcome then.
Well, Regan has been struggling lately: Her issues go beyond that arthritis diagnosis. I’ll spare you the details because I myself don’t like to dwell on them and, well, Regan hasn’t signed a HIPAA release. But I promise to give you occasional reports on how she’s generally doing and — I’m confident — recovering.
Rest assured that it’s nothing fatal. It’s just difficult: For the time being, she and I aren’t able to take our usual long walks together, and I sometimes need to carry her up and down the stairs and lift her up to and down from the bed. Because I want to give her some diversion and plenty of time outdoors but she won’t linger in the yard if she’s alone there, I sit in an Adirondack chair — arms smooshed against my sides as I bang awkwardly on my laptop keyboard — while she watches the birds.
She deals with her new containment. I deal with al fresco punditry. Love means shooing away the fly that just landed on your semicolon, the mosquito that streaked past your past participle en route to your flesh.
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