The Friday Brief

November 8, 2024

Anatomy of a Campaign Lost

What Went Wrong

A note: this is very much my Version 1.0 take on this election. I’ll be writing more about it soon, but I wanted to get this down in the immediate aftermath.

First, as a Firefly fan from the way back, let this one sink in for a moment:

Victory, as they say, has a thousand fathers, but defeat? It’s always an orphan. In politics, though, the losses are where the real lessons lie, and this time, there’s a hell of a lot to learn.

At the end of the day, he ignited rural, low-propensity voters like a wildfire, scored big with working-class Black and Hispanic men, while she couldn’t match Biden’s numbers. The cold truth is that, for all our progress, white, rural, non-college voters in places like North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan weren’t ready to vote for a Black woman as president. Call it racism, call it hesitation, call it fear of the new—it’s an ugly truth, but one we can’t afford to ignore.