Last Wednesday, the day after Election Day, I hosted a political roundtable in downtown San Francisco, the audience mostly (but not completely) consisting of people upset and even shocked by the voters’ choices, particularly on the national scale. Yes, Daniel Lurie’s capture of the mayor’s office surprised some who had been lulled into assuming a Mark Farrell or London Breed victory based on months of polling that only fairly recently began to shake up, and some of the ballot initiatives raised eyebrows. But it was the national results that had people fearing for the country and for San Francisco. Just what will happen next?
For me, I knew it was going south for the Harris-Walz ticket about midway through the evening when the news source I was watching (I forget which) noted that so far, Donald Trump was pulling in more than 25 percent of the vote in Dane County, Wis. That’s both an unusual situation and an example of what was happening to Democrats across the country. Dane County is the home of Madison, the state capital, as well as my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, one of the most successful research universities in the world. In addition, multiple insurance companies and other businesses are based there. It is a liberal bastion, an economically successful region, and national or statewide Democratic candidates need to pile up astronomical numbers in Dane County and nearby Milwaukee if they want to win the state.
As of yesterday, with 100 percent of the Dane County precincts reporting, Harris-Walz had 74.9 percent of the vote, which is not astronomical enough. Add up all of the seven third-party or write-in candidates, and they still don’t come anywhere close to being the difference in the county this election. In Dane County, 74 percent is a loss, and it tells us something about why the Democrats lost the White House, U.S. Senate, and (likely at this point) U.S. House of Representatives.
The voters ain’t buying
It shouldn’t have come as a shock. It just depends on which tea leaves you were trying to read in the runup to Election Day.
People who watched the incredibly energetic campaign of Kamala Harris since she entered the race naturally thought that if anything, the polls would be unable to capture the enthusiasm of voters, especially women, for Harris. I was one of them, watching a candidate reaching out to moderates and even conservatives like no other candidate has done for years, and raising record sums of money. But when it came time to cast their ballots, Trump increased his support among every group — rural, urban, young, Black, women, Latinos, especially Latino men — over his previous election. Black women remained a pillar of Harris support, but everyone else seemed to be very Trump-curious.
The areas of highest Trump support were Outer Mission, Chinatown, McLaren Park, Portola and Visitacion Valley. These are not areas filled with white tech bros.
The San Francisco Department of Elections is not finished counting all ballots, but as of yesterday morning, Kamala Harris had a little more than 80 percent of the votes in her former hometown San Francisco; Donald Trump had more than 15 percent. That’s up a bit from what he got in 2020, when he pulled in 12.72 percent against Joe Biden. In 2016, he only got 9.23 percent against Hillary Clinton. Every election — despite Covid, an insurrection, trillions added to the national debt — Trump performed better in San Francisco and across the country.
So what was the problem? Was it proof that the American people are irredeemably racist and sexist?
I would never claim that racism isn’t a problem in this country, nor that it is widespread. But consider Trump’s success in attracting Black and Hispanic voters, the very people he has belittled, insulted, and threatened since Day One. Democrats still enjoy high levels of support among Black voters, especially women, but in this election they got a little more than half of the Latino vote. Democrats continue to think the way to attract Latino voters is to emphasize loose border policies. But ask Latino voters (and pollsters have done so many times) what their priorities are, and it’s the economy, crime, education. And oh, they want tighter border policies.
This election in San Francisco, Trump drew that 15 percent of support not from white people in the name of white supremacy or whatever excuses the Left wants to believe. According to Andrew Chamings in the San Francisco Chronicle, the areas of highest support for Trump were Outer Mission, Chinatown, McLaren Park, Portola, and Visitacion Valley (where he got 34.3 percent of the vote). These are not areas filled with white tech bros.
Or take an anecdotal case. A San Francisco friend told me about a conversation with two female coworkers, one Black and one Latina. Both of their families were either mostly or totally behind Trump.
Democrats, you have a problem
As political analyst Melissa Caen said in my roundtable, voters are not mysterious: “Voters are not hiding things. They’re telling you what’s important — it’s the cost of groceries and gas, and illegal immigration. They are yelling it from the rooftops, and yet everyone goes ‘Gosh, I just don’t know why they don’t like us.'”
Yes, there is racism and sexism, but that can be an excuse for ignoring the policies the party is pushing. “If Kamala Harris was Karl Harris, and was a white guy, he still would have lost. People don’t want to buy what you’re selling,” Caen said. “The problem with chalking it up to racism and sexism is you don’t get to the real problem, so next time you go ‘I’ll just run a white guy saying the same stuff’ and you’re going to lose again.”
The problem is that the public is increasingly not buying what the Democrats are selling. Yes, inflation is down, but prices are higher than they were a few years ago, especially for renters. To those of us old enough to remember inflation in the late 1970s, this was not a shock. But tens of millions of Americans have grown accustomed to negligible inflation over the past 40 years, so this was a shock. And it should be remembered that inflation helped make Jimmy Carter a one-term president. Voters might not have bought into all the myth of the Reagan Revolution, but enough of them looked to him to save them from a temporary problem, and they got the revolution anyway.
Similarly, a vote for Donald Trump by many people was not likely a vote for his more extreme policies. It was a rejection of Bidenomics and its terrible messaging. (Biden could really have used a James Carville or Rahm Emanuel to publicly fight for his policies, but he might also have been better off not filling his economic team with progressives.) And socially, the party has catered far too much to — at risk of simplifying too much, but I stand by this — the “women good, men bad” theorists. Wondering why Black and Hispanic men are voting increasingly like white men? Spend more time talking about toxic masculinity and all the bad virtues that seem always to be attributed to men, and see what happens.
Oh, this election is what happens.
If Democrats want to ensure that future elections like this don’t happen, they will need to diagnose their problems correctly. The bitter pill that Democrats locally and nationally will have to swallow is not whatever actions the neo-Trump administration takes in the next four years. It is the need for accepting that it has to change to meet voter demands. And that’s going to involve more familial infighting than a parent cutting off a teenager’s screen time.
