I am still thinking about the election. Yeah, I figured. You probably are, too. Well, as I’m thinking, I’m realizing. Today, my realization was this: 

I undervalued the importance of Joe Biden’s unpopularity. 

It never recovered, not even after he dropped out. More than anything, that fact gives credence to the claim that the economy was the driving factor in the election. The electorate, still reeling from the effects of pandemic-relation inflation, simply voted against the party in power.

Whether it was the economy or perceptions of it is something I have discussed and will discuss again in future editions. For now, I want to stick with this realization – that I undervalued Biden’s unpopularity. 

If you take Donald Trump out of the picture, as well as the fact that he’s an adjudicated rapist, a felon and an insurrectionist who stole government secrets – not to mention that he campaigned explicitly as dictator-in-waiting – this election would be more comprehensible. 

Which is to say: of course the incumbent party lost. 

It was not popular.

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But of course, we can’t take Trump out of the picture. He’s a lying, thieving, philandering sadist who led an attempted paramilitary takeover of the United States government after he botched, as president, the country’s response to the pandemic so badly that the electorate threw him out of the White House at record rates.

And it’s because we can’t take him out of the picture that I undervalued Biden’s unpopularity. I figured no matter how badly voters rated Biden’s performance, no matter how old he seemed to be, no matter how poor he might be at communicating his transformational record, it was still going to be better than how they saw the former president. After all, they already threw Trump out for the worst job performance ever. Why on earth would they rehire him after having fired him?

This affected my thinking about Kamala Harris, too. Even if a lot of the electorate was too sexist and too racist to vote for a biracial woman, no matter how great she is, I figured that the electorate had already fired Trump for gross negligence. As long as she acted normally, even a biracial woman would be seen as the superior option when compared to a deranged man who tried overthrowing the will of the people and who, nearly four years later, was clearly in the throes of dementia.

But all this was premised on an assumption: that Biden’s and by extension Harris’ low approval rating was not that important. Virtually every article I have written about the 2024 election was based on the idea that Trump’s blinding horribleness would overwhelm whatever deficit there was on the other side. I even assumed that it didn’t matter who that was, because the electorate would still vote against Trump.

I was wrong, obviously, but I didn’t start to understand why until I read an interview with some Harris campaign staffers. Specifically, I didn’t start to understand until I read what advisor David Plouffe said about the campaign’s internal polling. It never showed her ahead of Trump.

Let me say that again, with feeling:

Internal polling never showed her ahead of Trump.

How is that possible?

How is it possible when Trump himself was already unpopular, was indeed never popular, even when he was the president? And how can that be when Trump ran not a campaign so much as a vengeance movement in which he practically declared himself unfit? He even vowed to defund schools that required children to be vaccinated, reminding voters why they booted him out the first time around.

I have been thinking about this all day. At first, I thought Plouffe was lying, covering his ass, as it were, saying that there was nothing they could have done differently so don’t blame them for failing. They did the best they could, blah blah blah, but she was doomed from the start. 

But then I thought about Biden’s unpopularity and by extension hers, and how that fact, under any other circumstances in any other election, would explain why she was never ahead. The president has been underwater since the last quarter of 2021. The vice president had a hundred days to turn that around. She came close, but fell short by about 230,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. 

Some will say that Biden should have dropped out sooner, and they would be right, but only because they have the benefit of hindsight. While we don’t know what Biden’s internal polling was showing, we do know that Biden himself had enormous faith in the electorate to choose someone who was not promising to be a petty tyrant. For those of us who were so focused on stopping Trump that we were willing to overlook Biden’s liabilities, especially the fact that he hadn’t been popular in three years, his faith in America was good enough.

Why is Biden unpopular, even now? Perhaps it’s the economy. Perhaps it’s perceptions of the economy. (The rightwing media apparatus is larger today than it was four years ago and it’s getting bigger.) Whatever the reason, his unpopularity carried over to Harris, who was already shouldering a deficit in terms of time (100 days) and in terms of her sex and race. She came close to overcoming it all, but didn’t. (Would distancing herself from Biden have worked? Maybe, but I doubt it.)

I would like to end this on a note of hope, but honestly, I don’t know how. Like Biden, I had faith in the ability of voters to decide between a candidate who may not be the greatest for some and another who was the absolute worst for everyone. They fired Trump, but forgot why.

If there is hope, it’s in thinking about the destructive shortsightedness of the majority of voters. Just as they forgot why they fired Trump, they’ll forget why Biden and Harris were so bad that they had to give a criminal a second chance, putting him above the law. In victory, Trump is experiencing a popularity he never had as president. Given the attention span of voters, he’ll be back to where he started before long.