The "Dogshit, My Kid's Math Homework, and Sports" Edition
Trying to figure out what the hell happened
I’m not a political pundit, but we have to put some time into trying to figure out how Trump beat Harris. If we can’t figure that out, we can’t figure out where to go from here—our navigational problem since the map of our Constitution is now gone, leaving us with only our own compasses.
It’s important not to over-analyze what happened. Trump won very narrowly—within the margin of error, and it could have just as easily all gone Harris’s way. Considering the international trend against incumbents, and just how badly Biden was faring when he pulled out, I think we have to give Harris credit for clawing back to where she gave Trump a serious run for his money despite being an underdog. I could raise a few quibbles with her strategy—maybe running on “joy” didn’t capture the national mood—but I’m inclined to think she ran a helluva campaign considering where she started from.
I keep thinking back to David Sedaris’s joke that choosing between Biden/Harris and Trump was like “a waiter telling you the meals are chicken or dogshit with bits of broken glass in it, and you asking how the chicken is prepared.” Analyzing Harris’s campaign is like asking whether the chicken should have been served with farro instead of risotto. Does her campaign really explain why a majority of voters chose the dogshit with broken glass? Why would people do that? How was attempting the violent overthrow of the government not a deal-breaker?
They’re just not that hungry: Trump didn’t gain votes, but Harris lost them. Turnout dropped. Some people just chose not to order anything. The chicken didn’t inspire them enough, and they assumed they’d just have empty plates, not be forced to eat a communal plate of dogshit with broken glass in it.
They love the taste of dogshit: sure, some people must love what’s in Project 2025, but it’s pretty clear that’s not a winning majority.
They thought the chicken was too expensive: inflation is corrosive to a society. Most Americans are poorer than they were in 2020 because of inflation. Most Americans don’t own stock, so telling them how good the market is means nothing. The unemployment rate matters a lot to unemployed people and very little to people who already have jobs. When our jobs and pay are doing well for us, we’re all more likely to attribute that to our own merits, not public policy.
The last time the chef pitched chicken to them, they had to go to Iraq to get the chicken, and it killed thousands of us and we still didn’t get any chicken. Then the chefs urged us to take out loans to buy a lot more chicken, and the economy collapsed, and many normal people never recovered their savings from that last binge on sub-prime chicken: so why would they trust the chef offering chicken now?
It may be dogshit, but it can’t have broken glass in it: Sure, it smells and tastes gross, but I’ll probably just puke it out before I swallow, right? I’m not really going to swallow broken glass that will shred my organs and make me bleed out internally, am I? That’d be crazy! Surely Trump was so incompetent in his first term he can’t possibly impose fascism in his second!
The chicken might be unsafe because it’s imported from countries whose food safety we don’t trust: the border was an issue Dems failed to address forthrightly, or even understand correctly.
Don’t believe anything the Deep Kitchen tries to sell you: you can’t trust the CIA whether it’s the Central Intelligence Agency or the Culinary Institute of America. You’re just sick of these elitist chefs telling you what’s tasty and nutritious. It would be fun to eat dogshit just to see the horrified looks on their faces as you did it!
Looking at all of this, it seems clear to me that if everyone was coming back to dogshit from these choices, Harris just had too steep a hill to climb. Maybe she should have run on a stronger emotion than “joy” to reach people who clearly aren’t “joyful;” maybe she didn’t employ Tim Walz enough to reach young men. It may be that putting abortion rights on ballots in key states actually backfired: maybe people felt they could vote to protect abortion and vote for Trump, not realizing that federal laws or court rulings could preempt their own state constitutions and laws.
Most likely, she was in the Hubert Humphrey trap. In 1968, Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the election in March and punted the nomination to his VP, but Humphrey couldn’t distance himself from LBJ’s unpopular Vietnam policies while still serving loyally as his VP. He lost to Nixon in a 301-191 Electoral College landslide (George Wallace got the rest), but Humphrey only lost the popular vote by one percent. This goes back to what I said back in July: Biden should have resigned (or just not run to begin with!) so that Harris could chart her own course as President rather than be stuck in his wake.
The bigger overarching problem dragging Democrats down—and Harris more than the down-ticket—was the Democratic consensus on defending institutions most Americans have given up on. They seem to have thought that electing Biden in 2020 meant normalcy was restored and people wanted that normalcy. In the name of promoting normalcy, they downplayed both inflation and the border rather than acknowledge Americans’ feelings about them and make them core issues. That was disastrous, because it meant they focused on restoring the Third Republic when the thing to do was shape the Fourth. I called this out as far back as February 2020, when I said that on a scale of "Restoration, Reformation, Revolution," Dems needed to aim between "Reformation" and "Revolution" and abjure "Restoration." Biden et al did the opposite.
The failure to be proactive about the border tied into another core Democratic mistake decades in the making: trying to place the Latino community in the “BIPOC” bucket of Blacks, Indigenous, and People of Color. As part of this effort, activists tried to make the border a racial justice issue rather than a national security/law-and-order issue. This was disastrous because I think it fundamentally misread the Latino community: excepting Black Latinos, most Latinos (and most other non-white immigrants) think of themselves as ethnic minorities more akin to the Irish, Italians, or Poles in America: certainly facing discrimination, but able to foresee the prospect of integrating into America within a few generations.
America is something that happened to Black and Indigenous people, and that requires policy attention and cultural consideration, but other ethnic groups chose to be here, knowing it wouldn’t be easy, but expecting eventually to succeed. They want no part of a coalition with marginalized groups because they don’t believe they are bound to marginalization. Now, they may be about to learn that how one wishes to be identified might not be how those in power identify one, and ultimately that latter has life-or-death implications. We’ll see how that plays out—I’m guessing badly.
Finally, the urge for normalcy led to the appointment of the Third Republic’s George McClellan, Attorney General Merrick Garland. Trump should have been prosecuted for his role in January 6 immediately upon Garland taking office; instead Garland waited almost two years to name Jack Smith to the job, and then only because of the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago! Trump should be in prison right now. This wasn’t the kind of case where the prosecutor needs to roll up lots of little fish to build a case against the big fish: Congress’s investigation did most of the work for them! Liz Cheney or Jamie Raskin would have been better AG picks.
We have Trump’s own words from before his speech that day: when told the crowd was dangerous because the Secret Service was finding lots of weapons at the metal detectors, Trump told them to take away the detectors, because “they’re not here to hurt me.” Biden and Garland’s commitment to normalcy was as egregious a failure as Mitch McConnell’s refusal to support a second Trump impeachment after his insurrection. At least McConnell may have sincerely expected Garland to do his goddamned job.
But enough about these failures. Let’s talk about my kid’s math homework, and my feelings for sports.
Election analyses have talked a lot about different electoral fault-lines: Latinos (never say “Latinx!”), education gap, gender gap, voters vs non-voters. One of the worst fault lines appears to be basic knowledge of politics and current events: the more you knew, the more likely you were to vote for Harris. The more you were wrong, the more likely for Trump.
It makes me think about my ninth-grader’s math homework. Last year, I could help him with his math homework; this year, my wife has to. I’m still good for history and English.
Obviously I passed ninth grade math in ninth grade! But I haven’t used high school math since high school. That’s just not the direction my life went in professionally. Fortunately, I married an economist, meaning she uses calculus all the time. My kid’s math education will work itself out thanks to her.
If I can’t be trusted to remember enough high school math to help my own kid, how reasonable was it for me to expect average Americans to make electoral decisions based on their recollections of high school civics?
Put another way: my kid just tried out for the basketball team. If he’d made it (there were a lot of older boys), I’d have had to go to a bunch of basketball games. I am not into sportsball: I hate basketball less than I hate baseball, but more than I hate football, which can occasionally get my attention for basically just Army-Navy, Harvard-Yale, and the Super Bowl, if even then. Tell me one of those happened this weekend and I missed it and I’ll believe you.
I think most Americans approach elections the way I approach the Super Bowl each year: maybe there’s a team I’m sentimentally attached to from a place I used to live. Maybe I’ve read that one team is doing really well, or the star of one team is dating a rock star. That’s about the level of information I’m bringing to my choice of whom to support, if I even root for anyone. Basketball? I’m useless. Baseball? I’ll pay you money to let me skip it.
Am I coming off as elitist? I certainly am by many measures. But I also acknowledge freely that when my car breaks down, my auto mechanic is the elite in that moment. Ditto a plumber or an electrician. We’re all “elite” at something, or should strive to be. Most Americans are not “elite” at politics.
Should they be? Arguably! That’s what citizenship should be about! But is that reasonable? Should I know more about math, sports, my car, or my house’s plumbing? It wouldn’t hurt. Those are certainly all less abstract things than politics, which we all know affects us, even if we rarely can see how. Yet here I am, preferring CNN to ESPN every time. Is that something we think we’ll legislate, that everyone has to watch an hour of CNN at night? That’s awfully North Korean even if we assume everyone would watch and derive the same conclusions we do.
I still find myself thinking that maybe mandatory voting would help. If I knew that the tax code required me to bet, say, $1,000 on a Super Bowl team every year, I’d certainly pay a lot more attention to football to try to make the right pick! Maybe facing a fine for not voting would get me off the couch to learn about a candidate to vote for, since I’m required to show up anyway. Hey, maybe we link voting to a lottery! Ten voters win a million dollars!
I think I’ve gotten myself through what I can piece together of why decency lost to dogshit. I need to think a bit more about what we do about it.
Regarding Trump’s cabinet picks: I don’t presume to comment on each of them as they sail by, but suffice to say they all have two things in common: 1. They all intend to turn state and national security power on American citizens; and 2. They’ll support limitless graft.
Good Reads
Ken White is a brilliant appellate lawyer and his blog, Popehat, is pure gold. We’re all hurting right now, but read his meditation on this pain and what he takes from it.
Dan Drezner has the right take on how Harris’s campaign went.
I’ve said before that “Concealed Carry Reciprocity” is the Dred Scott of gun rights: you think you go to bed knowing the rules for carrying guns in your community, only to find out that any yahoo from the least-regulated place in America can wander around your community strapped. All I can say is, arm yourself. You may be philosophically opposed to guns, but that’s no reason to disarm yourself unilaterally in the face of armed intruders from other communities who share neither your values nor your interests.
Feedback is always welcome, and the comments section or DMs of Substack are more effective for it now than my email. I’m also focusing a lot more on Bluesky than X; I may soon leave X entirely. I used to think it was a space worth contesting, but am starting to doubt that analysis. Ask me again in a month.