The Blame Game

Susan Estrich on Nov 7, 2024

And now it begins. America has elected a very flawed candidate. An aging, raging bully. Not the first choice of many Republican leaders. Not an acceptable alternative. Not a moderate by any standard. Not presidential by any definition.

So, who's to blame? I was on Black radio last night, and Tavis Smiley asked me if it was white women who were to blame. I was wrong, because I was counting on white women and young women to come out in numbers that would change things. I was counting on women using the power we have to change the dynamics of power in this country. It didn't happen. So, blame white women if you want.

But what about Black men? Did they vote in greater numbers for Donald Trump than they did for Joe Biden four years ago? What about all those young men -- white or Black or Hispanic? Why didn't they vote for the women in their lives -- for their wives and daughters and girlfriends whose lives and health have been put at risk by this man?

It wasn't abortion that dominated this election. It was, as always, the economy, stupid. And the economy, at least on the exit polls, was -- along with the country -- headed in the wrong direction. That old standby -- the right track/wrong track comparison -- was "right" again. Voters felt their own economic situation was worse than it was four years ago. When the wrong track dominates, as it did on Tuesday, the incumbent (or the incumbent's vice president) is in trouble. I remember in the summer of 1988, when the right track numbers took a turn for the better, we knew George H.W. Bush's numbers were going to get better. Michael Dukakis made mistakes that year -- more than Kamala Harris' one big mistake (on "The View," she couldn't identify a single major disagreement with her boss), but there wasn't any mistake that a real change in the economy wouldn't have balanced out.

Which brings us to Joe Biden, who is certainly going to come in for a fair share of blame. Bidenomics didn't work, as measured by the voters, at least. And that means that Biden should have dropped out sooner, never gotten into the race in the first place, leaving Democrats free to pick the "best" candidate in an open process.

Did we, in fact, choose the wrong candidate? The simple fact is that Trump beat two Democratic candidates and lost to one. The difference is painfully obvious: He beat two women and lost to a white man. Would a man have done better among male voters? Is old-fashioned sexism staring us in the face? Would a white male nominee have cut into Trump's support among white men?

Or was racism to blame, the old "Bradley effect," named after the former mayor of Los Angeles who was 10 points ahead in the polls and lost the election for governor. The fact that the Bradley effect didn't apply to Barack Obama doesn't necessarily mean that racism no longer rears its ugly head in our politics.

And so it goes. The coming days will be full of deep dives into the numbers. We can spend all the time we want pointing fingers, blaming someone else, all the what if's and what's wrong. For my part, I'm ready to take a pass on that. What good will it do? It's everyone's fault.

What we have, for the next four years, God willing (Vance would be worse), is Donald Trump. He won. Our fellow Americans voted for him. We can be shocked, depressed, angry and defeated. We can turn our backs on politics and be grateful that we are not the direct targets of many of Trump's worst policies. Or we can face reality and keep fighting. I remember coming back from campaigning in Florida in 1980, from the Reagan landslide where he took control of the Senate as well. I was working for Ted Kennedy at the time; we came back as the minority party in the Senate, facing a budget from the new president with huge cuts in social welfare programs. Almost everything had changed.

But there, in the grim new year, I ran into Marian Wright Edelman, the legendary civil rights leader and founder of the Children's Defense Fund. She was fighting the Reagan budget, working the hallways the same way she did when there was a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate. What was she doing? She was fighting, she told me, who was still smarting from the losses. You never stop fighting. That is the only way to lose. You keep fighting for what you believe in. You go forward. Better than playing the blame game. It's a lesson I hope I never forget.

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