Post-election mailbag

The entropy of victory, liberals' cultural power, and one important chart

We’re working on this year’s Giving Tuesday campaign in support of GiveDirectly and could use your help with a brief survey, if you have a few minutes to spare. Slow Boring readers were amazingly generous last year, and we’re trying to figure out how we can make this year’s fundraiser even better. So, if you have three minutes to answer five questions about what would make you more or less likely to donate (including some potential incentives and prizes), we would be grateful!

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Before we get to today’s mailbag, I wanted to share this chart, because I think it reflects a point that should be central to any sane narrative about the 2024 election. There was a very strong six-point national swing toward Trump, but among the states with complete data, the swing was notably smaller in the core battleground states than it was nationally.

This is important, because it underscores that the net impact of the ad war was strongly favorable to Harris — by a margin of 2-3 points. That’s both to the credit of the Democratic Party’s ad makers and ad testers, but also an important breadcrumb for larger lessons. If we study what Democrats’ ads say, we know what kind of message in earned media could have made Democrats more popular nationally. Not always popular enough to win in the face of headwinds, but it’s still useful information.

That said, on to the questions (or, in some cases, really more of a comment).

David Muccigrosso: I don't think we should underestimate the Entropy Of Victory. Trump will eventually sour on Musk when the happy vibes wear off.

For the record, yes, my best guess is that there will be some kind of Trump/Musk falling out. During Trump’s first term, various people who believed they were smarter and more impressive than Trump signed up to work for him on the assumption that he’d be so lazy and disorganized that they would actually run the government. Most of the would-be puppet-masters, from Jim Mattis to Rex Tillerson to Gary Cohn, wound up washing out. There are exceptions to this (notably, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin), but I think the base case should be that other strong personalities are ultimately going to struggle to get along with Trump.

Sarah: I've been mulling the Tracing Woodgrains post since you shared it earlier on Twitter, and especially the bit you highlighted here: “And it's frustrating, alienating on a deep level, to go to law school and watch prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters and people who want to tear gifted education down treated as sane and normal and Respectable while knowing that if I don't voice perspectives sympathetic to the majority of the country, nobody will voice them at all.”

The people who are prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters at law schools are annoying, sure. But they don't think that Kamala Harris represents them, either. A lot of them spend a bunch of their time complaining online about Democrats and maybe not even voting for Democrats. It doesn't seem like Kamala really gave them the time of day during the campaign (which I think was a good thing). So why is this a Kamala Harris / national Democratic Party problem as opposed to a law school problem that needs to be reckoned with? I guess the answer is because these extreme left-wing views on college campuses have been successfully linked to the Democrats' toxic party brand throughout much of the country. But the relationship between these views and national Democratic politicians' party positions seems often more perceptual than real (there are exceptions). The poster talks about how they disagree with Democrats on the issue of “excellence in education” like with a high school in Virginia closing. Why is this something we should expect Kamala Harris to answer for?

I think an important part of the answer here is that he voted for Harris! She didn’t have to answer for it. But I think it’s worth considering his point on another level.