This article was also publishing in The Left is Right on Medium, March 11, 2025
Distinguishing the players’ performance from the owners’ performance
Much is being written of late during the hand-wringing period following the U.S. presidential election of 2024 about how the election turned out the way it did. The hand-wringing, of course, is mostly happening in Democratic political circles. The sorrow in all this hand-wringing is centered on questions like: How could this have happened? How could we, so obviously the good guys, let ourselves be sucker punched? How could we not have seen that punch coming? Why couldn’t we be the ones who decked the bad guys?
As anyone acquainted with the politics of losing could foresee, the answers came along with a lot of finger pointing and blame shaming, such as candidate failings, misguided policy positions, and disdain for voters’ needs. There are even claims that Democrats endorsed or validated some of the opposition’s agenda, and sacrificed spine and conviction in the process.
Even though it’s definitely fair to point out the failings of the party and individual candidates when they’re at fault, it’s also necessary to understand the forces at play that led to those failings. It’s the system, after all, that determines how the heady rhetoric of the party bigwigs based in their political philosophy gets pushed down to the candidates. So we get soul-searching questions about whether they were too liberal, too socially conscious, too embracing of too many special interest groups, too nice. All of which is unhelpful day-after quarterbacking. The better explanations of electoral failure have to be nuanced, more measured.
Did the loss come from a weak or flawed candidate or from an electorate turned off by the party’s positions? You can partly determine where the cause lies by looking at the extent to which individual voters went down their ballots checking all the R’s in front of them and ignoring all the D’s. If this is the case, as analysis shows it was in my local elections here in Jefferson County, WV, then it’s likely that the explanation for the failure lies in the voters’ perception of the party.
Blame should not be attributed to the relative strength or weakness of any particular candidate. My local Democratic candidates as a whole, by the way, made up an excellent slate. You could see that in the way their Republican opponents readily adopted (appropriated) so many of their policy positions. But for the voters, Democratic candidates were rejected and their Republican opponents were elected. So why was that? Was it that policy didn’t matter or that the voters predicted the Republicans could get the job done and the Democrats couldn’t?
Notice that the Republican positions were not obviously objectively better, under the meaning that putting them into operation would create a better society. What “better” means to a straight-line voter is impressionistic. There is no weighing of an individual candidate’s merits when the voter votes a straight ticket.
If you’re a disappointed Democrat who feels it necessary to throw shade on individual Democrats for the reason that they lost their campaigns, you’re encouraging people who are never-been-and-never-will-be Democrats to maintain their allegiance without question to the political machine of the Republican party. They will state that Democratic politicians are no good or not good enough. And that’s simply not true.
Any politician, Democrat or Republican, is susceptible to the forces that push them to do or say something. In the best form of legislating, any individual politician should be able to understand those forces, pro and con, and justify their own stance through a well reasoned understanding of its probable impacts, short-term and long-term. But they typically won’t take the time if their voters don’t give a hoot how they vote.
It’s staggering to see, for instance, the Republican party which in campaigns argues for competence in government falling in line to put completely incompetent, unqualified individuals in charge of full government agencies. A television broadcaster with no higher level military experience in charge of the Department of Defense. A mixed martial arts promoter in charge of the Department of Education. A medicine sceptic in charge of Health and Human Services. It’s like they’re wishing for these agencies to fail. And failure means that people impacted by those agencies will be hurt.
But all four of the West Virginia Federal legislators — Shelley Moore Capito, Jim Justice, Riley Moore, and Carol Mille — approved of these appointments. Could they have possibly believed that a lack of credentials in these important positions was going to ultimately improve the lives of West Virginians? Would they be in favor of appointing some guy to be the Secretary of Education because he has an 8th grade education? Is that enough to qualify in their minds? Do our Federal legislators lack the capacity to predict how effective someone might or might not be in their job? Or did they vote the way they did because they were told to do so by their bosses? The answer seems obvious.
When you have a legislature in which the control is vested in a single party’s positions, you as an individual legislator are prone to short-circuit your oversight responsibility to understand all the forces at play. Instead you accede to the demands of those higher than you on the pecking order. You vote as you’re told, not as you should. It’s unavoidable to see that this is what our West Virginia legislators did.
To my mind, if I want to preserve gay marriage, restore women’s control over their uteruses, allow minorities to keep their votes, restore value to our public education and health care systems, and treat immigrants humanely, I’ll continue to vote for a Democrat. Any elected Democrat may not be able to do all that, again because of those opposing forces at play, but I believe that they should want to. And, further, they should tell me that they want to. So even if that’s doing the same thing I’m ascribing to straight ticket Republican voters, I will vote for Democrats, rather than for any Republican who is squishy about or outright antagonistic to these positions.
Now that Democrats are in the minority both at the Federal level and here in West Virginia, it’s even more important to be diligent and neither go limp nor learn to live with the oncoming assault. There are candidates who in their campaigns will tell you they will work for your good, though we might cynically suspect that they won’t. We support this suspicion on the evidence that they surrender their principles to the authority above them. That’s where they get their talking points. If we elected them expecting that they were going to make wise decisions for our benefit, we should un-elect them when they don’t.