It’s been six days since the results started trickling in and we, as Americans, have to face exactly what we’ve allowed to happen. As many people have reminded me over the last week, we don’t know what will happen. It can’t be done. By his very nature and temperament, Trump invites chaos. “Capricious” is not enough of a descriptor of what goes on in that man’s head, and I don’t see any reason why prognostication about his plans in office should be taken at face value. (Especially given his new inner circle is wildly egotistical and will [hopefully] turn on each other very quickly.)

But with that said, the stakes are high enough that it is worth taking him and his friends at their word. They campaigned on promises of mass deportations, on stripping away the rights of women, on threatening the lives of anyone who does not fall into the cishet bucket that forms their voting base, and thinly-veiled threats to the lives and liberties of anyone who is not an evangelical Christian. If you apply a disaster preparedness mindset to all of this, then it’s obvious what we have to do: Figure out what to do if the worst comes to worst and we’re faced with a thoroughly-entrenched, effective authoritarian regime. For my money, I’m not confident that the national Democrats will learn any lesson from this – indeed, they’ve seemed to repeat past mistakes and begin assigning blame to the trans community, the nebulous “left,” and anyone who didn’t attempt to court the Republican vote.

I don’t think I’m in a space to talk about what preparedness in the face of a Trump regime will look like, but I can attempt to work out my thoughts about the Democratic strategy. I’ve had a fair few sleepless nights since November 5, and a lot of that liminal space has been dedicated to thinking about stuff like this. (It should not be surprising to anyone who knows me that this is what I’ve thought about while I’ve lain away at night.) So, here we go. This post will be about my thoughts on the Democrats’ attempt to court Republicans and Independents and, later on, I’ll post something about how, I think, they should approach voters going forward. (Spoiler: Actually embrace progressive causes and talk to people on their level.)

So much of the Democrats’ strategy since Obama’s second term has been to attempt to appeal to the reason of “moderate Republicans.” For my money, this grew out of the otherwise rational reaction that the Tea Party could not possibly represent the average Republican voter. The Democrat strategist strawman in my head saw the Tea Party and thought, “Well, these people are lunatics,” and reacted against them. This, after all, seemed to work to get Obama elected in the first place. And yet, according to stats from Cornell, what you saw was a 93/6 split in favor of Romney among Republican voters. Which, fair enough. Romney was a boring and, in relation to today’s standards, moderate candidate. Not too surprising that he captured such a huge proportion of the GOP vote.

What I’m getting at, for 2012, is that Obama’s progressive platform was wildly tamped down and moderated in order to appeal to moderates and conservatives. Yet what that got him was barely over half of moderate voters (56/41 split), a roughly even Independent share (45/50 in favor of Romney), and barely anything from the GOP. Yet, Obama was elected, so one can imagine Democrat strategists doing a victory lap and entrenching the methodology in The Books.

Let’s now fast-forward to 2016. The election that broke tons of hearts. The Democrats wound up with Clinton via the primaries. She ran a pretty bog-standard Democrat platform: center-left, very moderate on most issues, and insisting that policies would be enough to appeal to the average American voter. And you know: That should have been enough. She was running against a maniac. A guy who bragged about assaulting women (and, indeed, in a matter of years would be proven to be a rapist in court). The Democrats were, indeed, sure that they could court the moderate and Republican voters who were, as they said in their own words, disgusted by Trump. And yet, Clinton lost with a similar share of moderates and a slightly-improved share of Republicans. But only slightly.

Okay, sure. That’s fine. Let’s assume, for the moment, that Trump’s charisma was enough to appeal to those disgusted Republican voters. (The guy was on TV after all, and we Americans love our TV personalities.) Clinton lost the campaign and the Democrats immediately turned on the progressive wing. People in my immediate social circles blamed Bernie Sanders (specifically “Bernie bros”) for the loss, as if the left in America is substantial and the electoral left is anything more than a drop in the bucket. The Democratic party at a national level did not spend time thinking that their insistence on policy was enough to get people’s attention. They didn’t seem to consider the reality that, to most people, anything more nuanced than an acknowledgment that the rent is too damn high and eggs cost $6.50 at 7-11 (!!!) is too much to handle.

And so we had four years of Trump in office, leading the country to massive deregulation, near-critical events on the international scale, and a global pandemic that killed thousands in short order. And yet, despite his many failures, the 2020 race was a close one! The Democrats wound up with Joe Biden who, to his credit, won. The party managed to keep voter turnout high and get people to bite their tongues and vote. And to Biden’s credit, he did a decent job of delivering on some of his progressive platforms. He shored up the NLRB, had a consumer-friendly FTC, and mitigated the absolute worst impulses of the government. (But only the absolute worse.) The thing we’re concerned about here is: Did he manage to pull Republican voters more than Clinton did? The two had the same opponent and Biden, arguably, had an easier time since so many people died under the watch of Trump.

Let’s look at the numbers. He did worse than Clinton! So much worse! Trump’s Republican base snapped back from an 88/8 split to 94/5! Credit where it’s due, Biden did pick up an extra +12 on the moderate side, but that sill kept him under 2/3 of the moderate vote – a number you’d hope would have been much higher. Biden saw a similar gain among Independents over Clinton, but, again, not substantial and in this case, well under 2/3 of the Independent vote.

As I write this, votes are still being tallied and it’s not clear how the Republican/Independent/Moderate vote share will shake out, but it’s clear that the Harris strategy of courting Republicans and moderates did not hand her the victory the campaign thought it would. Early numbers I’ve seen point to Trump retaining that 94/5 split, maybe even a little higher, with a substantial drop from Biden among independents. The moderate vote was roughly similar to Biden, maybe a little more, but still: Nowhere near what the Democrats needed and were trying to get with all of their positioning of Harris as someone who would lead, essentially, a coalition administration.

What does all of this mean? Well, to me, it tells me that the strategy of courting potential converts from the other political party does not work. A couple of months ago, one of the execs at my company had a brief spiel about how difficult it is to get people to shift from Android to iOS and visa versa. People are attached to their brands. The brands are part of their identity, and separating themselves from that aspect of their lives is like asking them to slough off part of who they are. American voters’ identities are roughly the same – especially for Democrat and Republican voters. That’s been proven election after election. The fact that the moderate vote is, consistently, either near an even-split or just over that, should imply that the moderate vote is really people who would be Democrat or Republican, but don’t want to register as such. In other words: They should be treated as a 50/50 split.

The game, ultimately, is getting more of your party and that 50/50 share to turn out for the polls. That’s always been the game. That’s why you used to have local parties bus people out to polling stations. You need to ensure that you have your base on lock and turning out, otherwise you’re screwed. As I told my Dad on the phone the other day: This is less of a problem for the GOP than it is the Democrats. The GOP has evangelical churches do that work for them. (i.e., Protestants voted for Trump at a 63/36 split and evangelicals in particular went for him at a whopping 82% of the vote.) The Democrats, locally and nationally, must come up with an answer to that. They ran on a platform of saving democracy and that was, apparently, not enough to get their people to turn out or to not switch their vote to Trump.

So, what does that strategy look like? Well, in the next post – soon™ – I’ll talk about what I think that looks like. (For all the good that’ll do.)

The key point here, though, is that continuing to appeal to the center and the “reasonable right” is a lost cause. You can’t get people to switch their phone OS, and getting people to vote against their party is harder still.