R&R: Blame game
A few disparate tidbits to understand the 2024 election.
Happy Sunday! Welcome to R&R, a feature for paid subscribers taking a step back to look at the week that was and offering my recommended reads. Programming note: There will be no newsletter tomorrow, for Veterans Day. 🇺🇸
I will, however, be running a mailbag column next week, so send your questions to gabe@wakeuptopolitics.com. Any questions on the election results, the second Trump administration, what’s next for the two parties and three branches of the government, are welcome.
Two weeks before Election Day, I wrote:
As of today, more than 17 million Americans have voted in the 2024 election. Two weeks from today, the last voters will cast their ballots. If we’re lucky, some time that night, we’ll know who won. Much more likely, some time in the subsequent week, we’ll know who won. If we’re really unlucky, as in 2000, the call will come some time in the subsequent month.
But, whenever it is, there will be a winner. And once they are declared as such, their strategy will be celebrated. Their advisers will be fêted. Either Susie Wiles or Jen O’Malley Dillon will instantly become the toast of Washington.
Broad declarations will be made about the American electorate — even though, if not for fewer than 100,000 people voting differently, the opposite declarations would be popping up. It won’t matter. History is written by the winners.
I was off a bit on the particulars — we did, in fact, know the winner before going to sleep that night; the margin was closer to 300,000 voters than 100,0001 — but the broader point has proven true. Five days after the election, and the postmortem-industrial complex is still going strong.
As I wrote in that October piece (in which I pre-registered my own “broad declarations” about the electorate for either outcome), reporters typically begin crafting these campaign obituaries before the race is called, and it’s amusing to think about how certain anecdotes would be presented if the outcome had been reversed.