General
Postmortems Are Bad at Predictions: Democrats May Just Need a ‘Change’ Election
An opening will probably emerge for Democrats in four years, but it may not be what the party and pundits expect today.
Change was a key message in 2008, and in most elections since.Credit…Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
There’s a lot about politics that’s hard to predict, but there’s something you can count on every four years: One party loses a presidential election, and the recriminations begin.
Every four years, the post-election fight seems to play out the same way. Every move of the losing campaign is questioned and scrutinized. The party’s center blames the activists for alienating swing voters. The activists blame the center for failing to mobilize the base.
And no matter what, you’ll find each pundit concluding that the party’s way forward is to do exactly what that pundit has been arguing for all along.
While you might not guess it from my tone, these debates do matter. They shape the strategy of the next midterm campaign, they can change the policies supported by elected officials, and they even influence how ordinary voters cast their ballots in future presidential primaries.
Still, there’s a reason you could probably tell my eyes roll at the prospect of most election postmortems. In hindsight, they don’t usually look great.
In fact, many look so bad that there may be more lessons for today’s Democrats in the failure of past postmortems than in any analysis of Kamala Harris’s campaign.
