2024 Presidential Elections: Lessons Not Learned
2024 Presidential Elections: Lessons Not Learned
It is time for progressive Democrats to stop being so arrogant. They occupy no moral high ground, and they should stop lecturing the rest of us for not valuing what they have to offer.
The 2024 presidential elections offer many important lessons for political scientists, campaign consultants, partisan activists disguised as journalists, comedians, or professors, and ordinary citizens.
Check out my first attempt to produce an audio version of my essay. Should I continue to provide audio files?
It seems many of the people most in need of those lessons refuse to learn them. I, however, am not one to give up easily.
I will try to reframe some of the lessons from our recent history-altering elections in ways that might grab the attention of those who are currently staging protests and denouncing those whose votes they desperately want to attract.
(There’s one important lesson: If you want to attract others to vote the way you do, consider not calling them derogatory names.)
Regulations
Americans have now lived within a progressive regulatory regime for so long that they’ve become like fish who spend their entire existence in water: they don’t know it’s all wet because they’ve never experienced anything else.
Many citizens today, who have grown up surrounded and controlled by regulations—Americans who are accustomed to asking bureaucrats for permission and purchasing permits before doing what they please with their own property or business—simply don’t pay attention to the many ways regulations shape their lives.
Yet, regulations shaped the 2024 presidential election decisively, including the candidates for whom we could vote.
Republicans
On the Republican side, campaign finance laws and regulations incentivize wealthy individuals, like Donald Trump, to run for high political office because they can, in a pinch, self-fund their campaign if they need to.
Limits on individual donations to federal candidates are set by unelected bureaucrats within the Federal Election Commission. The FEC limit of what you can give, as an individual, to a presidential candidate is currently $3,300.
To run a successful campaign in a national presidential race requires many tens of millions of dollars—or more. Under campaign finance regulations, that means a candidate must have the name recognition to raise (relatively) small amounts of money from large numbers of individuals. If a candidate cannot do that, he might have to self-fund his campaign to a large extent.
Most ordinary Americans working just to pay bills cannot self-fund a successful national campaign. But the super-wealthy few can. Regulations mean that we should expect to see more Trump-like candidates in the future, not fewer.
Democrats
On the Democratic side, campaign finance regulations were the reason Democrats ended up with a candidate so weak that she struggles to speak a coherent sentence.
After Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, the obvious question for Democrats was whom to choose as his replacement.
Why, however, did Democrats in the summer of 2024 choose for their presidential nominee someone who had failed to demonstrate any real excellence, whose career was propped up by crony and sexual favoritism—even the progressive Los Angeles Times was publishing articles in the 1990s about Kamala receiving political appointments and promotions from her married boyfriend, Willie Brown—a candidate who could not win a single vote in the 2020 national Democratic primary?
Answer: Regulations.
The issue was that President Biden had raised a hundred million dollars that was sitting in a presidential campaign bank account.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were both part of the same campaign committee, which controlled that money. If Harris remained on the ticket as either presidential or vice-presidential nominee, she could continue using the existing campaign funds for the general election, per federal campaign finance regulations.
If, however, Biden was no longer running for President and Harris was not on the presidential ticket either, federal campaign finance regulations limit how much Biden could give from his own campaign funds to another candidate or campaign.