Politics is never over

The American political struggle will not end today.

There. Having resisted for months making a prediction about the contemporary political scene, I have no hesitation making that one.

But it doesn’t mean what you think it means.

It doesn’t mean that the election won’t be resolved by midnight, though that could be true. It doesn’t mean there will be endless contention about the outcome, though that could be the case as well. And it doesn’t mean that the election will be thrown to the House of Representatives, where Donald Trump will win, though that remains a possibility, if a slim one.

It means something else entirely — or, more accurately, two things. 

One is that no matter who wins the election (and, no, I don’t know any more than you do who will prevail, nor how long it will take for the contest to be resolved), the party that loses will reevaluate its values, its profile, its procedures. The other is that no matter who wins, the winning candidate will have to contend with a rump of voters who are troubled by the direction of the new administration.

Ordinarily, it’s only one party that has to engage in these kinds of introspective exercises. When the Democrats lost the 1988 election, for example, the party had failed in five of the previous six contests. It went into a cathartic self-examination and a period of self-flagellation that led to the emergence of Bill Clinton as its next nominee. Meanwhile, the Republicans, under George H.W. Bush, merely carried on. 

There was a similar period of introspection and self-flagellation, this time among the Republicans, when Mitt Romney was defeated by Barack Obama in 2012. The GOP had failed to win a popular-vote majority in five of the previous six elections. One result of that was the emergence of Trump. 

As the 2024 political cycle began its movement toward its November denouement, fissures developed in both parties. 

A slice of the GOP remained horrified at the populism of Trump. A slice of the Democratic Party was fearful about the fitness and mental acuity of President Joe Biden. 

As Trump moved from strength to strength in the primaries, the virulent opposition of figures such as former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire became increasingly futile; the two eventually lined up behind Trump. But Haley still received thousands of votes in places such as, among many others, Indiana (22% of the vote), Pennsylvania (16%) and Wisconsin (13%) — even though she no longer was a candidate.

A large slice of the Democratic Party harbored grave doubts about the political skills and long-term prospects of Kamala Harris, but those doubts evaporated — much the way the skepticism about Trump disappeared as his nomination seemed to become inevitable — when Biden withdrew and when party leaders rallied behind the vice president, more out of desperation than confidence.  

“If you’re the Republicans, you have to figure out whether MAGA is the identity of the party or a wing within the party,” said Aram Goudsouzian, a University of Memphis historian. “If the Republicans are a purely MAGA party, there will be some pushback from traditional Republicans. If you’re the Democrats, you’ll have to find a way to think about recapturing the centrist voters who don’t love Donald Trump but are looking for a politics that speaks to national unity.”

In some ways, the long-term challenge is greater for the Democrats. Both parties have histories of internal struggle — the Robert Taft wing of the Republicans fought with the Dwight Eisenhower wing in the 1950s, and the Barry Goldwater wing fought with the Nelson Rockefeller wing in the 1960s — but the Democrats have had more enduring struggles. 

From the New Deal era of Franklin Roosevelt through the Great Society years of Lyndon Johnson, the liberals within the Democrats have fought with the party’s conservative, sometimes racist, elements. Today that fight has new life, perhaps without the racist trace elements, as progressives tangle with moderates on matters such as health care, gender issues and, for the past 13 months, whether the party should tilt toward Israel or Palestine. No matter the election result, those tensions will persist.

There already have been adjustments in the broader political environment. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined forces with Trump, becoming the first of the four presidential candidates of the Kennedy family to support a Republican. Recently, former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, once in the GOP leadership in the House and the daughter of a two-term Republican vice president, is supporting, and actually campaigning with, Harris. 

“If the Democrats lose, they will have a ‘come-to-Jesus’ moment and, really, you can already see the strains in the party,” said Victor Menaldo, a University of Washington political scientist. “If the Republicans lose, the question is whether Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney can change a party that really has become a populist party. That would be a battle, and an uphill one.”  

But the reevaluation — the introspection and recrimination — won’t be confined to the two parties.

The mandarins of the press will undertake a self-examination, asking whether news outlets were too permissive about Trump; whether they leaned too heavily in favor of Harris; whether their traditional emphasis on horse-race coverage was so prominent that it warped the reporting and the contest; whether fact-checking was comprehensive enough or too wide-ranging; whether journalists practiced moral equivalency; whether reporters misused poll results; and whether the withdrawal of endorsements was inappropriate, or worse.

Pollsters will have their own difficult introspection. If past patterns repeat themselves, public-opinion surveys won’t match the final results. Adjustments will have to be made to compensate for the errors. This will have the air of generals preparing to fight the last war, but that’s what pollsters are forced to do after every election.

But there will be — there must be — a reckoning among the voters.

The public needs to make a reevaluation about their engagement with democracy,” said Justin Levitt, an LMU Loyola Law School expert on election law. “There’s some very important work we have to do about how we choose to be participants in a democratic system. Right now, some of the actions are based on the premise that democracy is under threat. That’s true only if we let it be under threat. Democracy isn’t a state. It’s an activity.”

David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.