A couple of weeks ago, Hillary Clinton offered a rather pointed response to a question about what Kamala Harris had to do to prevent a replay of the 2016 race. HuffPost noted:
‘Well, first of all, I don’t think she has Jim Comey in the wings waiting to kneecap her, so that’s good, and I’m very grateful for that,’ joked the former secretary of state in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Thursday.
The on-air comments, which caused a bit of a stir in political circles, touched on a point that I’ve pondered for the last eight years.
After Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, I comforted myself with an argument that certainly seemed true: The Republican’s success, I contended, was a fluke. A devastating and consequential fluke, to be sure, but a fluke nevertheless.
He was poised to lose in 2016 — by some measures, handily — until a confluence of weird events, including Clinton’s pneumonia and then-FBI Director James Comey’s decision to reopen a criminal investigation into the Democratic nominee in late October. Even then, Trump managed to win with roughly 46% of the vote — a smaller percentage of the electorate than several recent losing candidates, including Mitt Romney in 2012 and John Kerry in 2004.
Yes, Trump won in 2016, but he won with national support comparable to Michael Dukakis’ showing in 1988. To see him as some kind of electoral juggernaut seemed preposterous.
In the years that followed, the political world confronted episodic evidence that the Republican’s success was, for all intents and purposes, accidental.
In 2017, Democrats had a great year, winning gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey.
In 2018, Democrats took back the U.S. House majority.
In 2019, Democrats won gubernatorial elections in Kentucky and Louisiana, which aren’t exactly reliable blue states.
In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Trump.
In 2021, Democrats had mixed results, but they defied a historical trend and won in New Jersey again. In 2022, Democrats defied a historical trend again and expanded their majority in the U.S. Senate. In 2023, Democrats held onto Kentucky’s gubernatorial office again. Year after year, race after race, Trump-backed candidates kept losing. All of this made it easier for Americans to tell the world, “See? We’re correcting the mistake. The accident of history is being gradually undone. We’re putting things right.” But as the dust settles on the 2024 race, the bigger picture now appears quite different. Trump’s 2016 victory no longer looks like a fluke, it now looks like the point at which our politics was infected, before that infection metastasized.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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