"Lessons learned" is one of the most powerful weapons in a military's arsenal — a formal process for "capturing, analyzing, and applying knowledge or insights gained from past operations, exercises, or other events."
While it lacks the dramatic presence of an M1A3 Abrams main battle tank or the existential dread of a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile, Lessons Learned allows a military organization to avoid repeating failures, to build on past successes, and — perhaps most importantly — to disseminate those lessons throughout the organization and enhance future decision-making.
If there's a human pursuit as chaotic and prone to failure as military operations, it must be politics.
The military can be quite adept at applying Lessons Learned. There are, after all, lives on the line. So if you'll allow me to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, when a man knows he is to be shot at in the morning, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
While the U.S. military (and other organizations like NASA) have Lessons Learned built into their processes, political parties generally seem to approach their losses (and their wins, for that matter) with much less rigor. At first blush, that seems odd. Elections, like war, are a zero-sum game. Fair or foul, every election comes down to either "I win, you lose" or "I lose, you win."
You might assume then that parties would implement formal Lessons Learned systems that would kick into gear after each election. After the tragicomic disaster that was the 2020 election, the RNC did indeed put together a study group to learn how to avoid a similar disaster:
The Committee on Election Integrity, which produced the report, was created by RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in February with the stated goal to “study and make recommendations to restore election transparency and integrity” in future elections.
“What we saw this past election — states undoing important safeguards, bypassing the proper legislative processes, and changing election laws in the eleventh hour — was deeply troubling and brought chaos and uncertainty to our sacred democratic processes,” McDaniel, the niece of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, said in February.
Flash forward to 2024, and it worked. While it took far too long to give feckless former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel the boot, her replacements, Michael Whatley and Lara Trump, put together a legal team that was ready, willing, and able to Stop the Steal.
"Why the hell aren't we doing this after every election, win or lose?" I silently yelled at my computer screen. But I quickly realized why neither Democrats nor Republicans regularly do so. You see, the military only has lives and entire nations on the line, but losing an election impacts something much more precious: egos.
An army or a navy is a longstanding institution, each going back centuries in most of the world. But a political campaign, particularly a presidential campaign, is more akin to producing a major Hollywood movie. Many specialists are hired from all over the place, and great sums of money are collected very quickly, and then the whole operation shuts down once the film is completed or the election is held. The national party committees play the role of the movie studios: they have a permanent presence but don't directly control the big production/campaign.
The egos involved in running a presidential race are every bit as outsized as those of an auteur director or a fifty-million-dollar movie star. Winners' egos often proved resistant to learning lessons — "I won, didn't I?" But egos that got crushed on election day can dig in even deeper against the truth. Besides, there's another election in four years, so who cares what those losers think?
Besides, it's so much easier to "point our fingers and blame, blame, blame," as Paul Simon sang. "Some Democrats attacked white women after the election for 'dooming Kamala,'" economist Joel Kotkin wrote for the Telegraph this week, "particularly married suburban women, who turned out to care about things other than sexual politics."
"It's those damned married suburban women." "It's those damned black and Hispanic men." "It's the damned disinformation peddled on Elon Musk's X." Anybody and everybody is to blame for their loss except for Kamala Harris or her oddly fey sidekick, Tim Walz.
Over at Ruy Teixeira's Liberal Patriot substack, political analyst Michael Baharaeen looked into the abyss of denial, the persistent insistence, "But Harris ran as a moderate!" Bahareen wrote, "This view was perhaps best summarized in a recent monologue by comedian-turned-pundit John Oliver."
Oliver said:
If what you want is a centrist campaign that’s quiet on trans issues, tough on the border, distances itself from Palestinians, talks a lot about law and order, and reaches out to moderate Republicans, that candidate existed—and she just lost… I’m not sure how you reach out to moderate Republicans more than appearing with Liz Cheney multiple times.
Oliver and so many Democrats who follow his line of thought are in an onion of denial. Every time you peel back one layer, there's another — and they all stink.
More concerning is Denver Mayor Mike Johnston. On Wednesday, I reminded you just how important illegal immigration was to Donald Trump and Harris voters. Yet, the Dem-dominated Los Angeles City Council and perhaps Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) are ready to double down on "sanctuary" status for illegal aliens. But Johnston just took it a dangerous step further.
Visegrád 24 reported that Johnston "has challenged Trump to try to deport any illegal migrants from his city, saying he would deploy the Denver City Police and volunteers from the local community to use force against federal forces trying to deport illegals."
"More than us having DPD stationed at the county line to keep them out, you would have 50,000 Denverites there. It's like the Tiananmen Square moment with the rose and the gun," he boasted. "You'd have every one of those Highland moms who came out for the migrants. You don’t want to mess with them."
What is it with Democrats and insurrection, anyway?
Not that I want Democrats to learn from their Harris-Walz disaster, but I do want you to see how badly they need to:
The astonishing collapse in Democratic support in deep blue areas is the strongest evidence that the 2024 election was, in fact, a referendum on 2020-era progressivism, and the progressives lost decisively. pic.twitter.com/DEUZZZWb1D
— Geoff Shullenberger (@g_shullenberger) November 20, 2024
The only state that didn't veer rightward on Nov. 5 was my home state of Colorado. But I wouldn't be surprised if Colorado's election results were largely bogus, given all the election shenanigans Democrats have gotten up to here since they took full power over the state government a decade ago — up to and including our deeply corrupt Secretary of State Jena Griswold "inadvertently" leaking the passwords to our Dominion voting machines.
Harris lost for any number of reasons, starting with how far to the left Democrats have moved and the intolerance for any dissenting voices that inevitably followed. Cenk Uygur is a committed lefty, but even he couldn't help but notice that "Now, the Democrats are in a lot of ways the less tolerant party."
"If you try to give constructive criticism of the party to improve it," he continued, "they drive you from the party while screaming, 'He’s not a real Democrat!!'"
However, the most important reason for Harris's failure is purely personal: she was the least-tested, least-proven candidate run by either major party in my lifetime.
Harris came up through the Bay Area progressive money machine. Once Nancy Pelosi puts her imprimatur on a young candidate, the donation floodgates part like the Red Sea. Having caught Pelosi's eye via Willie Brown, Harris never had to face a serious contest. As a result, her skills were so underdeveloped that she was forced to give up her 2020 presidential ambitions before a single primary or caucus was held. It's one hell of an indictment of somebody's political prospects when they have to drop out the year before the primary.
Sure, Donald Trump had never run for office before 2016. Still, he'd been through the Republican primary process, and he had spent his entire adult lifetime taking the slings and arrows of outrageous personality. Trump was tested in ways that Harris still hasn't been, even after running her losing race. Harris-Walz was a virtual repeat of Joe Biden's 2020 basement campaign — she was kept coddled in the mainstream media's protective embrace.
A candidate who had honed their political skills might have been able to smoothly transition from Bay Area Progressive to Universally Acceptable Moderate, but, as Glenn Reynolds put it earlier today, "Everything about her campaign was fake." Worse, everything about Harris herself was fake — even her celebrity endorsements were purchased.
What, then, is the Lesson Learned for Democrats going into 2028?
Democrats need to relearn how to practice democracy.
Biden became his party's nominee in 2020 because party insiders — the "corporate robots" Uygur complained about this week — rigged the primaries against upstart Bernie Sanders, who appeared to be winning. Despite his obvious and accelerating cognitive and physical decline, those same insiders denied grassroots Democrats the opportunity to primary Biden out earlier this year. (That effort, by the way, cost them RFK Jr. as Biden's likely replacement and possibly another President Kennedy.) When that same cabal belatedly forced Biden off the ticket in an intra-party coup, instead of going through an accelerated primary process — reportedly that's what Barack Obama wanted — Harris was installed as the nominee.
Lesson Unlearned: high-level intrigues do not produce quality candidates or even candidates who are well-known by the voters expected to turn out for them on election day.
Democrats, despite their name, forgot that the voters are always right. That isn't to say that voters are always wise, mind you. As we keep learning — or maybe I should say as we keep failing to learn — H.L. Mencken wasn't nearly cynical enough when he observed, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." But voters are always right in the sense that on election day, their decision is final.
Sometimes primary voters pick a bad candidate, but it is better to lose a single election than to drive away some of your most talented candidates and, worse, destroy your brand and dispirit your voters.
Believe me. As a Republican voter, I have been forced to learn this lesson too many times.
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