Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Professor Drew Westen, of Emery University, wrote a fascinating book in 2008. In “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” Westen, a clinical psychologist, notes that fear, passion and individual values drive the way people vote. Dispassionate intellectual and rational analysis are very often outweighed by emotion.
This should come as no surprise, because it has always been part and parcel of democracy.
While the presidential election was unusual in that Vice President Kamala Harris had only a little more than 100 days to mount a campaign, she nonetheless managed to come within 2.5 million votes of winning a hotly contested election, with 74 people million voting for her. President Trump received 76.5 million votes.
In New York, Harris got 55 percent of the vote, and beat Trump by 1 million out of the 7.7 million votes cast. Interestingly enough, the New York Equal Rights Amendment, enshrining abortion rights in our state Constitution, passed with the approval of more than 57 percent of voters. Similar constitutional provisions were added in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri and Montana. While Nevada, too, voted for such a protection, its unique law requires public approval in two separate elections.
'Arizona, Missouri, Montana and Nevada all went for Trump. How, then, do we account for abortion rights passing solidly in states in which voters elected the man who prides himself on appointing Supreme Court Justices who overruled Roe v. Wade?
Similarly, while Trump beat Harris in Nassau and Suffolk, voters in those counties passed the ERA in a landslide, Suffolk with 72 percent of the vote.
Statewide, Democrats won additional seats in the House of Representatives and flipped three Republican seats. On Long Island, there was no change in State Senate representation, and the Assembly added one Democratic seat. Republicans won one additional Senate seat statewide.
It is challenging to neatly account for this dissonance, and even though I have run for office many times, your guess is certainly as good as mine. I do, however, believe there are some unifying threads.
On the presidential and state levels, Democrats are at a severe disadvantage when they don’t run strong candidates in every state and in every legislative district, isolating only a handful of states in which to battle for the presidency.
The same is true in state legislative races. This year on Long Island, Democrats ran some great candidates in districts that would have been very challenging to win. They assembled professional staffs, had strong community and grassroots support, and raised money. Many earned the endorsements of the reputable press. These promising candidates learned a great deal, and we will see them running again in the future.
Yet just as we see weak Democratic campaigns in too many of the red states, we also see Democratic State Senate and Assembly candidates who are candidates in name only. The lack of viable candidates in those districts adversely affects an overall interest in inspiring registered Democrats, and others, to vote.
I have no patience with some Democrats and pundits who claim that Harris should have run a ran a better campaign. I, for one, believe she made a flawless effort given the narrow window of opportunity to counter a national Republican campaign that began on January 6, 2021.
I will continue to trust our nation’s voters. With wars across the world and people still suffering from the anxieties of the pandemic and its remaining adverse economic challenges, it is understandable that many Americans wanted to buck the status quo, with many believing that Harris would have been more likely to continue it.
As a Democrat, I don’t want President-elect Donald Trump to fail, and I don’t want America to fail. We Democrats must now be the loyal minority on the national level.
Nonetheless, Democrats in New York and elsewhere will not disregard our responsibility to fight for an aspirational nation guarding individual rights. We must all appreciate that America has a strong and growing economy. We must acknowledge as well that our economic rights are a direct reflection of our personal rights. To be sure, if we lose our fundamental constitutional and human rights, our economic rights will not long survive.
Charles Lavine represents New York’s 13th Assembly District, and serves as chair of the Assembly’s Judiciary Committee.
