What would voters have needed to learn, or to remember and believe, to deny Donald Trump a second term last year? What common knowledge would have propelled Kamala Harris victory?

It’s easy to wish circumstances a year ago had been different—that Trump had been imprisoned by 2022 or that his successor had been a silver-tongued young man. But all else equal, under the circumstances that prevailed at the time, I don’t think it’s hard to imagine the electorate interpreting facts on the ground differently, more faithfully to the truth, in a way that denied Trump a comeback.

It might have looked something like this:

In 2017 Trump inherited a strong economy, and for three years he milked it to give tax cuts to himself and other millionaires and billionaires. But he didn’t fully waste his inheritance until 2020, when his failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic, or to tell Americans the truth about coronavirus, precipitated an economic collapse larger than any since the Great Depression. When voters wisely threw him out of office for these failures, he embarrassed the country before the whole world, and nearly ended its democracy, by leading a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the election.

His successors have done a good job digging out of a deep hole since Trump reluctantly left Washington. Daily life is back to normal for most Americans, unemployment is historically low, wages are historically high. But the job is not done, and the last thing the country should do is hand control back to the corrupt and incompetent man who plunged us into crisis in the first place.

It wouldn’t have been easy to remind Americans of these basic facts—not starting in 2024, not after so many years of wishing Trump out of existence. What was so depressing at the time, though, and what remains infuriating in hindsight, is that they never really tried.

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BACK TO THE FUTURE FORWARD

Democrats today are fighting internally over which operatives deserve most blame for Harris’s defeat: the ones who worked for her campaign, or the ones who worked for Future Forward, the party’s main super PAC.

The former contend that Future Forward went rogue, driving a pro-Harris economic message when the campaign had concluded the most urgent task was to pull Trump’s floating approval numbers down. The latter contend that their superior data operation vindicates their judgment, and they were right to spend their money as they did, mixed message or no.

There are a thousand things to say about the groups and personalities and methods that helped Harris squander a lead and a winnable election. But to my mind the most revealing thing about the fight isn’t any tactical disagreement between the camps—it’s their shared assumptions...