I’ll open this by pointing out that there are going to be a lot of bad-faith actors who are going to be sharing their ridiculous theories based on their pet theories, and many of them claim to be centrists. But they are not, and no, Harris didn’t lose due to “Defund the Police” nor will supporting the punishment of trans people clear a glorious path to Democratic victory, because Democrats pretty much ignored trans issues and the only people talking about woke and defund the police are either critics like James Carville or a Portland barista with 200 followers on Twitter.
Say it with me: Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, people driven by hate, are not our friends.
I will cover what, in my opinion, based on my experience as a communicator in my day job, I think Democrats might be able to do to counter this will be the subject of Friday’s post. For today, I want to play mythbuster.
This was not a landslide.
One thing to think about is we need to wait until all the votes are counted. Trump’s lead continues to get less impressive and likely will be somewhere in the 1.5-2.0% range. The leads in many of the swing states will probably shrink as well.
This is not yet complete and they haven’t updated their numbers as far as the latest counts as of this writing (national is down to +2.4 Trump), but compared to RealClearPolitics polling average, these are actually going to be pretty close to the actual result.
Who cares, right? You lose the Super Bowl by 2 points or 20, you still lost. Good point, but also for political purposes, this means that Trump’s win was not insurmountable nor necessarily an agenda. There is even an outside chance that he does not quite get 50%.
In normal times, this would be a simple opportunity for Democrats, to just swing the relatively small number of votes (likely 150,000 people in Rust Belt swing states) and get things back, like what happened in 2018. The horror that is on the way will likely make at least his soft support voters realize that they fucked up, and they will be votes to get.
The problem with that we have no idea how bad things are going to get, including what they will try to do to destroy our electoral system. But we can’t give up the fight, even if it will be harder than it’s ever been.
Part of that will be resisting any claim that Trump won by a landslide. Democrats at all levels need to shut that garbage down. The idea is not to downplay the seismic shift that just happened. Just tamp down the despair a little. Again, we can’t give up.
The last word goes to Fleetwood Mac with a song about what didn’t happen.
I was listening to Weekend Edition on NPR over the weekend (yeah, I know). They interviewed some late-breaking Trump voters to see what had tipped the scale for them to cast their ballot for Trump. A Puerto Rican voter said he didn’t care about the “island of garbage” line, he wanted a president who would Get Stuff Done. Another voter said it was the horrible shape of the economy, and rampant inflation. Still another said it was about gas prices, and another said it was about the working class and how the Biden administration hadn’t done anything for workers.
Except for the Puerto Rico “joke,” every one of these points is wrong. I won’t weigh in on what people’s “vibe” was, but their reason for voting Trump is demonstrably wrong. Inflation is down, it was driven largely by oil company greed, higher fuel prices mean higher transportation costs, mean higher prices at the checkstand. Wages are up, and President Biden is the only president ever to walk a picket line. The CHIPS Act and the PRO Act were both boons to workers, and the number of federal jobs requiring a college degree was reduced.
But for some reason, each of these voters, and millions more, all had drew the same conclusion based on faulty evidence. Uncanny! I would say that any election post-mortem that doesn’t address this point (voters choosing Trump based on false information) is incomplete.
“Trump gets stuff done” is just so over the top stupid I have no words, so I won’t write any more of them here.