Okay, I know that reality is now considered biased and not something the Most Reasoned Minds of the Great American Discourse treat as necessary or even reasoned, but some of us really are trying to live in a reality-based world.

Far be it from me to cast aspersions on the brilliant minds who are now lecturing the Democrats on what they MUST DO, but some of what they are pointing to as proof is based on three giant myths.

Myth #1: Trump won by a landslide: As per the Cook Political Report page, as of this writing the popular vote is at 76,942,246 for Trump, or 49.87%, and 74,450,212, or 48.25%. That’s a lead of 1.62%.

Call me crazy, but that’s not really what anyone would call a blowout, or even resounding. Certainly not a big mandate, or crushing, or any other synonym you want to use. Trump hasn’t even won a straight majority of Americans. His win would fall near the bottom in both electoral wins and vote count wins in presidential history. And that extends across the Republican party, as this Washington Post analysis demonstrates. The Senate, the House, and state and local elections do not point to a massive Republican landslide.

Unfortunately, people in both the left and the right seem to accept the equivalent of a 25-23 football score as a blowout. None of this means that the next four years will not be horrible nor does it argue the Dems don’t need to take a hard look at what just happened. But too many people are using this myth of a resounding Republican victory for their own not-so-good uses. An example…

Myth #2: Harris ran an identity politics campaign: There was an identity-politics-focused campaign, but it wasn’t Harris. It was most certainly Trump. The Very Serious and Reasoned Centrists of the discourse, when they aren’t yelling at LGBTQ people for fleeing TwitterX for Bluesky and blocking, you know, homophobes, are demanding that Democrats reverse the strategy that they did not run in the campaign and adopt…a version of the campaign that Harris ran?

Identity Politics(tm) is a vague concept, similar to woke, that you can apply to anything you might not like and it also gives you cover to hold some terrible views like transphobia. You can also yell loudly at anyone who calls you on it because your anger can bend reality to how you like it, you are just that powerful. Like James Carville, who can look like something Frodo and Sam might encounter in the latter half of Lord of the Rings when he is angry. Given that this argument is solely based on something that actually did not happen unless you think campaigning with Liz Cheney is an example of identity politics and “I will be a president for all Americans, including the ones who didn’t vote for me” is an example of woke, that powerful reality-changing anger is helpful, except that also doesn’t exist.

So if indeed, as transpeople I actually know have noted, Harris never mentioned them even when Trump was putting out ads about trans that made the Willie Horton ones like the Teach the World to Sing Coke commercial, what then are these people demanding? One can only assume attacking trans rights, and one can then only assume that they believe that turning off a portion of their base is a winning strategy. Okay, you say, but trans folks are a tiny percentage of the population, so that wouldn’t matter, but that runs into two problems: one, let’s run with that so given that, why is it such a focus given it only affects a small number of people, and two, while it might be hard for these raging talking heads to grasp, Democrats tend to have empathy and that would be a turnoff for them. I’ll add a third, that Identity Politics(tm) can also include women’s bodily autonomy. Again, turning off a portion of your base is not a great strategy, even if you think you’ll just scream at them to shut up and vote.

I don’t need to get too much into Trump’s Identity Politics(tm) campaign. If you weren’t in a coma, you had to have seen it, but here’s the tl;dr…anyone who doesn’t vote for me is an enemy of the state and is garbage, and white Christians are the Real Americans.

Myth #3: I can use exit poll data to prove my point: In 2016, white women, like our own Cassandra for example, were accused of going for Trump by nine points. This turned out to be nonsense.

The reason why it was nonsense is that it was all based on exit poll data. Exit poll data, as the linked article points out, is often nonsense, and much less accurate than regular polls because the sample breakdown is more difficult to manage.

We are hearing all kinds of things about how particular groups voted, but you really need to take those with a giant grain of salt. To quote political science professor Anna Galland on Chris Hayes’ podcast:

Anna Galland: Right. I’ve actually had a similar thought, which is I don’t want to either under learn or over learn any lessons here. First of all, it’s also too early. We won’t have the voter file back to actually know what happened at the voter level for months.

 

Chris Hayes: Can you actually explain that? Because I think people need to understand the difference between the exit polls that are being published right now and that everyone’s posting and the voter file.

 

Anna Galland: Right. I was thinking today that it’s almost like the difference between polling that told us what might happen in the election and actually having some sort of returns. Like, exit polls are to the voter file as pre-election polls were to the election itself.

So, I know that this is VERY inconvenient to the Very Serious Minds of the Great American Discourse who just want to punish trans people and progressives, but any decision now is not based on…

Reality.

There’s that “R” word again. It really does still mean something. When you ignore it, the end result is often not what you want, no matter how much you don’t want that to be true.

The last word goes to Radiohead.