Americans vote viscerally, rather than logically. That’s not a new observation but it is the key factor in what happened this past election and what’s in store right around the corner for Donald Trump, although that crowing buffoon doesn’t know it. He’s drunk on vainglory, he thinks he’s universally loved, not that he squeaked by. Half the country hates him more than ever and the rest of the country will begin to turn on him soon enough. That’s what we know and he’s about to find out.
The Democrats didn’t get the story book ending hoped for, but trust me, the MAGAs are in for a much bigger let down than the yous and mes. We have the usual post mortem on why we lost, and some of that will be discussed below. But bear in mind two factors: one is the myopia of the American electorate, the foolishness of not paying better attention to government, which has gotten us into this mess; and the other is the destructiveness that shortsidedness can bring.
The myopia I speak of is the inability to see things in context and only to see and feel the most outrageous thing that affects us in present or recent time.Trump largely was defeated by his failure with the COVID crisis. That was Biden’s high card, and what got him elected — even though Trump had done many other egregious things that should have lost him an election. The most egregious thing that was affecting people, and particularly in an election year, 2020, was COVID. And so the people lashed out.
Now on to the key factor: that is shortsightedness, which is frequently destructive shortsightedness. And that is what worked against the Democrats this last election cycle. Everybody was up in arms over inflation. Grocery prices and restaurant prices soared these past several years. So did post COVID gas, rents, mortgages. The larger story is that Biden brought us through a global recession in very good shape because the inflation could have been much much worse. But we don’t have a media that reports things simply, clearly, and in context. The right-wing media does. Right now, for example, it’s all over Fox News how the bird flu is causing a spike in the price of eggs. That was the case during two years of the Biden administration but mainstream media never bothered to explain it simply. The eggs issue was simply left to the right to exploit rather than be defused for what it was, i.e., utterly beyond Biden’s control.
Inflation was the buzz word and on everybody’s mind. So the choice was made to bring back the former guy, the one who got fired for incompetence, rather than go with the Democrats, who had demonstrated competence and skill in guiding the economy in a post COVID world. That didn’t matter. Joe Biden was unpopular because he couldn’t do miracles and so, evidently, the plan is to see if Donald Trump can do something miraculous. He probably will. But it won’t be miraculous in the sense of something amazing and good it will be miraculous in the sense of things getting screwed up on a scope never before seen — or at least not seen since the days of Hoover. Isn’t that cheerful?
I found an essay which addresses this destructive shortsidedness. Yes, the incumbent party lost, as incumbent parties are wont to do when something happens during the presidential tenure which outrages people. But the incumbent party lost to a previous president who had been thrown out of office for his abject incompetence. Go figure that. And take your time. We have four years ahead of tumult and incompetence and long before it is over the electorate will have received an education that it will long remember.
Virtually every article I have written about the 2024 election was based on the idea that Trump’s blinding horribleness would overwhelm whatever deficit there was on the other side. I even assumed that it didn’t matter who that was, because the electorate would still vote against Trump.
I was wrong, obviously, but I didn’t start to understand why until I read an interview with some Harris campaign staffers. Specifically, I didn’t start to understand until I read what advisor David Plouffe said about the campaign’s internal polling. It never showed her ahead of Trump.
Let me say that again, with feeling:
Internal polling never showed her ahead of Trump.
How is that possible?
How is it possible when Trump himself was already unpopular, was indeed never popular, even when he was the president? And how can that be when Trump ran not a campaign so much as a vengeance movement in which he practically declared himself unfit? He even vowed to defund schools that required children to be vaccinated, reminding voters why they booted him out the first time around.
I have been thinking about this all day. At first, I thought Plouffe was lying, covering his ass, as it were, saying that there was nothing they could have done differently so don’t blame them for failing. They did the best they could, blah blah blah, but she was doomed from the start.
But then I thought about Biden’s unpopularity and by extension hers, and how that fact, under any other circumstances in any other election, would explain why she was never ahead. The president has been underwater since the last quarter of 2021. The vice president had a hundred days to turn that around. She came close, but fell short by about 230,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Some will say that Biden should have dropped out sooner, and they would be right, but only because they have the benefit of hindsight. While we don’t know what Biden’s internal polling was showing, we do know that Biden himself had enormous faith in the electorate to choose someone who was not promising to be a petty tyrant. For those of us who were so focused on stopping Trump that we were willing to overlook Biden’s liabilities, especially the fact that he hadn’t been popular in three years, his faith in America was good enough.
Why is Biden unpopular, even now? Perhaps it’s the economy. Perhaps it’s perceptions of the economy. (The rightwing media apparatus is larger today than it was four years ago and it’s getting bigger.) Whatever the reason, his unpopularity carried over to Harris, who was already shouldering a deficit in terms of time (100 days) and in terms of her sex and race. She came close to overcoming it all, but didn’t. (Would distancing herself from Biden have worked? Maybe, but I doubt it.)
I would like to end this on a note of hope, but honestly, I don’t know how. Like Biden, I had faith in the ability of voters to decide between a candidate who may not be the greatest for some and another who was the absolute worst for everyone. They fired Trump, but forgot why.
If there is hope, it’s in thinking about the destructive shortsightedness of the majority of voters. Just as they forgot why they fired Trump, they’ll forget why Biden and Harris were so bad that they had to give a criminal a second chance, putting him above the law. In victory, Trump is experiencing a popularity he never had as president. Given the attention span of voters, he’ll be back to where he started before long.
This is true. And this is nothing new. Wait until reality dawns on these people as it has before. Trump has a great many disillusioned followers from the first time. Expect that number to swell as the promises get ever more grandiose and the reality doesn’t track the “golden age” that he has promised to one and all.
We are a people who have had it good. To be raised in the United States is to have it better than most people in the world. We are blessed. But we take our blessings for granted and we don’t realize how precious and fragile a thing democracy is. We are about to see representational democracy challenged to the utmost. It is going to be a rude awakening.
Trump thinks he’s got it made. He emphatically does not. He won the popular vote by the smallest margin since 1968, less than one percentage point. The House and the Senate are both hanging by a thread. There is no mandate except in Trump’s fantasy and right-wing media copy. That’s it.
The next four years are going to be one non-stop fight. And expect 2026 to be a turnaround and expect 2028 to see the Democrats cleaning up Trump’s mess once again. The political pendulum always swings back. Expect it to swing with a vengeance.
Wow. Just wow. I’ve come to bitterly believe that we were mistaken about the majority of the country. But we were wrong – racism and sexism haven’t improved like, during the campaign it seemed they had. I could write a lengthy comment going into 2008 with a black candidate and 2016 with a female one but I’ll try to keep it simple. We thought in 2008 (during the campaign and for a while after) we had actually made some progress on race. It just took a while for the backlash to build up and the RW media machine to help the GOP clean off the crud of the virulent racism that’s still rampant in this country. Hillary in 2026 was proof that we simply weren’t ready to elect a woman as President. And we still aren’t.
Given that, while I’m stunned to learn what you wrote about the internals never showing Harris she was leading I can’t say I’m surprised. I can’t think of anyone else in the Party who could have generated the effort and enthusiasm she did given the FUNK even many Democrats were in for so long when it came to Biden. I hope the Party will find a way to make use of her instead of discarding her when everything shakes out next year.
We were outspent by a crooked, biased right wing media, some of it the old ‘mainstream media’ owned by billionaires and long biased against anyone not republican, and the formerly centrist formerly even-handed ‘mainstream media’ now biased against anyone not republican for fear of being criticized for ‘bias’ that now ‘both sides’ every issue into inanity – which is now also owned by billionaires worried about their own selfish interests.
And added to these, the new ‘social media’ owned by billionaires with opaque algorithms that can run billions of individually targeted adverts to undermine anyone they don’t like, and bolster anyone they do like – even if it involves actual active lying about anything.
In this advertising and cultivation of lies and spin, misdirection and mistruth we were outspent by about five to one.
Our true message of a good economy, and low crime, low immigration, rising wages and low inflation was swamped by the size of their lying media machine.
This will remain a problem for our side at the next election too. If they can get away with it once, they can do it twice. We need our social media to step up – and there are encouraging signs of that with BlueSky. The descent of xitter into RWNJ irrelevence now seems assured.
At some future time, the next step will be to get rid of the social and civic cancer of billionaires and their corrosive effects on civil society, human rights and fairness.
the minute Harris answered on the view daytime show that she wouldn’t do anything different from Joe Biden she lost the race full stop. we knew it then & we know it now.
totally agree with concinitty
When the tariffs hit and prices go up yet again it should wake up the deplorables to the severity of their stupidity. We import a heckuva lot of stuff from Mexico—-food (fruits and veggies), car parts, electronics, fuel. Pain in the pocketbook is what got trump elected and pain in the pocketbook will bring him down.
We ARE NOT a country full of moral, God fearing people. We put ‘God’ on our money, have people swear on the Bible in court, and yada yada yada. LIES. We worship money. Period. We lap up the false history where we were the GOOD guys that wiped out the savages to steal the land; we whitewash our brutal history of kidnapping, rape, torture, and enslavement of African Americans, which made many white people rich; women are essentially concubines not able to even control their bodies and destinies; CLEARLY the ‘equal justice under law is and has always been horseshit designed to keep the moronic masses in check, while allowing us a false sense of superiority over other societies; and, as a nation full of descendants of immigrants, we lie to ourselves about other people’s right to a better life. We worship money, non stop entertainment, big trucks, sex, fame, and a false religion to get that big eye in the sky to assure us we’ll get to walk on streets of gold in our fantasies of heaven. We are a nation of self deluded liars. We claim to honor those who sacrificed their LIVES to hand us this land, but, its CLEAR that’s a lie also. While some of us abhor the evil liar in chief, actually the majority, being chronic liars themselves, LOVE THE KING OF LIES.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran, German born pastor, was hung by the nazis in 1945 for dedicating his life to defeat Hitler. He could have stayed in America and avoided that fate, but HE WAS A DISCIPLE OF CHRIST, and wrote about ‘cheap grace’ versus ‘costly grace’. He wrote: “cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves…grace WITHOUT discipleship…costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again…it is costly because it cost a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.” We are a nation that worships cheap everything…we run to stores on black Friday, we mouth oaths and prayers that mean NOTHING and cost us nothing, and we elect a ‘man’ who embodies our true values that lead to death not life. The only way out is repentance, but even that we want for free. I understand your point but, I’m afraid we are headed into a darkness that will, in fact, cost us everything. You get what you pay for.