As political pundits explain Kamala Harris’ stunning under-performance in every county in the nation, they are constrained to twist reality to fit their narrative. A dominant theme is that Harris lost because the majority of American voters are sexist and racist. At the Free Press, a list was compiled of some of the best excuses.
But if the media meltdown that followed Trump’s extraordinary comeback is anything to go by, there is no end to that fever dream. Just take a look at what has transpired over the last 36 hours:
- On MSNBC, Joy Ann Reid said, “anyone who has experienced this country’s history. . . and knows it, cannot have believed that it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color.” Of Harris’s election effort, she added: “I mean, this really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign.”
- On The View, Sunny Hostin said: “I was so hopeful that a mixed-race woman married to a Jewish guy could be elected president of this country. And I think that it had nothing to do with policy. I think this was a referendum of cultural resentment in this country.”
- On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough said to a nodding Al Sharpton that “It’s not just misogyny from white men; it’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from black men—things we’ve all been talking about—who do not want a woman leading them.” He added that it “might be race issues with Hispanics. They don’t want a black woman as president.” (He left out the fact that Trump performed nine points better with Hispanic women this year compared to 2020.)
- Laura Helmuth, the editor in chief of Scientific American, chimed in with a now-deleted tweet:“I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.” (Fifty-four percent of Gen X voted Trump.)
- The pastor and activist John Pavlovitz, who has 400,000 followers on X, declared: “Kamala Harris was the perfect candidate and she ran a beautiful campaign of joy, empathy, and unity. She just happened to run in a nation that is addicted to nihilism, cruelty, and division.”
- Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project at The New York Times, warned that: “We must not delude ourselves in this moment.” Among “shifting demographics where white Americans will lose their numeric majority,” she added, there is “a growing embrace of autocracy to keep the ‘legitimate’ rulers of this country in power.”
We could go on, but you get the point. And their point is: Don’t blame Harris, blame the voters.
Just as I’ve argued the importance for the Democrats of having a loyal opposition to keep them honest, the current Trumpian Party unfamiliar with honesty in any of its forms, the same is true, perhaps even moreso, for the Republicans to have a loyal opposition to temper its worst excesses. When the opposition hides within its delusional bubble where neither it nor its designated body can be faulted, it’s incapable of performing its critical function of preventing the in-group from using its power in the most oppressive possible way.
Before the election, for example, a common plaint on the left was to eliminate the filibuster so that the Republics in the Senate could no longer stymie the will of the majority. It was the tyranny of the minority, they cried. Just as a president who won the electoral college but failed to win the popular vote was a president of the minority. What happened to majority rules, they shrieked?
Welcome to the morning after. Elections have consequences, for better or worse, and while it’s true that the voters do the voting, it remains up to the candidate to earn their vote or, at least, not drive their vote away.
As Trump will resume his presidency, this time without adults in the room and, perhaps, as unaware monkey to the Heritage Foundation’s grinding organ, with a Senate in tow and, at least as of now, a pretty good chance of a dysfunctional House as well, the need for a loyal opposition could not be greater. Not the “Resistance.” Not the crazy and violent. But voices more rational and in tune with the needs and desires of the majority of Americans when the insular victors get too high on their own . . . whatever.
The only way this happens is for the Dems to get their collective heads out of their delusional butts and start confronting the reality outside their elite bubble. It’s not just for their benefit, but for everyone’s.
Your common sense gets swept away by your partisanship yet again. Lots of adults in the room. Ridiculous for you to claim otherwise. Vance, Elon Musk, Gabbard, Rogan, Kennedy, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Desantis, Senator Kennedy, Cruz. Trump doesn’t even enter his second term as a lame duck. He enters as the spearhead to a bipartisan legacy that will blow your preferred team away like the wolf did the straw house. You blocked me for a few comments, but then you let my last comment through. I told you you were about to get spanked, and I was right. Hah! Let this one through! I DARE you! Chew on the crow.
[Ed. Note: If your comments are remotely on topic, they get posted. If not, they get trashed, like everyone else’s.]
You’re like the Joy Reid of the MAGA nutjobs, except without a TV show or anyone who cares that you exist.
These words, “preferred team”…I do not think they mean what you think they mean. (See https://blog.simplejustice.us/2024/10/28/i-did-not-vote-for-someone-but-i-voted/)
I also think that the term “bipartisan legacy” is more nuanced than your short note suggests. Presidential elections are often overdetermined and I think this one was for sure. That is, voters may choose a candidate despite, not because of, specific positions, and you cannot infer popular support for a given set of policies just because a candidate who endorses them was victorious. For example, I may detest wokism, anti-Western jihadism, and vulgarity from the president, but perhaps Trump won because the modal voter loves presidential vulgarity [or “Give ’em Hell, Harry” frankness if you like the message] and doesn’t care about woke issues or jihad. Thus, even though the outcome was pleasing enough, the future—the legacy you mention—may be unpleasant indeed.
A vote is an incredibly blunt instrument, especially when there are only two viable options to choose between.`
The dogs bark as the caravan passes by.
Her anti-free first amendment wokism moved votes. Harris would force Catholic hospitals to perform abortion. No exemptions. That was a factor for me to vote against her. Among a lot of other reasons including who would be the so-called grownups in the room with her? Waltz? Obama? Hillary? Etc. Spare us.
Amen! But I’m an optimist. I think the Democrats will make changes. They have to do so, or else they will enter a permanent minority party status. The radical leftist experiment was a failure. They will go back to more centrist policies. It’s okay to have a few Bernie Sanders (who seems like a nice person) on the fringe, but the fringe can’t be in charge. Just go to the grocery store and buy a few bags of food and you will immediately understand why Trump was re-elected. It should not have come as any big surprise that the Democrats faired so poorly. Has anyone else (aside from Fox News) noticed that the Republican Party is becoming (if not already has become) the party of the working class in America, with the Democrats in the role of sanctimonious privileged elites?
The most rabid leftists will be pushed to the side for a year or so, but they will continue to gnaw at the party and the country, as they continue to write and publish all sorts of “analyses” that prove that the people were misled by Trump, or by traitors in their midst (Biden, etc), and the loss does not show any weakness in their underlying arguments. They are just as delusional as Trump, but with a different set of beliefs working in a universe with a different set of physical laws.
Nate Silver thinks high inflation was a big reason for Trump’s win. Trump certainly stressed it, and Harris didn’t defend it well at all. But it’s hard to defend when the inflation rate is a very ordinary 2%. What more is to be expected? I doubt it is a good campaign strategy to tell people they need to get a better job, or that if they haven’t gotten a raise since the months of high infkation, their boss is cheating them. So they voted for a candidate who will increase their taxes and cancel half the safety net.
And that is just one side of the economy. Corporate profits are high, the stock market is breaking records, and yet the financial world is rejoicing at the turn of Trump. Big business limits its interest to taxes and regulation, and doesn’t much care if their customers have enough money to buy their products.
This common refrain that inflation is back where it was at the beginning of the administration so why are people upset is like wondering why people are still complaining about a flood now that the waters have receded.
Indeed so. And I’m sure the folks in Appalachia are thinking the Feds will do a better job after the next hurricane with Trump at the helm.
Nice analogy pivot.
Isn’t this Tu Quoque? It seems so… happy to be corrected.
FWIW I think I mistook his comment at first and thought he was just being literal, and maybe a pretty good continuation of the metaphor went right over my head.
Let me rephrase. Folks are angry about high prices. What reason do they have to think Trump would be better than Harris about prices?
If he doesn’t and voters hold it against him, I doubt the same people will wave away the effects.
People are angry and want change. When the Democrats don’t actually help people who are working and poor and struggling, they’ll vote Republican. Are the Republicans actually going to help those people? No, they’ll almost certainly make their lives worse. But what else can they do – it’s a two party system.
If the Democrats want to win elections, they need to pivot to policies that will actually help the working class rather than spending all their time sniffing their own farts worrying about pronouns and intersectionality.
I think the better analogy is that we had a flood, the water hasn’t receded and people are still drowning. Lower inflation just means that additional floodwater isn’t rushing in as quickly. Most working people have not seen their wages rise 30%+ in the last 4 years to match increase in their grocery bills, or their insurance or their rent – not even close. Telling people the economy is doing great when they are struggling to put food on their table and pay their bills while working the same job they have all along is a truly awful (and tone deaf) message.
Wall of text incoming.
The inflation rate has fallen because the Federal Reserve under Jerome Powell, who appears to be sole responsible person left in Washington, D.C., tripled interest rates to force it back down, which makes housing unaffordable for many people, including young men, who are now trending Republican in part as a result.
Also, wages have yet to catch up from the hangover we have experienced from inflation, particularly for those outside of the laptop class.
One of the chief reasons that we did not fall into a recession during the Biden administration was that Federal spending was out of control with the fiscal deficit increasing every single year after the end of Covid, from 1.4T in 2022, to 1.7T in 2023, and now 1.8T for this fiscal year. You can thank the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act for that.
Prior to Covid, the chief instrument to goose the economy was to hold interest rates abnormally low. Since Covid, the government has goosed the economy with out of control spending.
At this point, the chief thing that both political parties could do for inflation and interest rate relief would be to cut the deficit back down to the what seems in hindsight reasonable 500B when the Bad Orange Man was President.
It will take everyone working together to make this happen. As I said yesterday, I’m not holding my breath.
Traveling across the country as I do, it was no surprise the election happened the way it did. The vast majority of people I encountered were getting tired of being constantly broken down into identity groups, told what to think, being called names because they didn’t follow the demagoguery faithfully, and most importantly they didn’t see any chance for their economic situation to improve under current policies. James Carrville said it best in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Voters are more than single issue voters, no matter what the polls say. They’re going to default to what they can see as affecting them the most…the economy.
You don’t mention the very long list of former Trump admin officials, serious and accomplished people, who came out against Trump. They worked with him. They know him. And they refused to endorse him. My point is that it’s unheard of for an opponent to have a leg up like this by the very people who know the guy best, and still Harris couldn’t manage to reach Biden’s numbers. This is damning.
The entitlement of these people is off the charts. The nobility can’t understand why the populace doesn’t fall in line and fete them like good peasantry should. “Let them eat identity politics.”
The dumbest part of it is that they probably don’t even take what they are saying seriously themselves. They are just televangelists putting on a show. Even if they believe in their god they have other priorities.
“I mean, this really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign.” La Reid is delusional. IIUC, Harris did not exceed Biden’s 2020 results in a single county across the entire country.
Hostin comment equally inane, “I was so hopeful that a mixed-race woman married to a Jewish guy could be elected president of this country. And I think that it had nothing to do with policy. I think this was a referendum of cultural resentment in this country.” Implicit in this statement is that there’s something inherently noteworthy/ desirable in Harris being a “a mixed-race woman married to a Jewish guy”. Astute readers will note that this has “nothing to do with policy”. She’s half write about the election being a cultural referendum as black and Latino men appeared to repudiate a lot of the “woke agenda”. I hate to give Trump/ his campaign credit, but their ads w/ the tag line “Harris is for they/ them, I’m for you” clearly resonated w/ some voters.
Similarly, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is as untethered from reality as Trump, claiming that demographic shifts causing whites to vote for autocrats ignores both Trump’s gains among black and brown men and that Harris won white women.
Scarborough blaming misogyny also misplaced. It certainly played a part, but Harris (like Hillary) ran a poor campaign (e.g., proclaiming “I support the Second Amendment, but I also support an Assault Weapon ban and ‘red flag’ laws, which gun owners heard as ‘I support the police coming to your homes and taking your guns’… and young black and brown men find the idea of warrantless searches/ seizures especially alarming).
Trump is unfit to serve, but the Dems shouldn’t have let Biden run and then once it became clear he was no longer competent Harris ran an ineffective campaign. She should have relentlessly ridiculed Trump and made election a referendum on his character.
Had she done so, I think she’d have won. I’m not sure she’d have done a good job, but considering the alternative…
You say that like there hasn’t been a continual referendum on Trump’s character since he first descended the golden escalator in 2015.
Giving actual policy statements and not trotting around like a limousine liberal would have helped her. Not with me, but I can see it helping her with others.
Well, she did release an 82 page policy statement… Of course, Trump had “the concept of a plan”.
If Harris campaign had done half as good a job as LeBron James did in the video calling out Trump’s fear mongering, racist, only intermittently coherent, bullshit she’d be president elect.
Unfortunately, Trump would then likely have claimed the election was stolen and we’d be perilously close to civil war… so, I should be careful what I wish for.
I listen to NPR to understand what the left is saying, and it sounds like they haven’t realized that the election is over. They are all running the same arguments about how much better Harris is than Trump, and how any disagreement about policies is due to evil thinking, stupidity, and racism/sexism. Not just from the talking heads, but from the callers, who cannot understand how people could be so ignorant that they support Trump.
This sounds like the leftist playbook for the past 100 years – “Yes, we did not triumph/win this time, but it is all because of the wreckers. We will do it the right way, next time, and march to victory, FOR THE PEOPLE.” They cannot understand, in any sense, why the people rejected their ideas, which are founded on SCIENCE. The only explanation must involve ignorance and evil.
I don’t think they are going to get over this any time soon. Trump will have one year, if he is lucky, to accomplish anything, and then it will be back to the old ways. The leftists never change.
Two years with guaranteed control of the House and the Senate.
“I don’t know how Nixon got elected – nobody *I* know voted for him.”
“Bubble” is correct. Gonna have to challenge on the “no adults in the room” given that to my “pox on both their houses” point of view NEITHER side seems to be all that mature. One only has to look at the toddler level of temper tantrum throwing when they didn’t get their way because they KNOW that they’re right and everybody else is wrong to see that Team D has the same issue. Whatever their other flaws – and there are oh so many – at least Team R suffers less from that smug holier-than-thou attitude a lot of Ds carry around.
But, ya know, that’s how garbage can be.
I wonder if Trump will get another Supreme Court justice or three….
(it would be fun to be back in law school right now – just to watch the meltdowns I’m sure would be going on.)
“stunning under-performance in every county in the nation”
This is actually a myth. Harris outperformed Biden by >3% in 53 counties. When John King was showing Jake Tapper the totally gray “state” chart, Tapper was confused and said that it was the “county” chart. King then corrected him and showed the “county” chart, but that was left out of the viral videos (understandably, the solid gray chart and Jake’s amazement were highly entertaining). This a case where the myth conveys the true nature of the situation better than the reality.
Harris’ handlers (presumably the same people who run “Joe Biden”) ran one of the worst campaigns in history. Against a deeply flawed and widely unpopular candidate, they managed to lose both electoral college and popular vote, by substantial margins. Your comment about the “elite bubble” is spot on. These people live in immense luxury and understand nothing of the issues that concern regular people, and they appear to have no interest in understanding. They believe that they can lie and censor the truth, and get people to vote against their own values. I have no hope that they will see the light. The only solution is to replace them with other “elites” who are slightly less out of touch, and who understand regular people well enough to competently pretend to care about them. That’s what happened in this election.
The vast majority of the American people hold utter contempt for the “establishment”; for the mainstream media, for politicians, and for the plutocrats who puppeteer the politicians. By trotting out Liz Cheney and other warmonger neocons, who are widely hated by almost everyone, the Democrats cemented their position as the party of the uncaring, unaccountable establishment. They made it clear to Americans that they would be sending our children to fight in pointless wars, recruiting them into mental illness and moral degradation, and leaving them without a future by continuing to export jobs and import illegals. Their only argument in favor of this assault on regular people was “We’re not as bad as Trump, and he’s bad because we say so!” The fact that they expected this to work is a testament to their monumental hubris; to their utter lack of humanity.
Recycling Liz Cheney? Arghhhhh.
By its nature, the totalitarian leftist ideology is elitist. Heretics aren’t welcome, and there is to be no communication with them (apart from screaming imprecations at them). Essentially, the Democrats have adopted the tactics that failed the religious right back in the 1990s.
They didn’t know they were losing, so of course they don’t know why they lost. The “explanations” they generate within their ideologically maintained silos are unlikely to prove useful or informative.
“Harvard Professors Cancel Classes As Students Feel Blue After Trump Win.” Harvard Crimson.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/11/7/harvard-students-react-donald-trump-reelection/
Ran a perfect campaign? Ha.
Can’t elect a woman? I’d have happily voted for Tulsi if the Ds had run her. I’d have happily voted for Hailey if the Rs had run her. I happily voted Jorgenson when the Ls ran her. I am not alone in this. Well, maybe in the Jorgenson vote…
I suspect the next three years are going to be more insane than Trump’s first term. The media is going to be worse than they’ve been since the Spanish war.
I hope by the time Trump’s term wears down, people will be so spent from all the crazy that we’ll see a return of sane, informed candidates. Or maybe I’ll get my ocean front property in AZ.
The Democratic Party should learn from people like Bill Clinton how to address kitchen table issues; they needed to explain how their economic policies are better for the middle class than the alternative ones offered by Trump/Musk. By kitchen table, I do not solely mean economic issues, but they are the most important ones.
I read Edward Bernays’ book Propaganda, in which he argues the merits and effectiveness of propaganda, along with his own special skill in wielding it. Our modern media has come to take for granted both the efficacy of propaganda and their own skill in using it. Clearly, they were deluded in one or both aspects. When will they get around to perfecting the product instead of the pitch?