The post-election blues continue on, obviously.
One of the things still haunting me a month later is how the results just did not fit the enthusiasm I saw among fellow Harris/Walz voters, how it just didn't seem possible that a deeply unpopular figure like trump could add to a popular vote count to win.
And now we have to cope with the "autopsy" as it were with people yelling and screaming where things went wrong.
Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up this Monday pointed me to another blog where the artist created a cartoon basically highlighting all the (hindsight) armchair quarterbacking taking place among the Democratic ranks after the loss:
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| Visit Amp's blog to view the full image, please |
As the artist Ampersand noted:
Lacking any clear-cut truth, most people just go ahead and say that the election proves that the Democrats have to endorse whatever policy stance they prefer or they’ll never win an election again...
I understand the impulse. I think the Biden administration has been horrifically bad on Gaza. Now that Harris has lost, it would be very convenient for me if everyone agreed that Harris lost because of the Biden administration’s terrible policies on Gaza.
But “convenient for me” isn’t the same as “true.” (Which is a very unfortunate way to set up a universe, and as soon as I locate the management I will make a complaint)...
Everybody's got a pet peeve and policy issue to defend. I've encountered a number of the ones presented in that comic: I've met people who are obsessed over reports how Elon Musk's Starlink system got election counting data before any official counting was done; I know a few people online who were genuinely upset about Biden's failure to rein in Israel's genocide of Palestinian families in Gaza and West Bank; I've read the arguments from the media pundits who think Biden (and by proxy Harris) were getting punished for higher prices even as inflation was trending down.
I myself am convinced that the mainstream media - led by the cowards at New York Times and Washington Post - failed to keep voters informed about how criminal and corrupt donald trump was, underplaying his scandals while punishing Biden/Harris/Democrats with a "both siderism" narrative that made Democrats look old and broken themselves.
But even I know that's not the entirety of the problem.
The real answer why Democrats failed to win this 2024 election cycle is that donald trump - leading a squalid and cruel army of Republican officials and voting base - appealed to the worst nature of a large plurality of our fellow Americans and got them to back his election. He stuck to his decades-long campaign hating on immigrants, hating on Blacks, hating on women; getting more and more Republican figures and media cheerleaders to push that fear and rage. And he got more and more voters - and not just angry Whites but also angry men and angry women from the very ethnic groups he's attacking - to buy in, spreading Hate like a plague.
trump went from 63 million voters - when we could explain it away as a failure of a broken Electoral College - to 74 million - where we could avoid it by accepting Biden's popular vote win of 81 million - to 77 million where there's no other way to avoid this.
Democrats lost because Republicans appealed to sadists and assholes who are greater in number than we realized. The Cruelty was the point, and now it's policy.
Every attempt to appeal to any rational Republican or centrist voting group wasn't going to work. Trying to get more liberal and progressive voters to show up seems limiting, and not enough of them were willing to buy in to the Big Tent Biden and Harris tried to build.
The reason why a lot of us who voted for Harris - who voted for competency and sanity and justice and an America we thought we knew - are skittish and unhappy today is that we've learned our neighbors, families, and communities are full of people who knew trump was a monster - a convicted felon and sex offender, openly willing to commit more crimes as President - and voted for him anyway.
Gods help us.
2 comments:
It's way easier to convince people that things are bad than to convince them that things are good. And after you've convinced them that things are bad, they are less likely to blame you for fucking up the things they like, because, you know, things are bad.
All I can say is that if we still have a functioning government on some level, we have to own the bounce back. Own it. No more Manchin and Sinema won't let us bullshit. No, I don't know how we can do that. Just that we have to do it.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
Name-calling is always easier than doing the hard work of figuring out what went wrong.
One thing that went wrong is that the Democrats' lies were a lot more visible, and a lot more calculated to enrage people, than Trump's lies. For example, the claim that crime is low and going down. Everybody can see with their own eyes that this is not true. Here in Portland I've been seeing an endless stream of stories about businesses leaving our once-vibrant downtown because their employees aren't safe from the violence, or because robberies and vandalism make it impossible to run a business successfully. In Oakland and San Francisco, soft-on-crime officials were voted out because people have had enough. The statistics claiming crime is low come from the FBI and are worthless because they count only crimes reported to the authorities, which a lot of victims these days don't do because they no longer see any point in it. Hearing Democrats claiming that crime is actually low and that the devastation we can see right in front of us is some sort of right-wing talking point enrages people. It enraged me.
Then there's the economy. They kept telling us the economy is doing great, and the GNP is certainly growing, but the extra wealth is not going into the hands of the workers who produce it, it's being siphoned off by the 1%. Homeless camps are proliferating, housing prices are increasingly out of reach, and more and more people are struggling to make ends meet. I don't know where these claims of 2% inflation are coming from, but everybody knows that doesn't reflect what they're actually paying for things. Of course, Trump is unlikely to improve any of these things, but I can understand angry voters simply deciding to punish the left for claiming that the economy is doing great and ignoring the reality most people are living in. I don't agree with it, but I can understand it.
There were a lot of reasons why the Democrats lost, but those are two examples. Understanding what really happened requires getting out of the echo chamber and listening to people with contrary viewpoints. Throwing up one's hands and announcing "the voters are stupid evil assholes" is the royal road to losing more elections. Nobody will vote for a party that not only ignores their pain but sneers at them for it.
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