What the United States really is
This should cheer us up – Susan B. Glasser at the New Yorker on Trump’s revenge.
Electing Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake—a consequential one, to be sure, yet still fundamentally an error. But America has now twice elected him as its President. It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be. His victory was a worst-case scenario—that a convicted felon, a chronic liar who mismanaged a deadly once-in-a-century pandemic, who tried to overturn the last election and unleashed a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, who calls America “a garbage can for the world,” and who threatens retribution against his political enemies could win—and yet, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, it happened.
…
Trump has now achieved an unthinkable resurrection. Even his four criminal indictments have served only to revive and reinvigorate his hold on the Republican Party, which is now centered more than ever on the personality and the grievances of one man. Almost sixty-three million Americans voted for Trump in 2016; more than seventy-four million cast their ballots for him in 2020.
More than 74 million people look at Trump and like what they see.
And yet what a leap of unthinking partisanship and collective amnesia it has taken for his party to embrace this twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, once-convicted con man from New York. Trump in 2024 was no regular G.O.P. candidate. He was an outlier in every possible way. In 2016, perhaps it was conceivable for voters upset with the status quo to see Trump, a celebrity businessman, as the outsider who would finally shake things up in Washington. But this is the post-2020 Trump—an older, angrier, more profane Trump, who demanded that his followers embrace his big lie about the last election and whose campaign will go down as one of the most racist, sexist, and xenophobic in modern history. His slogan is now openly the stuff of strongmen—Trump alone can fix it—and he will return to office unconstrained by the establishment Republicans who challenged him on Capitol Hill and from inside his own Cabinet.
Unconstrained by anything at all, I would think.
Once again, the fact that all the supposedly career-ending scandals of Trump’s first term as president didn’t prevent him from gaining votes between 2016 and 2020 should have made his return to power only too thinkable. No “resurrection” needed. He was never dead in the first place.
Joe Biden received 81 million votes to Donald Trump’s 74 million in 2020, enough to defeat Trump.
As of today, Kamala Harris only received about 70 million votes to Trump’s 74 million.
https://news.sky.com/story/us-election-how-big-a-win-was-this-for-donald-trump-13250701
There was undoubtedly sexism and racism involved in the opposition to Kamala Harris, but the main problem is that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party ran a bad political campaign. Once again, the Democrats assumed Trump’s bigotry and crassness would make him easy to defeat, and got disastrously complacent.
The female, working class and ethnic minority voters who should have made the anti-Trump candidate victorious stayed at home. Kamala Harris *lost* millions of those voters. It wasn’t Jill Stein, or Cornel West, or Bernie Sanders who did that – again, it was Kamala Harris.
And now the United States, and the world, faces a bleak future.
I’m pretty sure Biden had already lost most of those votes before Harris became the new Democratic candidate, though. If something as superficial as a campaign (as opposed to, say, the survival of democracy, the rule of law etc.) is that decisive, then that’s already a very serious problem in its own right.
I would be interested in seeing how many of the people who voted for Trump were on the spectrum of indifference to complete disgust for the candidate, but overcame that because they either valued something they thought his presidency would facilitate, or hated what they thought a Harris presidency would. While a large statistic here may not rein in Trump, it might mitigate the idea that over half the country loved him, specifically. They voted for him in spite of what even they could see were flaws. That’s got its own problems, of course, but it’s better.
I don’t know. The Harris and Walz messaging I was hearing sounded pretty good to me. If it’s so obvious that they were running a “bad political campaign,” what would have been a good political campaign? How come nobody in charge of the campaign knew what the real winning strategy would have been? I’d really like to know.
This trope comes around every time a Democrat loses the election (and not infrequently when they win). When Clinton spoke about policy – OMG, voters don’t want policy! When Harris didn’t talk policy – OMB, voters want to know your policies!
Voters don’t want policy. They don’t want reasoned discussion. They want someone who hates the same people they hate, and are willing to say so. They want someone who understands that they (the voters) have it uniquely bad over any other person in history, and promises some sort of simple remedy for that. They want someone who says all the things they want to say, and maybe have said. And above all, they want to be entertained.
One other thing about the voters: they don’t want a woman. They don’t want to say so, because it makes them sound sexist (which, of course, they are if they think that way). I have spent so many years in Trump Central (before Trump was a thing politically, of course) and I’ve heard all the things both the conservatives and the liberals say. Those who are liberal find a brace of reasons not to vote for Clinton, or Harris, things that wouldn’t have been an issue with a male. The conservatives haven’t had to worry about it, because so far the only women who got that far were Democrats. They could just say ‘too liberal’ and cast their vote for the male on the Republican ticket.
Harris didn’t run a ‘bad’ campaign. She ran the sort of campaign people were saying she should. Clinton didn’t run a ‘bad’ campaign. They lost. A loss doesn’t mean a ‘bad’ campaign. It means a lot of things, many of which are baked into our society so firmly we can’t see it, any more than we can see the eggs in a cake.
Analysts will come up with every possible reason for the Democratic loss, but they will not say the real reason: the voters. The voters had clear information about who Trump was; while Harris was a bit more of an unknown, we had seen enough of her to know the basics of who she was.
We must face it: people voted for Trump because they wanted Trump. We need to face the reality, that somewhere around half of our neighbors hate us, would love to see us persecuted and even prosecuted, and would probably happily be the one to flip the switch at our execution…but they will accept a sufficiently tough-talking profane substitute who promises to do it for them.
It isn’t because we are smug. It isn’t because we are out of touch. It isn’t because we fail to understand the needs of the rural voter. The Republicans meet all that, and more. The GOP will work against the best interests of the rural voters – and everyone else not a billionaire. At some point, I can tell the people I know who vote Republican actually understand this. So why do they vote for a toxic misogynist, racist, nearly illiterate asshole in spite of what’s best for them?
Because they see themselves in him. And because they think they are persecuted. And because they hate, and they can see he hates.
There is no way to run a ‘good’ campaign against that.
Ben Davis at the Guardian had a good article about the election:
None of the conventional explanations for Trump’s victory stand up to scrutiny
He lists the many reasons given for the Trump victory, from across the political spectrum, and explains why he thinks they are wrong. What he thinks is correct:
He goes on to discuss what he thinks could have done to counter these effects.
maddog1129 # 2:
In my opinion, the reasons Kamala Harris ran a bad campaign were:
1) Harris didn’t differentiate herself from Biden enough. When Harris was asked on the TV Show “The View” what she would have done differently, she said “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of – and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done.” Biden had become unpopular after 2020 because of the economy, yet Harris didn’t offer any sign that she was going to be her own woman politically and fix the issues with the economy that were blighting the Democrats’ support.
Kamala Harris failed to appeal to Democratic voters unhappy with Biden’s administration.
2) Harris alienated Arab-American voters by giving almost uncritical support for Netanyahu’s war in Gaza and Lebanon, which has left tens of thousands of Arab civilians dead.
Harris also welcomed support from Dick Cheney, who helped organise the Bush Administration’s war on Iraq, which again, left tens of thousands of Arab civilians dead. Arab voters thus either voted for the anti-Netanyahu Jill Stein or stayed at home.
Kamala Harris lost the Arab-American vote.
3) The Harris campaign didn’t do enough to convince the Latino community that Harris was going to help them with their economic problems. The campaign assumed that because of Trump’s disgusting comments about Latino people, that this community automatically wouldn’t vote for him: they were wrong. Enough Latinos decided Trump was “stronger on the economy”, and decided to vote him in spite of his vile rhetoric.
Kamala Harris lost the Latino vote.
https://english.elpais.com/usa/elections/2024-11-08/false-promises-and-political-neglect-why-latinos-did-not-vote-for-kamala-harris.html
That’s how I felt about George W. Bush in 2004.
I voted against Bush in 2000. I wasn’t happy when he was elected, but I wasn’t too concerned, either. By 2000, I had concluded that Democrats and Republicans were two different brands of the same establishment politics and that neither was much serving my interests.
Bush turned out to be far, far worse than I had ever anticipated. Inept, bungling, uncaring, corporatist, religionist, plutocratic, war-mongering, reverse-Robinhood, starve-the-beast, strip-mining the environment–the whole Republican horror show that we’ve been living with and fighting against for 20 years now.
In 2004, I thought, OK, we made a mistake. We elected a bad president. These things happen. But now we can fix that mistake. Right? Right???
And we reelected him.
I’d say the biggest issue is the very notion of ‘the’ Latino vote, honestly. Democrats keep wanting to treat Hispanic-Americans as if they are a single voting bloc, like they do African-Americans. But Latinos have no overriding common historical trauma the way Black Americans do. Instead, they’re at least a half-dozen different sub-groups with agendas that make a very low-overlap Venn Diagram when it comes to what they want to hear. And I could see in the final months of the campaign that the Trump camp was doing a better job of addressing key sub-groups specifically (using lies, of course, but targeted lies on Spanish radio and TV).
Let me put it this way–you know that comedian who made the crack about Puerto Rico being a floating island of garbage, the one that everyone figured was going to secure “the Latino Vote” for Harris? Yeah, I estimate about 10-20% of my Mexican-American neighbors would’ve laughed at that joke, and maybe even made it themselves. And more still wouldn’t be more than generically offended about it, because in their minds, it wasn’t a joke directed at them, because they aren’t Puerto Rican.
And this sort of difference is rife within the broader Hispanic-American population. Hell, Mexican-Americans, in particular, have a non-trivial percentage of their population that are full-on with Deport Them All (where “Them” means undocumented immigrants)–because after all, they or their parents came here legally, and they are just as resentful as the local WASPs are at what they perceive as line-jumping.
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