There’s a TV character whose name escapes me for now whose perennial opening line, spoken in Brooklynese, is, “How’re ya doin’?”
“Not great,” would be my reply these days, five days after the catastrophe.
I studiously avoided reading post-mortems about the election until, just after midnight Friday when I couldn’t sleep, I opened an essay from Heather Cox Richardson, author of the blog “Letters from an American.”
Citing examples from reports (I had chosen not to read), Richardson pointed out that many, many voters were clueless to the truth behind Donald Trump’s positions and those of Kamala Harris.
“In Salon today,” she wrote, “Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.
“Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats.”
Another example of the truism, “Never overestimate the intelligence of the average American.”
What turned these “useful idiots” into Republican voters was an overwhelming misinformation campaign by social media miscreants and a right-wing media complex led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. The campaign successfully painted Harris as the extremist.
While Democrats are licking their wounds, many self-inflicted because of far-out progressive positions that Harris could not distance herself from, the aggressive across the board self-flagellation may be unwarranted. Yes, Trump swept all seven battleground states, but consider these grassroots results in key states:
- Pennsylvania Democrats captured enough seats to retain control of the state House;
- North Carolina elected Democrat Josh Stein as governor. Democrats won enough seats in the State House to break a Republican supermajority, thus restoring to the governor the power of the veto;
- Republican supermajority was broken in Wisconsin’s Senate, while Democrats added seats in the GOP controlled Assembly;
- In a Minnesota special election, Democrats defended their supermajority in the Senate;
- Abortion rights ballot measures won in seven out of 10 states.
Trump’s national victory in the Electoral College was not all it has been cracked up to be in the popular vote. For sure, he beat Harris, but his 74,708,910 total was less than half a million more than his 2020 total of 74,223,975.
Harris received 70,980,381 votes compared to Joe Biden’s 81,283,501.
Trump won because some 10 million voters chose to express their disappointment with the Democratic candidate by not voting.
What is not explained is that if Trump improved among Black men, Hispanics and women, how is it his vote total did not dramatically go up? Could it be that even some, probably many, Republicans had enough of him and, like their Democratic counterparts, they too just sat home, too disillusioned to trudge down to the polling place or to the mailbox to cast their ballots?
Don’t expect me, or anyone, to provide concrete answers. They will be no more accurate than the polls predicting a close election were.
Trumpism will be with us for the next four years, though the 2026 Senate and House races will provide a report card on how successful his programs will be perceived. Recall that in 2018 Democrats were able to recapture a majority in the House.
So, in two years the electorate will decide if the market basket of goods, especially for eggs and gasoline, is lower than in 2024; if the deficit has been reduced, if gross domestic product (GDP) has gone up; what direction unemployment has taken; if interest rates have declined; if the tariffs he has espoused have been effective or have taxed consumers; if the border is more secure; if Trump has deported illegal migrants without incident; if he has supported a national abortion ban; if he has solved the Ukraine-Russia war and the Israeli-Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran war, and no new war has broken out that affects American interests; if he has emasculated NATO; if he has replaced Obamacare without jeopardizing coverage of pre-existing conditions; and, if he exacted revenge on his enemies?