Some odd thoughts about the Election

I've been stewing on this for over a month, and it is time to unload. Alas, there is a lot of self reflection we need to do as a society, and I am not sure we are ready for this internalization

Editor’s note: I am sure this will cost me a slew of subscribers, so be it. It needs to be said though.

donald trump eating a dog turd

I have started and abandoned this post many times in the last 5 weeks.

Like many (and if you have read my posts for any length of time) I was optimistic of the chances of this election finally putting Trumpism in the oubliette of time once and for all.

Alas, that isn’t what happened, as you no doubt are aware of. Some of you¹ are probably glad of this, but by and large this was a shocking result.

Alas, about a month prior to the election, I was getting nervous. Not because of anything that Harris/Walz was doing — wrong or otherwise — but because I was seeing some worrying signs in the atmospherics of the election.

But what happened?

I have a few theories that include:

• The Biden victory in 2020 was powered by a strong anti-Trump voting pattern, that this wasn’t a political realignment in the US, but a reaction due to Trump’s ham-fisted response to Covid, and lingering antipathy to the measures required to combat the virus and pandemic

• That it wasn’t a collapse in the Democratic base so much as it was a shift of the so-called “independents”.

• That the legacy (or mainstream, or corporate) media did not cause the collapse of Democrats, and

• The right-wing media is now both larger, and more effective than all of the legacy media and the left-leaning media.

• That the election wasn’t rigged, that Trump didn’t cheat, and that while it’s egregious, Musk spending $250M to help Trump win isn’t against the rules.

Let’s get into the meat, shall we?

---

---

The Anti-Trump collapse

I am not sure where I read it, but about 3 weeks after the election, an analysis showed not that Democratic voters didn't flee the Democrats so much as the broad middle that helped elevate Biden’s thumping of Trump in 2020.

In state after state, and particularly in the 7 swing states, the shift was profound. Trump gained votes apparently everywhere, among demographics that boggle the mind. Black men, Hispanic men, White Women. The only domain that Harris didn't lose votes to the MAGA side were college educated suburbanites, and women in that group.

The Democrats have since the 1990’s been pivoting to being more corporate friendly, and less focused on the concerns of the working class and those who didn't attend college.

This was always a compromise that bothered me. Starting with the original dot-com bubble in the late 1990’s and in the aftermath of the collapse, the conventional wisdom was that everybody needed to get a college degree, preferably a Comp-Science degree to participate in the modern economy.

This fed an acceleration of growth in student loan debt, rapidly rising costs for tuition as institutions of higher learning worked to compete to get access to the sweet government-backed student loan dollars.

This led to a generation of over educated, impoverished and indebted graduates (or worse, those who have a huge debt load and an incomplete education that is less than worthless.)

This came to a head in the turmoil that Covid wrought on America, and the initial response was to vote Trump out.

And it worked, but Biden and the Democrats took the wrong lessons from their win. They wanted to provide relief to holders of soul crushing student debt, to rebuild infrastructure, and to spread help to rural and other heavily Republican power centers with the IRA, and the Chips Act funds. Don’t get me wrong, these are noble endeavors, but to the general population, it felt like bailing out the privileged, and a slap in the face to those “real” Americans who roll up their sleeves, don their Carhart’s work gear and put their backs into it.

In 2020, this cohort was largely upset at Trump for the incoherent response to Covid, and now that Biden quietly and competently addressed the chaos that Trump left, they didn’t credit Biden’s policies for making their lives measurably and objectively better.

Oh sure, Inflation that at first seemed to be transitory was stickier, especially given the permission that it gave business leaders to up prices under the guise of “inflation” and “supply-chain disruptions”.

No matter that the FED was able to quell and control that inflation with an unprecedented soft-landing.

Regardless, a lot of the “anti-Trump” voters from 2020 drifted back, and returned to Trump, with their wishful thinking that things were better 4 years ago (in the depths of Covid, before the vaccines became available). No matter, they weren’t a durable demo for the Democrats. In fact, the evidence is pretty clear that they just stayed home.

---

---

Why did the Democratic Base collapse?

That is a question I have heard asked a lot, and I have read a LOT of bad takes on it. But I think it didn’t collapse. In fact, if you look at voting patterns, it seems like apart from the softening of support from Latino and Black men, the Democratic base was rather durable.

But this is where I need to drop a truth bomb, in the general electorate, the demographics break down into a third who are registered Democrat, a third who are registered Republicans, and a third that are NPA² or Independents.

While I can (and have) make arguments that this swath of independents is a mirage, that a large fraction of them claim to be independent because they are either ashamed of being Trump supporters, or they like the extra attention that the press and politicos slather on them for their allegiances.

My belief is that if there was an honest analysis of this cohort that probably 90% of them vote either R or D uniformly, and that 10% are true persuadables. And that 10% does align to the shifts in voting patterns (that is besides the large number of anti-Trump voters that sat out 2024). This is where the loss of Hispanic and Black men hurt terribly.

But this does explain the shifts at the margins, and hence the coming up short by Harris/Walz.

Legacy Media Fuckery

Look, I love bashing the NY Times, the WaPo, and others of the legacy media sane-washing Trump as much as anyone, but we really need to recognize that the people who swung to Trump, and his core voters, are not, and were not ever going to read The Times, the Post, or The Atlantic.

In fact, his cadre of voters make a point of shunning the legacy media.

While there was a ton of pearl clutching by the left of center on how badly the legacy media was missing the mark by not calling out in exquisite detail all the shitty positions and uttering by Trump and his surrogates, the truth is that that legacy media ecosystem is really ineffective at this juncture in our history.

Partly, this trajectory began with the rise of Fox News in the mid 1990’s, and before that with the right wing AM radio talk programs (Limbaugh, and his progeny) with the rise of social media, influencers, and just waves of money from the wealthy Republican donors, there is a complete ecosystem of influencers that reach hundreds of millions of people.

There is NO democratic focused alternative. The question is why? Is it just money? Or, is it a difference in mentality between the two cohorts?

I am not sure, but one thing I will point out is that attempts to build a counter ecosystem to combat this have not panned out. My suspicion is that Democratic donors want to see near-term ROI’s of this spend, and when it fails to quickly bear fruit, they tire of the work and just pull funding.

On the R side though, the wealthy Republican Donors do fund, and they count it as a cost of doing business, and it is a check they will write year after year.

And that has bred a population of influencers like Mike Davis, Ben Shapiro, and Tim Pool that are happy to take this money, echo the talking points, and laugh all the way to the bank.

Honestly, when I read that Reid Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn, and major Democratic donor is contemplating leaving the US to avoid any unpleasantness that Trump might send his way, I get very stabby. He is precisely the sort of billionaire who can afford to fund a long range effort to alter the conversation.

But he won’t, because he’s a fucking cowardly chickenshit asshole³.

And now that Trump is welcoming an incoming class of crass billionaires to his cabinet and to positions of influence in his coming administration, we will see an entrenchment of kleptocracy, and Kakistocracy.

What could go wrong with that?

No, until we see a shift in donations and funding of left of center influencers and news vehicles, this shift is going to be durable.

---

---

The Right Wing Media is now dominant

Alas, this one is tough to swallow. When Fox news was new, it was “cute” and it wasn’t a significant threat, but the last 3 decades has seen a wholesale shift in the media landscape, and it is now a fact that it has a larger footprint, more reach, more viewers, and an audience that is hardened against logic and reason.

We can look at things like JRE, Fox News, OANN, and the myriad of online influencers and think they are nuts, and that no thinking person would fall for that tripe.

But that elitist attitude (and I am guilty of this too) is what has hardened this segment of the population. They are tuned into it, and if you tried to argue with that drunk MAGA uncle at Thanksgiving, you realize that they are pretty much irredeemable. The news they consume, the media they watch, is so full on MAGA that there isn’t any reaching them.

Buying them subs to the Times and the Post will not help them. No amount of facts, statistics, and hard evidence is going to alter their worldviews.

And, the scary thing is the success Trump had in luring the incel brigade, the masses of the Joe Rogan Experience viewers, the lowest of the low propensity voters into his sphere influence was both masterful, but also terrifying.

Indeed, I am not sure that the Democrats can reach these people. They may need to wait for the next generation, and that means that we have many more bad elections to come.

The arguments against Woke, DEI, and LGBTQ+ ideas is a heavy entrenchment in that cohort is gone for a full generation.

And that is going to lead to a bad time.

---

Lastly, the election wasn’t stolen or rigged

There is a hard kernel of liberals, and lefties that is waving around that there was no way Harris lost, and that there is all this evidence of irregularities in the counting, in the patterns of votes, and much more.

Alas, this is as fanciful as the MAGA “Big Lie” of 2020.

Just stop. The election was fair. It was clean, and Harris just lost. There are plenty of possible reasons why this happened, but at the end of the day, it is who we are.

The Progressive left and far left really think that their positions are winners, but all evidence is that the US is a center Right electorate, and while poll-testing some of the ideas of the progressives yields favorable opinions, once the details are shared, the ardor of the agreement wilts, and the hard right beliefs come out.

This is as it always has been, at least since I came of age in the early 1980s.

And, while I hear a lot of people whining (appropriately) about the influence of Musk and his homeless abortion, Twitter, on the election, the truth is that it is all legal. He (and the rest of the retromingent twatwaffles) was well within the parameters that the SCOTUS and the constitution lay out.

I have had more than one person dress me down for saying that “This is who we are”, using vote totals, and percentages of the population to make them feel good about their resistance, the truth is, this is who we are.

The Electoral College is here to stay, and the old strategy of focusing on the 7 (+/-) swing states ignoring the rest of the country is over. Trump decisively swept that whole contingent, handily, and while Harris didn’t lose net votes in the swing states, the data shows that Trump outperformed his prior efforts, and all the polls.

This might as well have been a 49 state sweep a’la 1984.

Coda

I honestly don’t know where I go from here. Do I roll up my sleeves and continue the resistance? Do I try to save people from what will be coming their way?

Or, do I just look out for myself. As a middle aged white dude, I can just coast.

What I am thinking is that this is what America wanted. They wanted the mass deportations, the petty vindictive retribution, and the chaotic incompetence that will roil society.

I fear for my LGBTQ friends and coworkers, I worry about the coming onslaught of idiocy, the empowerment of the worst of the worst, the boat parades, and the regression on any attempt combat the climate change.

Nope, I think they are going to need to experience the full chaos. Good and hard.

1. Hello MAGA trolls, I see you.

2. NPA -no political affiliation

3. I really fucking hate LinkedIn, they are the fucking worst

---