Very interesting, thanks for sharing this. My gen Z kids are now all voting age, and I can say that while they may not be a perfect average, they definitely are more right wing in their beliefs and their friends are too. (I’m more centrist with a right lean when it comes to some topics, but think overall I occupy the middle and would probably be a swing voter if I lived in the US)
At any rate, I’ve heard some very reflective comments from some democrats, while others are intent on calling this a racist and misogynistic win for republicans. I think that interpretation really fails to understand the deep suffering many people experienced over the last 4 years, and to my perception, the great divide between upper middle class/upper class and those who are living pay cheque to pay cheque. In the US the divide between socioeconomic groups is even more pronounced than in Canada - or that’s what I’ve seen from the conferences and events I’ve attended in the US, some of which have included outreach to low income groups.
I’ve also observed that my American friends who fall in the demographic of white and college educated do not have any understanding of what other socioeconomic groups live with. They give lip service to it, but they don’t understand that things like pronouns are something you have to have a certain amount of privilege to even consider. People worried about a roof over their head and food in their belly generally don’t have time to think about extra things like pronouns. (This becomes even more absurd when one considers the high rate of illiteracy in some sociodemographic groups and that many wouldn’t even understand pronouns to care about them.)
I’ve rambled - but the TL;DR version is - yes, there’s a big divide where the democrats are living in a very insulated reality and they’re losing voters because what they say doesn’t match reality in people’s lives. There shouldn’t be any mystery about that, and yet it seems the echo chambers are so strong, that the best many democrats are coming up with is misogyny and racism as dog whistles. I hope with time the conversation becomes more balanced and introspective as it’s really tiresome seeing people acting like life as they know it just ended and unfriending anyone who supported Trump rather than trying to understand why someone may have made that decision.
You have not rambled. You wrote a very good comment describing what is actually happening in real life out there. But I do not hold out hope that the conversations, such as might be happening, will become more balanced and introspective. The crowds of people that are the democrats, well-off, elitist, wokey, today's left (entirely different from old left) various sorts of activists and eco-fanatics, Trudeauist Liebranodips, various types of administrators and professional "academicians", I do not see any interest in honest introspection on their part. These types of people will have to be repeatedly defeated in elections.
I suspect you're right with your last sentence. I just have difficulty accepting it. It's been very eye-opening seeing the literal panic some people are spouting, including Canadians who claim they won't visit the US after Trump's inauguration.
These pundits can try to spin the American election results as being about the economy. I believe the results show that the majority of American voters believe in the future Trump provides. Fascist in a word. Totalitarian in respect to no effective opposition. I will not plan a trip to the USA for at least three years. Enough time to see what the US has become. Ireally think this election was about race, gender and getting rid of the immigrants. Trump really brought out the worst in those citizens in the USA. All one can really say is they will get what they voted for. Last time Trump was in the general population got nothing. I am concerned our country may follow suit.
I wish they would (stay home that is). Instead of driving around in their Canadian plated Mercedes SUVs and $500K diesel pushers making comments about guns and cowboys and tipping 10% on restaurant meals to show how generous Canadians are. 😡
One would infer from your statement that you are a US citizen. You likely do not realize we have cowboys up here too. We also have guns, lots and lots of guns, except we have regulations and checks and balances that seem pretty effective at preventing mass shooting in public spaces like churches and schools, not to mention shopping centres.
One can infer all one wants. I was born a British subject in the then Colony of Canada and will die a free citizen of the USA. I know Canada has cowboys and has the few types of guns that the totalitarian Trudeauites lets them have until the next election when they take away more of them. Living near Ottawa in the summers the Canadians I know are mostly either French Quebeckers or civil service workers and pensioners who seem to know very little about their country outside of a 30 mile radius let alone about their neighbors to the south who spend their blood and treasure in Alaska protecting their feckless northern cousins and allowing them to whittle their armed forces down to little more than a palace guard. And your regulations are targeted at only law abiding gun owners and do nothing to prevent multiple shootings since the shooters get them illegally anyways.
I am old enough to know that political doom and gloom types of comments are almost always exaggerated. Trump already spent 4 years in the whitehouse. He’s old. He’s not about to ruin democracy in the US. I didn’t think Trump should’ve got the nomination just because I felt like if he really cared about the US he would’ve recognized how divisive he is and stepped back. But here we are. If you’re going to stay home, ok. But I don’t think you’re protecting yourself or proving anything. Life will go on just like it always has. Stupid things will be said by politicians - just like they always have. But the actual changes to people? Meh, I don’t think they’re going to be earth shattering. Through I do agree with deporting the people who’ve illegally crossed the border - there are legal channels and I think it’s important those are used. Countries don’t have endless space for illegal immigrants nor should they be expected to continuously accept them. Look at what’s happened in Canada with too many legal immigrants leading to lack of affordable housing and more demand on schools and healthcare than there is infrastructure to support.
There's also the failure of the American media to inform why inflation blew up, that it wasn't just in the US but was global, but they just normalised Trump instead. They just love their unrestricted capitalism and when it bites them in the ass, it's the presidents fault. With all due respect, a lot of Americans aren't too bright.
Biden’s biggest mistake was opening the southern border. On his first day in office he undid Trump’s border restrictions.
Millions poured in, completely unvetted. We know in Canada that too many newcomers too fast leads to housing price and rent hikes. It’s a disaster in my city of Victoria, BC.
A Pew Research poll showed that 90% of Republicans favour mass deportations. Even 40% of Dems do too.
Thank you for confirming how well propaganda works. Millions did not pour in at all. Since 2020, the number has risen by about 500000. Still too many, but your bought the lies.
I think a lot of the problem is that Dem voters are convinced that everyone in their various peer groups is also a Dem voter (I find that Liberal Party supporters are often the same). The Republicans help perpetuate this by not really being open about who they support. They seem to let people make those assumptions. The Dems are in for a rough four years, now that they realize that Trump won the popular vote as well. They are going to have to acknowledge that there might be some Republican supporters that they encounter in their everyday life that they actually like. But I don't know if the feeling will be mutual. Judging from the memes that my Dem friends are sharing on Facebook, party members/supporters aren't nearly as caring and tolerant as they purport to be.
I think you make a valid point. The Republicans (Trump in particular) keep referring to anyone not ascribing to their far right evangelical views a communists. Most Americans have not the slightest knowledge of what socialism, communism nor even fascism is about. Their whole education is simply to instill in the populace that the USA is the best country in the world. As a result, the world outside the US and very likely world history that does not present itself in the best possible view of the USA is generally not covered. At least it would seem that way since they could not see the resemblance of the Republican candidate's rhetoric over the last decade or so as resembling if not actually copying the speeches and behaviors of the fascist leaders in Europe. The Republican Party is not what people remember. They are of a different mind set than the old timers. I am basically centrist but progressive and it really scares me when people elect someone who does nothing but spew racism, misogyny and xenophobia. They will reap what they have sown.
Great fact based piece. What I find odd, though, is how well the Trump campaign "owned" the "this country is getting worse" message, despite clearly positive trends over the last two years on inflation, employment, real wage growth, decreasing wealth and wage inequality... you name it. The Democrats need to ask how they completely lost control of the underlying vibe among voters even given this backdrop. Did the GOP master new media that much more quickly and more effectively?
There's 2 factors: the most important is inflation. People HATE inflation, and it hit everybody in the pocketbook in a way that's visible every time they do grocery shopping, fill up their vehicle, go out for something to eat, or buy anything at all. Moreover, even though inflation has slowed, the price increases are here to stay and it's going to take a while for real wages to catch up. That means people continue to feel those effects.
Second, Trump and his campaign did their damnedest to convince people that the economy was actually terrible, and were reasonably successful. Expect that message to suddenly reverse into proclamations of how great everything is once Trump has been sworn in.
Trump's policies will quite likely reignite inflation, and he'll suffer the wrath of voters in turn. To some extent, Biden made inflation worse with excessive spending and too much meddling through things like additional regulations. However, even if he hadn't, he was going to get stuck with blame for it because politicians have stupidly convinced people they're responsible for the state of the economy. If you want to pretend it rains because of your awesome power, you're going to get blamed when it's a drought.,
The wrath of voters is now irrelevant in the US. It is no longer a democracy. The only question is how long that concept survives in the rest of the free world.
Biden accomplished tremendous things for the country; including the recovery from the pandemic. His mistake was thinking he had the capacity for a second term. That was ego. The Democrats were beaten by propaganda, a public with idiotic expectations, complete ignorance of the outside world, and their usual inability to focus on the big picture. Add to that the blind stupidity of ignoring the pandemic ; "things were cheaper under Trump", and the recipe for disaster was complete.
That ignorance; which is never bliss, has now cost them their country and their future.
You write about " ... clearly positive trends ..." What about food bank usage; what about how Jews are treated as compared to (oh, dare I say it?) Muslims in terms of demonstrations; what about; what about?
My point is that there is a very great difference between those who are benefiting from those things and ever so many in the population as a whole.
While I hear you, Ken, the vast majority of trends - affecting the vast majority of people - were trending positive, but the trends you indicate - which are impactful on the margins, as awful as those margins felt - dominated the zeitgeist. And oddly, you bring up antisemitism - but the MAGA populace was at least as antisemitic as the pro-Hamas zealots on the left wing, yet Trump owned the noise with respect to that issue. I'll also point out that Trump never really took a stand on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - to do so would have risked his interests in the Persian Gulf as well as his personal relationships with Netanyahu; he just allowed the left to eat itself.
I think there's a legitimate question that emerges here: how did Trump effectively control the overall perception of world conditions in the US, despite the facts not really lining up in his favor?
I would guess that he has been peddling hatred even before the 2016 election. I see your question as a modern day version of , 'Why did the Germans not see what Hitler actally had in mind?'. Likely because he spent a whole lifetime spewing irrational lies about what was wrong with Germany at the time. Isolationist in that it was Germany first in all things. Foreigners were not to be trustedand especially the Jewish people. Of course they were scapegoats because it ended up even non-Jews were persecuted. He also had a plan, it was there in black and white, just as the Republican paty has their plan in black and white (Project 2025). Fear and hatred won this election for Trump and the Republicans. I wonder what those voters will do when they come for them.
You can't rule out Fox News and all the other megaphones on the unhanged right. Plus in the land of podcasts apparently nine of the top 10 podcasts are right wing or adjacent. There is no President Trump in the first place without Fox News carpet bombing conservative minds for decades....which is exactly what it was designed to do. The Democrats were not getting their message out in the right places.
I think you’re wrong about no inflation. I’ve seen articles in the Wall Street Journal about why food prices are so high. Although I’m not sure it was Biden’s fault.
But it was Biden’s fault that he undid Trump’s border restrictions, resulting in a massive wave of illegals that he ignored until last summer.
He also changed Title IX, basing it on “gender identity,” clearing the way for men to participate in women’s sports. Hardly anyone favours this.
He also ditched Trump’s sanctions on Iran, who fund Hamas and Hezbollah. Now the Middle East is in flames.
We did a lot of Hispanic focus groups this year and the story we heard over and over again was that the Biden-Harris immigration policies were bringing crime and danger into their communities and that the Biden-Harris economy was failing them. Democrats countered this with “Latinx,” “representation,” and accusations of racism. That may have played well in ethnic studies departments and with the punditry, but they fell flat with real voters leading real lives. The numbers can’t be denied."
I think that Harris was a very poor candidate. That, coupled with a seemingly confused Democrat party lost the election. I think Trump will do well and he and the Republican party should hold their heads high. But I am so glad the election is over.
... only that never would have happened. Had the Democrats run a proper "open" primary season, there were any number of potential non-batshit-crazy candidates who could have run effectively. But as long as Biden held onto the office, those non-batshit-crazy candidates respected the party, leaving only RJK Jr types to challenge the establishment.
The one thing that might have changed the narrative was Joe saying he wouldn't seek a second term. He fell into the same trap as RBG with the same tragic consequences.
I really don't get the ongoing fascination with Kennedy's. Camelot was 60+ years ago, and they have amply proven over and over again that many or most of them are absolutely terrible human beings who should be kept away from any position of influence or power.
Really? That's not what I saw. On the other side you have a criminal lunatic who spews gibberish constantly. He IS more entertaining. In this age of reality TV who cares about competence?
We saw that in Toronto with Rob Ford. Ford was someone who should never be anywhere near the mayor's office but the competitors were dull. Unfortunately, Trump may well be the greatest con man who ever lived.
There was a Conservative (but not Trumpian) commentator on the Ukraine: The Latest podcast this past week. His interesting point (and one I agree with after spending g time with American relatives) was that many Americans simply don't see Trump the same way much of the rest of the world does. His poor character is just accepted as a given while people focus on the things that matter to them that Alex describes here.
Jerry, I offer some different way of looking at it that comes to the same place.
Clearly Trump is a bullshitter, but absolutely everyone knows he is a bullshitter. That is simply who he is and everyone pretty much accepts that he is hyperbolic in his speech and they accordingly interpret his comments without resorting to clutching their pearls as do the Democrats. That is the first point.
My second point is a subset of the first point and starts with an old stereotype. If you are old enough, you will remember that Texans were known for absolutely EVERYTHING being bigger and better in Texas. Homes were bigger, ranches were bigger, steaks were bigger and juicier and tastier, and so on and so on and so on. Even when they weren't, The rest of the world simply knew that that was the way that Texans talked and evaluated accordingly.
Well, Trump is a New York City developer and he is stereotypically LOUD, brash, rude, crude and lewd and people know that that is who he is and evaluate his claims accordingly.
Put differently, understanding who people are and how they talk is important.
Please don't think that I am a Trumpist - to coin a word.
Instead, I am someone who looks at DJT and I think that there is something there that I, with my Canuckian background, do not see at all clearly. Absolutely he is that loud, brash, rude, crude, lewd (and now renewed!) person but there is more than that there; how much more (less?) I cannot say. Put differently, he is much more than the surface self caricature. Is that good? Bad? Otherwise? That I don't know but, as with 2016 - 2020 we will see.
Firstly, I didn't think so. Secondly, it wouldn't matter if you were, as long as we both enter into a conversation with good faith and with the objective of learning something. Which we both clearly did, and which I definitely have. 😊
The people in New York have known Trump forever and that's why he lost New York by about a million votes. They know him for being the slimy clown that he is.
Diving somewhat into the data, it looks like in many ways that as those who created the modern political world in the 1960s pass away, their influence is becoming less and less.
In the US, educated urban and suburban boomers created the modern political world. It was their demographic might that led both the Dems and the Republicans. A Clinton or Bush could never even get enough money to run in a primary today.
In Canada the impacts will if anything even be more stark. The 60s were an epoch in Canada. Many scholars split Canada into pre-1960s and post-1960s. The political vehicle of the urban educated boomers, and non rural French Quebeckers, The Liberals, created the modern Canada. Now that these demographics are losing their numbers there are "barbarians at the gate."
Joe Rogan in the US, one of the major themes of his hugely popular and influential podcast is the debasing of urban educated boomer truths. In Canada we have Jordan Peterson and Pierre Poilievre.
Make no mistake, these folks are the ones who are on the outside of the old political consensus in Canada and the US, and they want in. The Liberals and Dems are going to have to do better than offering yet more free stuff for boomers and urban educated women to stay relevant.
Interesting stuff. Trump clearly got his bloc of low propensity voters to turn out, and Harris once again showed that the Democrats are still tantalized by the 1-off turnout boom of minority and young voters when Barack Obama ran for the first time in 2008.
A couple of factors I'm curious about are 1) how much better would Republicans have done *without* Donald Trump on the ticket? and 2) how much did being a woman hurt Kamala Harris? Trump won, so clearly being Trump wasn't an insuperable handicap. Still, that sweeping electoral college win is rooted in a pretty slender popular vote margin despite all the factors that set the election stage in Republicans' favor.
Harris didn't make a big point of running as a woman, in contrast to Hillary Clinton in 2016. However, it looks like her campaign was picking up signals that being a woman was a problem for her, indicated by things like Obama scolding Black men for "not feeling it". Again, I don't think this was a determinative factor, but I suspect it wasn't insignificant either.
I think this happened because the Democratic side of the ledger didn't understand what was at stake in this election. Hillary was a lousy choice. Biden was a lousy choice. Harris was a lousy choice. Trump is a walking fucking catastrophe. The election was straight up about whether the US stays a democracy of follows Hungary into an effective dictatorship.
Trump now owns the 2 critical houses of government and the Supreme Court. He is the law. The GOP will now consolidate their control, and by 2026 it won't matter what the voters want. Expect a national abortion ban, don't be surprised if birth control is also restricted. Voter suppression laws will be passed. GOP states will redistrict further. And and all environmental restrictions will be stricken from the register. Anything that ends up on court will die at the hand of SCOTUS. The US is now a dictatorship.
Trump will settle lots of his imagined scores. Ukraine is finished. What the new DOJ does to Democrats remains to be seen. If he becomes too unhinged, the GOP might push him aside, pardon him, and Thiel puppet Vance will take over. I say that believing Trump's medical state is already such that he does not have his faculties. He got the GOP top the promised land; minority white Christian rule. He's now expendable like everyone in politics. We now live in a completely different world.
I'm sure many of you are thinking "Davy's off his meds again". That's fine. I really really hope I'm wrong. I'm not wrong. Lets talk again in a year. The tea leaves should be telling by then.
I fear that David is right on the money. Trump doesn't care about democracy. In fact, his psychopathy makes him unable to understand why anybody else's viewpoint could possibly matter. America's right wing billionaires have been working towards this since the '60s. They are the ones that engineered getting the corrupt stooges close to the Supreme Court. Trump got the ball across the goal line for them. They don't need him anymore.
Most of the billionaires lean to the right and, oddly enough, have gigantic egos. The idea that your vote counts as much as theirs is really offensive to them. And they feel that democracy is very unfair to them because they have to pay taxes and they don't need anything. There's a reason George Soros is painted as a demon. He puts a lot of money into pro-democracy causes. When people are spitting on Soros' name it means they aren't thinking about people like Charles Koch. It's people like him that are really pulling the strings to smother democracy. If you want to understand more I recommend a book called "Democracy in Chains" by Nancy McClean.
Great column! The one point I have is around the longer-term question whether the Trump 'coalition' and turnout increases in Hispanic, first-time voters, etc. will survive under his presumptive successor in 2028. Will nominee Vance (or whoever) hang on to these gains or will the Republicans fall back the way Harris did in '24 from Biden in '20. To my mind, the long-term forecast for both parties is very unclear (and will largely depend on how successful Trump is in 'fixing' the economy, at least in the eyes of many voters).
I'm curious where all the 'experienced pollsters' were during the campaign. The results were not even close to the predicted nail biter. The Monday morning quarterbacking is just tiresome. I feel sorry for the United States.
Just because a coin's odds are 50/50, it doesn't mean that I should expect it to land on its edge.
Battleground states are likely to be correlated, so even if odds are 50/50 between the two candidates, it's not shocking that the outcomes would break on the same direction.
The pollsters generally weren't predicting a nailbiter - and what is sort of lost in the reporting (even in this very good piece) is that the polls' margin of error allowed for the result we saw on Tuesday night. There's information which will likely never be known - how did pre-election day voters lean, and thus did the Dems really get crushed by the "stay at home" crowd, which seems to me likely parsing the numbers, along with what Alex points out about Trump's success in getting younger voters to the polls on Election day - but the piece points out the obvious and knowable data, and asks good questions about where each party should dig for the next time around - when Trump's personality won't be a direct factor, for example, and when the Democrats will have had a change to run a proper horse race to identify a candidate.
The polls essentially got this right. A small systematic error (within the stated margin of error) towards Trump translated into a clear electoral college win.
The popular vote was pretty close - 50.2% to 48%. The blowout was in the electoral college vote. Unfortunately that gives idiot news people and shrewd Republicans a reason to use the words like "landslide" etc. even though it really wasn't.
It’s actually simpler than all this. Trump was promising action, Harris was offering vibes. She seemed to have no ability to articulate any actual policy positions.
She had lots of policy positions but the opposition kept saying she didn't and the news media treated her a lot more harshly than they treated Trump. Her biggest single anchor was incumbency. She needed to distance herself from Biden and she didn't. Also, I find it very strange that even though Biden did quite a good job his team never managed to get that message out in any significant way. Meanwhile Trump is going on about America's turned into a garbage dump and people bought it.
Respectfully, disagree. She may have had 80 pages of policy positions on her website, but in a sit down impromptu interview (with ANYONE) she displayed zero ability to articulate a single coherent policy position.
Her entire campaign basically boiled down to “I am not him, trust me”
If the Democrats were smart, and serious about defeating Trump, they would have nominated someone Republicans could like, rather than someone they liked.
For something a bit lighter, yet clever, I'd like to recommend Line users consider following @JustineBateman (yes, the one that played Mallory Keaton on Family Ties), who is now a filmmaker. Her post-election voter reaction #SocialMediaVideoCritique on her X feed is comedy gold.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing this. My gen Z kids are now all voting age, and I can say that while they may not be a perfect average, they definitely are more right wing in their beliefs and their friends are too. (I’m more centrist with a right lean when it comes to some topics, but think overall I occupy the middle and would probably be a swing voter if I lived in the US)
At any rate, I’ve heard some very reflective comments from some democrats, while others are intent on calling this a racist and misogynistic win for republicans. I think that interpretation really fails to understand the deep suffering many people experienced over the last 4 years, and to my perception, the great divide between upper middle class/upper class and those who are living pay cheque to pay cheque. In the US the divide between socioeconomic groups is even more pronounced than in Canada - or that’s what I’ve seen from the conferences and events I’ve attended in the US, some of which have included outreach to low income groups.
I’ve also observed that my American friends who fall in the demographic of white and college educated do not have any understanding of what other socioeconomic groups live with. They give lip service to it, but they don’t understand that things like pronouns are something you have to have a certain amount of privilege to even consider. People worried about a roof over their head and food in their belly generally don’t have time to think about extra things like pronouns. (This becomes even more absurd when one considers the high rate of illiteracy in some sociodemographic groups and that many wouldn’t even understand pronouns to care about them.)
I’ve rambled - but the TL;DR version is - yes, there’s a big divide where the democrats are living in a very insulated reality and they’re losing voters because what they say doesn’t match reality in people’s lives. There shouldn’t be any mystery about that, and yet it seems the echo chambers are so strong, that the best many democrats are coming up with is misogyny and racism as dog whistles. I hope with time the conversation becomes more balanced and introspective as it’s really tiresome seeing people acting like life as they know it just ended and unfriending anyone who supported Trump rather than trying to understand why someone may have made that decision.
You have not rambled. You wrote a very good comment describing what is actually happening in real life out there. But I do not hold out hope that the conversations, such as might be happening, will become more balanced and introspective. The crowds of people that are the democrats, well-off, elitist, wokey, today's left (entirely different from old left) various sorts of activists and eco-fanatics, Trudeauist Liebranodips, various types of administrators and professional "academicians", I do not see any interest in honest introspection on their part. These types of people will have to be repeatedly defeated in elections.
I suspect you're right with your last sentence. I just have difficulty accepting it. It's been very eye-opening seeing the literal panic some people are spouting, including Canadians who claim they won't visit the US after Trump's inauguration.
These pundits can try to spin the American election results as being about the economy. I believe the results show that the majority of American voters believe in the future Trump provides. Fascist in a word. Totalitarian in respect to no effective opposition. I will not plan a trip to the USA for at least three years. Enough time to see what the US has become. Ireally think this election was about race, gender and getting rid of the immigrants. Trump really brought out the worst in those citizens in the USA. All one can really say is they will get what they voted for. Last time Trump was in the general population got nothing. I am concerned our country may follow suit.
And yet it isn't the US that is passing a draconian "On-Line Harms" bill.
A great many polls show the open southern border was highly unpopular.
I wish they would (stay home that is). Instead of driving around in their Canadian plated Mercedes SUVs and $500K diesel pushers making comments about guns and cowboys and tipping 10% on restaurant meals to show how generous Canadians are. 😡
One would infer from your statement that you are a US citizen. You likely do not realize we have cowboys up here too. We also have guns, lots and lots of guns, except we have regulations and checks and balances that seem pretty effective at preventing mass shooting in public spaces like churches and schools, not to mention shopping centres.
One can infer all one wants. I was born a British subject in the then Colony of Canada and will die a free citizen of the USA. I know Canada has cowboys and has the few types of guns that the totalitarian Trudeauites lets them have until the next election when they take away more of them. Living near Ottawa in the summers the Canadians I know are mostly either French Quebeckers or civil service workers and pensioners who seem to know very little about their country outside of a 30 mile radius let alone about their neighbors to the south who spend their blood and treasure in Alaska protecting their feckless northern cousins and allowing them to whittle their armed forces down to little more than a palace guard. And your regulations are targeted at only law abiding gun owners and do nothing to prevent multiple shootings since the shooters get them illegally anyways.
Agree that there’s a lot of irrational thinking out there. A lot of Dems are saying the electorate is too racist and sexist to vote for Kamala.
But others are more realistic and realize they’ve gone too far left.
I don’t know what the Dem operatives are thinking.
You show your obvious bias.
I am old enough to know that political doom and gloom types of comments are almost always exaggerated. Trump already spent 4 years in the whitehouse. He’s old. He’s not about to ruin democracy in the US. I didn’t think Trump should’ve got the nomination just because I felt like if he really cared about the US he would’ve recognized how divisive he is and stepped back. But here we are. If you’re going to stay home, ok. But I don’t think you’re protecting yourself or proving anything. Life will go on just like it always has. Stupid things will be said by politicians - just like they always have. But the actual changes to people? Meh, I don’t think they’re going to be earth shattering. Through I do agree with deporting the people who’ve illegally crossed the border - there are legal channels and I think it’s important those are used. Countries don’t have endless space for illegal immigrants nor should they be expected to continuously accept them. Look at what’s happened in Canada with too many legal immigrants leading to lack of affordable housing and more demand on schools and healthcare than there is infrastructure to support.
Obvious yes. That’s the American in me. A bias is a position someone has that you disagree with. Fair enough.
There's also the failure of the American media to inform why inflation blew up, that it wasn't just in the US but was global, but they just normalised Trump instead. They just love their unrestricted capitalism and when it bites them in the ass, it's the presidents fault. With all due respect, a lot of Americans aren't too bright.
Biden’s biggest mistake was opening the southern border. On his first day in office he undid Trump’s border restrictions.
Millions poured in, completely unvetted. We know in Canada that too many newcomers too fast leads to housing price and rent hikes. It’s a disaster in my city of Victoria, BC.
A Pew Research poll showed that 90% of Republicans favour mass deportations. Even 40% of Dems do too.
Thank you for confirming how well propaganda works. Millions did not pour in at all. Since 2020, the number has risen by about 500000. Still too many, but your bought the lies.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-releases-june-2024-monthly-update
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jp4xqx2z3o
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2024/06/12/politifact-how-many-undocumented-immigrants-live-in-the-u-s/74047477007/
https://cis.org/Report/Estimating-Illegal-Immigrant-Population-Using-Current-Population-Survey
I think a lot of the problem is that Dem voters are convinced that everyone in their various peer groups is also a Dem voter (I find that Liberal Party supporters are often the same). The Republicans help perpetuate this by not really being open about who they support. They seem to let people make those assumptions. The Dems are in for a rough four years, now that they realize that Trump won the popular vote as well. They are going to have to acknowledge that there might be some Republican supporters that they encounter in their everyday life that they actually like. But I don't know if the feeling will be mutual. Judging from the memes that my Dem friends are sharing on Facebook, party members/supporters aren't nearly as caring and tolerant as they purport to be.
As an aside, a friend sent me this the other day. It's a good read https://x.com/annbauerwriter/status/1854335263939424745
I think you make a valid point. The Republicans (Trump in particular) keep referring to anyone not ascribing to their far right evangelical views a communists. Most Americans have not the slightest knowledge of what socialism, communism nor even fascism is about. Their whole education is simply to instill in the populace that the USA is the best country in the world. As a result, the world outside the US and very likely world history that does not present itself in the best possible view of the USA is generally not covered. At least it would seem that way since they could not see the resemblance of the Republican candidate's rhetoric over the last decade or so as resembling if not actually copying the speeches and behaviors of the fascist leaders in Europe. The Republican Party is not what people remember. They are of a different mind set than the old timers. I am basically centrist but progressive and it really scares me when people elect someone who does nothing but spew racism, misogyny and xenophobia. They will reap what they have sown.
Thanks, I’ll have a look if I can access it without an X account. I deleted the app back when it was still Twitter.
You aren't rambling. You are calling out the Democrats for being captured by groups who have the privilege to obsess over "luxury beliefs."
In Canada we have the same issue, even more so, without the stark pass/fail society.
The Democrats and the Liberals are on the wrong side of demographics and are aging out.
Right on!👍
Great fact based piece. What I find odd, though, is how well the Trump campaign "owned" the "this country is getting worse" message, despite clearly positive trends over the last two years on inflation, employment, real wage growth, decreasing wealth and wage inequality... you name it. The Democrats need to ask how they completely lost control of the underlying vibe among voters even given this backdrop. Did the GOP master new media that much more quickly and more effectively?
There's 2 factors: the most important is inflation. People HATE inflation, and it hit everybody in the pocketbook in a way that's visible every time they do grocery shopping, fill up their vehicle, go out for something to eat, or buy anything at all. Moreover, even though inflation has slowed, the price increases are here to stay and it's going to take a while for real wages to catch up. That means people continue to feel those effects.
Second, Trump and his campaign did their damnedest to convince people that the economy was actually terrible, and were reasonably successful. Expect that message to suddenly reverse into proclamations of how great everything is once Trump has been sworn in.
And yet, the prices won't change.....or more likely will go up.
Trump's policies will quite likely reignite inflation, and he'll suffer the wrath of voters in turn. To some extent, Biden made inflation worse with excessive spending and too much meddling through things like additional regulations. However, even if he hadn't, he was going to get stuck with blame for it because politicians have stupidly convinced people they're responsible for the state of the economy. If you want to pretend it rains because of your awesome power, you're going to get blamed when it's a drought.,
The wrath of voters is now irrelevant in the US. It is no longer a democracy. The only question is how long that concept survives in the rest of the free world.
Biden accomplished tremendous things for the country; including the recovery from the pandemic. His mistake was thinking he had the capacity for a second term. That was ego. The Democrats were beaten by propaganda, a public with idiotic expectations, complete ignorance of the outside world, and their usual inability to focus on the big picture. Add to that the blind stupidity of ignoring the pandemic ; "things were cheaper under Trump", and the recipe for disaster was complete.
That ignorance; which is never bliss, has now cost them their country and their future.
You write about " ... clearly positive trends ..." What about food bank usage; what about how Jews are treated as compared to (oh, dare I say it?) Muslims in terms of demonstrations; what about; what about?
My point is that there is a very great difference between those who are benefiting from those things and ever so many in the population as a whole.
While I hear you, Ken, the vast majority of trends - affecting the vast majority of people - were trending positive, but the trends you indicate - which are impactful on the margins, as awful as those margins felt - dominated the zeitgeist. And oddly, you bring up antisemitism - but the MAGA populace was at least as antisemitic as the pro-Hamas zealots on the left wing, yet Trump owned the noise with respect to that issue. I'll also point out that Trump never really took a stand on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - to do so would have risked his interests in the Persian Gulf as well as his personal relationships with Netanyahu; he just allowed the left to eat itself.
I think there's a legitimate question that emerges here: how did Trump effectively control the overall perception of world conditions in the US, despite the facts not really lining up in his favor?
I would guess that he has been peddling hatred even before the 2016 election. I see your question as a modern day version of , 'Why did the Germans not see what Hitler actally had in mind?'. Likely because he spent a whole lifetime spewing irrational lies about what was wrong with Germany at the time. Isolationist in that it was Germany first in all things. Foreigners were not to be trustedand especially the Jewish people. Of course they were scapegoats because it ended up even non-Jews were persecuted. He also had a plan, it was there in black and white, just as the Republican paty has their plan in black and white (Project 2025). Fear and hatred won this election for Trump and the Republicans. I wonder what those voters will do when they come for them.
You can't rule out Fox News and all the other megaphones on the unhanged right. Plus in the land of podcasts apparently nine of the top 10 podcasts are right wing or adjacent. There is no President Trump in the first place without Fox News carpet bombing conservative minds for decades....which is exactly what it was designed to do. The Democrats were not getting their message out in the right places.
Well, life expectancy isn’t trending in the right direction.
I think you’re wrong about no inflation. I’ve seen articles in the Wall Street Journal about why food prices are so high. Although I’m not sure it was Biden’s fault.
But it was Biden’s fault that he undid Trump’s border restrictions, resulting in a massive wave of illegals that he ignored until last summer.
He also changed Title IX, basing it on “gender identity,” clearing the way for men to participate in women’s sports. Hardly anyone favours this.
He also ditched Trump’s sanctions on Iran, who fund Hamas and Hezbollah. Now the Middle East is in flames.
Ouch! But so true
"
We did a lot of Hispanic focus groups this year and the story we heard over and over again was that the Biden-Harris immigration policies were bringing crime and danger into their communities and that the Biden-Harris economy was failing them. Democrats countered this with “Latinx,” “representation,” and accusations of racism. That may have played well in ethnic studies departments and with the punditry, but they fell flat with real voters leading real lives. The numbers can’t be denied."
I think that Harris was a very poor candidate. That, coupled with a seemingly confused Democrat party lost the election. I think Trump will do well and he and the Republican party should hold their heads high. But I am so glad the election is over.
Yes. This election may have had a very different outcome if RFK jr had gotten the Democrat nomination and been the candidate.
... only that never would have happened. Had the Democrats run a proper "open" primary season, there were any number of potential non-batshit-crazy candidates who could have run effectively. But as long as Biden held onto the office, those non-batshit-crazy candidates respected the party, leaving only RJK Jr types to challenge the establishment.
The one thing that might have changed the narrative was Joe saying he wouldn't seek a second term. He fell into the same trap as RBG with the same tragic consequences.
Yeah. Simply for being a Kennedy. The "name recognition" bit. Never mind anything else about that person who is providing the "name recognition".
I really don't get the ongoing fascination with Kennedy's. Camelot was 60+ years ago, and they have amply proven over and over again that many or most of them are absolutely terrible human beings who should be kept away from any position of influence or power.
I'm not sure US elections are ever "over", though I too have had enough
She was a terrible candidate. Completely incapable of public speaking.
Really? That's not what I saw. On the other side you have a criminal lunatic who spews gibberish constantly. He IS more entertaining. In this age of reality TV who cares about competence?
We saw that in Toronto with Rob Ford. Ford was someone who should never be anywhere near the mayor's office but the competitors were dull. Unfortunately, Trump may well be the greatest con man who ever lived.
There was a Conservative (but not Trumpian) commentator on the Ukraine: The Latest podcast this past week. His interesting point (and one I agree with after spending g time with American relatives) was that many Americans simply don't see Trump the same way much of the rest of the world does. His poor character is just accepted as a given while people focus on the things that matter to them that Alex describes here.
Jerry, I offer some different way of looking at it that comes to the same place.
Clearly Trump is a bullshitter, but absolutely everyone knows he is a bullshitter. That is simply who he is and everyone pretty much accepts that he is hyperbolic in his speech and they accordingly interpret his comments without resorting to clutching their pearls as do the Democrats. That is the first point.
My second point is a subset of the first point and starts with an old stereotype. If you are old enough, you will remember that Texans were known for absolutely EVERYTHING being bigger and better in Texas. Homes were bigger, ranches were bigger, steaks were bigger and juicier and tastier, and so on and so on and so on. Even when they weren't, The rest of the world simply knew that that was the way that Texans talked and evaluated accordingly.
Well, Trump is a New York City developer and he is stereotypically LOUD, brash, rude, crude and lewd and people know that that is who he is and evaluate his claims accordingly.
Put differently, understanding who people are and how they talk is important.
So well said, Ken. Love your "different ways" of looking at it. We need to step outside our own perspectives to make sense of things.
Please don't think that I am a Trumpist - to coin a word.
Instead, I am someone who looks at DJT and I think that there is something there that I, with my Canuckian background, do not see at all clearly. Absolutely he is that loud, brash, rude, crude, lewd (and now renewed!) person but there is more than that there; how much more (less?) I cannot say. Put differently, he is much more than the surface self caricature. Is that good? Bad? Otherwise? That I don't know but, as with 2016 - 2020 we will see.
Firstly, I didn't think so. Secondly, it wouldn't matter if you were, as long as we both enter into a conversation with good faith and with the objective of learning something. Which we both clearly did, and which I definitely have. 😊
The people in New York have known Trump forever and that's why he lost New York by about a million votes. They know him for being the slimy clown that he is.
That is a good take, one I did not think of. But it should serve as a useful lesson to non-Americans.
Agree 100%
Thanks. I did a little piece on this on my own blog à while back. https://theprairiemaritimer.com/my-american-cousin/
Thanks for the link. Interesting & informative read.
I appreciate that.
Diving somewhat into the data, it looks like in many ways that as those who created the modern political world in the 1960s pass away, their influence is becoming less and less.
In the US, educated urban and suburban boomers created the modern political world. It was their demographic might that led both the Dems and the Republicans. A Clinton or Bush could never even get enough money to run in a primary today.
In Canada the impacts will if anything even be more stark. The 60s were an epoch in Canada. Many scholars split Canada into pre-1960s and post-1960s. The political vehicle of the urban educated boomers, and non rural French Quebeckers, The Liberals, created the modern Canada. Now that these demographics are losing their numbers there are "barbarians at the gate."
Joe Rogan in the US, one of the major themes of his hugely popular and influential podcast is the debasing of urban educated boomer truths. In Canada we have Jordan Peterson and Pierre Poilievre.
Make no mistake, these folks are the ones who are on the outside of the old political consensus in Canada and the US, and they want in. The Liberals and Dems are going to have to do better than offering yet more free stuff for boomers and urban educated women to stay relevant.
Interesting stuff. Trump clearly got his bloc of low propensity voters to turn out, and Harris once again showed that the Democrats are still tantalized by the 1-off turnout boom of minority and young voters when Barack Obama ran for the first time in 2008.
A couple of factors I'm curious about are 1) how much better would Republicans have done *without* Donald Trump on the ticket? and 2) how much did being a woman hurt Kamala Harris? Trump won, so clearly being Trump wasn't an insuperable handicap. Still, that sweeping electoral college win is rooted in a pretty slender popular vote margin despite all the factors that set the election stage in Republicans' favor.
Harris didn't make a big point of running as a woman, in contrast to Hillary Clinton in 2016. However, it looks like her campaign was picking up signals that being a woman was a problem for her, indicated by things like Obama scolding Black men for "not feeling it". Again, I don't think this was a determinative factor, but I suspect it wasn't insignificant either.
I think this happened because the Democratic side of the ledger didn't understand what was at stake in this election. Hillary was a lousy choice. Biden was a lousy choice. Harris was a lousy choice. Trump is a walking fucking catastrophe. The election was straight up about whether the US stays a democracy of follows Hungary into an effective dictatorship.
Trump now owns the 2 critical houses of government and the Supreme Court. He is the law. The GOP will now consolidate their control, and by 2026 it won't matter what the voters want. Expect a national abortion ban, don't be surprised if birth control is also restricted. Voter suppression laws will be passed. GOP states will redistrict further. And and all environmental restrictions will be stricken from the register. Anything that ends up on court will die at the hand of SCOTUS. The US is now a dictatorship.
Trump will settle lots of his imagined scores. Ukraine is finished. What the new DOJ does to Democrats remains to be seen. If he becomes too unhinged, the GOP might push him aside, pardon him, and Thiel puppet Vance will take over. I say that believing Trump's medical state is already such that he does not have his faculties. He got the GOP top the promised land; minority white Christian rule. He's now expendable like everyone in politics. We now live in a completely different world.
I'm sure many of you are thinking "Davy's off his meds again". That's fine. I really really hope I'm wrong. I'm not wrong. Lets talk again in a year. The tea leaves should be telling by then.
You’re being ridiculous.
Let's talk again in two years.
I fear that David is right on the money. Trump doesn't care about democracy. In fact, his psychopathy makes him unable to understand why anybody else's viewpoint could possibly matter. America's right wing billionaires have been working towards this since the '60s. They are the ones that engineered getting the corrupt stooges close to the Supreme Court. Trump got the ball across the goal line for them. They don't need him anymore.
Most of the billionaires lean to the right and, oddly enough, have gigantic egos. The idea that your vote counts as much as theirs is really offensive to them. And they feel that democracy is very unfair to them because they have to pay taxes and they don't need anything. There's a reason George Soros is painted as a demon. He puts a lot of money into pro-democracy causes. When people are spitting on Soros' name it means they aren't thinking about people like Charles Koch. It's people like him that are really pulling the strings to smother democracy. If you want to understand more I recommend a book called "Democracy in Chains" by Nancy McClean.
Great column! The one point I have is around the longer-term question whether the Trump 'coalition' and turnout increases in Hispanic, first-time voters, etc. will survive under his presumptive successor in 2028. Will nominee Vance (or whoever) hang on to these gains or will the Republicans fall back the way Harris did in '24 from Biden in '20. To my mind, the long-term forecast for both parties is very unclear (and will largely depend on how successful Trump is in 'fixing' the economy, at least in the eyes of many voters).
I'm curious where all the 'experienced pollsters' were during the campaign. The results were not even close to the predicted nail biter. The Monday morning quarterbacking is just tiresome. I feel sorry for the United States.
Just because a coin's odds are 50/50, it doesn't mean that I should expect it to land on its edge.
Battleground states are likely to be correlated, so even if odds are 50/50 between the two candidates, it's not shocking that the outcomes would break on the same direction.
The pollsters generally weren't predicting a nailbiter - and what is sort of lost in the reporting (even in this very good piece) is that the polls' margin of error allowed for the result we saw on Tuesday night. There's information which will likely never be known - how did pre-election day voters lean, and thus did the Dems really get crushed by the "stay at home" crowd, which seems to me likely parsing the numbers, along with what Alex points out about Trump's success in getting younger voters to the polls on Election day - but the piece points out the obvious and knowable data, and asks good questions about where each party should dig for the next time around - when Trump's personality won't be a direct factor, for example, and when the Democrats will have had a change to run a proper horse race to identify a candidate.
The polls essentially got this right. A small systematic error (within the stated margin of error) towards Trump translated into a clear electoral college win.
The popular vote was pretty close - 50.2% to 48%. The blowout was in the electoral college vote. Unfortunately that gives idiot news people and shrewd Republicans a reason to use the words like "landslide" etc. even though it really wasn't.
It’s actually simpler than all this. Trump was promising action, Harris was offering vibes. She seemed to have no ability to articulate any actual policy positions.
People voted with their wallets.
She had lots of policy positions but the opposition kept saying she didn't and the news media treated her a lot more harshly than they treated Trump. Her biggest single anchor was incumbency. She needed to distance herself from Biden and she didn't. Also, I find it very strange that even though Biden did quite a good job his team never managed to get that message out in any significant way. Meanwhile Trump is going on about America's turned into a garbage dump and people bought it.
Respectfully, disagree. She may have had 80 pages of policy positions on her website, but in a sit down impromptu interview (with ANYONE) she displayed zero ability to articulate a single coherent policy position.
Her entire campaign basically boiled down to “I am not him, trust me”
Harris was a weak candidate and hastily chosen.
If the Democrats were smart, and serious about defeating Trump, they would have nominated someone Republicans could like, rather than someone they liked.
Insightful piece, thank you, Matt and Alex.
For something a bit lighter, yet clever, I'd like to recommend Line users consider following @JustineBateman (yes, the one that played Mallory Keaton on Family Ties), who is now a filmmaker. Her post-election voter reaction #SocialMediaVideoCritique on her X feed is comedy gold.
Also, check out her piece on the death of Hollywood, and what she thinks will replace it. Interesting perspective.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91220089/hollywood-is-dead-according-to-justine-bateman-heres-what-comes-next
This is EXTREMELY useful. Thank you.
In the "Gender X Race" infographic, the numbers appear transposed (-39 and -24) for "Latino Women". Should it be Latina Women?
All you need is Latino and Latina.