How Could This Happen?

I know you expected this to come out on November 6, but I just could not do it.  I knew the Presidential election was going to be close and I knew that Trump had a good chance of winning.  But winning by 5 million votes and 69 Electoral College votes?  I did not expect that.  It took a couple days for me to think about how to respond.

Clearly, the pollsters and the Democrats missed the mark in understanding the mindset of the electorate.  The polls I understand – many people don’t tell the truth or change their minds or whatever.  But the Democrats?  One would think that the party of the people would understand their audience.  This was an epic failure. And that is saying something about the Party that’s important.

There are going to be a lot of folks proposing reasons for this historic loss.  Here are the ones I think are most important for the Dems to recognize:

1. They did not convince middle class white people (and a few others) that the party has their best interests at heart and that it has concrete ideas how to improve their lot.
2. Not being Trump was not a convincing message.  Clearly moral fiber, sexual misconduct, care for democracy, respect for the people in the Armed Forces, rejection of racist, misogynist and bullying jargon and attitudes were not persuasive arguments.
3. Democrats failed to recognize the damage done by inflation.  The party that misses “it’s the economy stupid” is doomed to failure and that is just what the they did.  The complicated arguments about why Trump policy was as much to blame for inflation as Biden policy were (are) too complicated to resonate with most people.  From a marketing perspective the message must be simple and clear, i.e., headlines like “Kennedy Dead,” “Dodgers Win” get the message across well.  “Go to my website and read my 12-page explanation of inflation” does not move voter attitudes
4. Moreover, the Dems ignored and/or refused to fight back, and/or completely failed to address the key issues that were critically important or tremendously irritating to many voters: identity politics, “woke” ridiculousness, and illegal immigration. The centrists never publicly confronted the far left progressives and the Democratic Socialists of America. This allowed their opposition to make the whole party complicity in the nuttiness
5. The Harris campaign decided not to recognize and then act against the fringe craziness produced by the progressive left’s world view (the white colonial oppressors vs the people-of-color oppressed).  They failed to respond to student protests that moved quickly from demanding a cease fire to supporting Hamas, advocating violence, and publicly demonizing Jewish students and faculty. They failed to realize that politically correct verbiage, e.g.  insisting on saying “pregnant people” instead of  “pregnant women” because women presenting as men were also able to give birth, appears both wacko and threatening to the “average voter.”
6. Sad as it is to say, particularly for the father of two daughters, America was not ready to elect a woman, even less so a woman of color.  The amount of misogynistic commentary on social media jumped up markedly after the election result was called
7. A flood of purposeful misinformation on social media from the right, from Russia, from China, and from Iran had a large impact on voting preference.  The day after the election the traffic on X (formerly Twitter) dropped precipitously as the bot-driven algorithms were turned off
8. Democratic messaging was too intricate, too intellectual, and too hard to come trippingly off the tongue.  Think about it this way: thanks to the internet, jokes can now be spread around the world in less than 24 hours.  I get a text or email, chuckle and send it to 10 people I think will get a kick out of it and the multiplier effect takes over.  People get jokes quickly.  The concepts are simple and the descriptions easy to understand.  Contrast that with Einstein’s theory of relativity.  Published in 1905, physicists are still working to fully understand the implications and validate the conclusions of the theory through experimentation.  Most people have no idea what the theory actually describes.  Concepts that are complex and intricate, i.e., have real intellectual content, take a long, long time to understand.  Thus, Trump got a lot more mileage out of his Arnold Palmer “dick joke” than Harris got out of her explanation of inflation
9. The Harris campaign continued the Biden belief in the “basic goodness” of the American people.  Turns out that for reasons of protecting their white privilege, lowering their grocery bills, being scared by the perceived implications of unregulated  transgender medical care and support, horror that immigrants (legal and illegal alike) are eating pets, belief in the demonstrably false conspiracy theory that FEMA is taking people’s houses, and other inanities, the American public will cave on moral and ethical issues.

This is an existential crisis for the Democrats.  The only big category of voters Harris won was college-educated older people.  Guess what?  That is not what most of America actually is and the Democrats missed it.  The Party is fractured and often members of their own party do more damage than the Republican opposition.  If the they cannot figure out how to create a solid all-together front like the Republicans have and do not address the 10 points above, they are in real trouble.  And they are in real trouble with a capital T.

PS.  I have noticed that in the days following the election, the items I receive daily in my spam folders (both email and text) have dropped by approximately 75%.  That is the one positive I can cite from this fiasco.