The Democratic Party has received a heavy rebuke from voters, who once could be counted upon to remain in support of the party.
It is mind boggling that 46 percent of Latinos, 39 percent of Asian Americans, 20 percent of African Americans, and working class Whites abandoned the party that promoted civil rights and social justice reforms over the 90 years since Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the 1930s.
But their “abandonment” is more centered around the key issue of the economy, the reality that the COVID 19 Pandemic created high inflation which finally, but belatedly, has been overcome in recent months.
Overall, the economy has done well, but since people think first about the issue of groceries, gas, and other costs that had been mounting, they decided to avoid dealing with the other issues so important out there, such as survival of democracy, abortion rights, and foreign policy concerns.
The inability of Joe Biden to deal with the problem of immigration at the border also was effectively used by Republicans, along with creating the false issue of transgender rights.
Donald Trump is not going to keep the support of the groups who voted for him, once they realize he is only concerned about corporations and the wealthy, and is on the road to another massive tax cut, adding trillions to the national debt, and imposing tariffs that will raise the cost of living for the people who decided to support him.
Donald Trump is assured to antagonize and alienate groups that will realize they have been taken advantage of, and as long as the Democratic Party comes up with new proposals and plans and have a dynamic primary season for the 2028 Presidential nomination, the party will be able to retrieve what they have lost!
Well Professor… wait for the now upcoming Wall Street crash due to this incompetent person’s lack of understanding of the “Micro / Macro” economics that he is going to pass through.
As they say in the military, “BOHIC!”
(Bend Over Here It Comes)
He will destroy our economy just like he did last time.
Plan and protect your personal finances based on this projection.
My friends are saying their biggest fears are another pandemic.
A good possibility with Trump promising Anti-vacation / Anti-Science RFK Jr. control of the public health agencies!
Trump’s mass deportations are going to hurt the economy as well.
Trump’s campaign manager, Susie Wiles, will be named his White House chief of staff.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/07/politics/susie-wiles-trump-chief-of-staff/index.html
I hear that Mike Pompeo and Marco Rubio are potential cabinet picks.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-20-who-would-be-running-top-jobs-trumps-second-administration-2024-11-06/
You’d think at least a few of the wingnuts would wonder about this:
The right-wing claims about voter fraud have suddenly vanished
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-republicans-voter-fraud-claims-election-2024-rcna179105
Racist text messages – some with references to “slave catchers” and “picking cotton” – have been received by children, college students and working professionals from unrecognized phone numbers in the wake of the presidential election.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/07/us/racist-text-messages-post-election/index.html
Ugh! I don’t know how much more I can take of this nightmare!
Trump wants to build a new missile defense shield with help from former NFL player Herschel Walker.
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4970165-trump-herschel-walker-missile-shield/
The media will never admit it but THEY PLAYED A HUGE ROLE IN THIS through their relentless negativity towards Biden, failure to cover VERY important Democratic legislation, also relentless negativity towards the US economy – which is basically the envy of the rest of the world, etc.
This is not productive.
Harris and Biden camps blame each other for loss.
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/08/kamala-harris-biden-advisers-blame-election
‘Straight-up BS’: Democratic chair attacks Bernie Sanders’ election critique.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/07/bernie-sanders-democrats-election
Bernie is completely full of crap on this – in fact, the Biden administration was VERY pro-worker, pro-union, etc.
RFK Jr.: Make America Sick Again
Rebecca Solnit captures my reaction perfectly.
Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/us-progressive-election-trump-maga
A guest on Andrea Mitchell’s show today basically said the same thing that Bernie is saying: that the Democratic party has become the party of wealthy, educated elites, who look down on the working class. The Democratic Party has lurched too far to the left, becoming increasingly driven by “woke” social issues that put a primacy on identity, while being dismissive of issues that working-class voters of all races and ethnicities care about — like crime, inflation and the border.
I’m keeping in mind the fact that Democratic Senate candidates in swing states ran far ahead of Harris on Tuesday night. This suggests that swing-state voters may have been more discounted with the Biden-Harris administration than with the Democratic Party writ large.
Also, North Carolina. Democrats won the governorship and several other key races down the ballot.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/presidential-race-democrats-good-election-north-carolina-rcna179167
Trump is all but certain to do many things that the public won’t like. I think that Democrats will have an excellent shot of regaining the White House on a wave of anti-Trump backlash in 2028.
Bob Casey lost his Senate seat.
https://www.alternet.org/casey-jr-mccormick-victory/
It’s looking more and more like Democrats may lose the House.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/house-democrats-narrow-majority-path_n_672d7e34e4b03941587e3879
An unnamed Biden aide said that Harris’ key mistake was eschewing her initial populist messaging for a more vanilla approach that included bringing on campaign surrogates like billionaire investor Mark Cuban.
https://www.alternet.org/harris-strategy-cost-election/
Some lessons after the defeat:
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/11/08/lessons-and-hope-after-the-defeat/
Lessons and Hope After the Defeat
It was a grim Election Day, but there lessons to learn and ways back from the abyss.
by David Atkins
November 8, 2024
There’s no way around it: Donald Trump’s unequivocal win in the 2024 election will almost certainly have devastating effects. His promised tariffs will hike prices, causing inflation to spiral higher. His mass deportations will sunder families, depress economies, and increase the costs of goods and services. He will appoint hundreds of ideologically driven far-right judges, including to the Supreme Court, who will determine policy for the rest of our lives. He will abandon Ukraine and likely Taiwan, encourage Benjamin Netanyahu to do whatever he wants, ally himself with dictators, and turn both foreign and domestic policy into tools of enrichment for himself and his wealthy buddies. He will do all he can to turn every agency, from the Department of Justice to the IRS, into tools of harassment and retribution. America is about to become far more like Putin’s Russia than we want to admit. It’s all extremely bleak.
But there are valuable lessons and a ray of hope buried in the bad news.
1) This was a tough election to win. Democrats faced enormous headwinds going into this election. Almost every incumbent party in industrialized democracies has gotten electorally obliterated in post-COVID elections due to generalized anger about many things, especially inflation and the cost of living. Joe Biden accomplished many wonderful things for the country but is the most unpopular incumbent president since Harry S. Truman. The Democratic Party recognized the need for a replacement far too late, and Vice President Kamala Harris had too little wiggle room to distance herself and escape the vortex.
Even so, Harris ran an effective campaign. Data is still coming in, but it appears that she performed significantly better in battleground states than in deep blue or deep red states—which means that insofar as it went when she and Trump went head-to-head in messaging, she outperformed the national baseline. But that’s also the bad news.
2) Democrats cannot cede control of the media environment and make up for it during campaign season. The Harris campaign dominated fundraising, ad spending, and the field operation. It didn’t matter much. The average nationwide shift to Republicans was about 6 points.
Republicans now dominate all new media arenas and most old media as well. Impressions of conservative content dwarf that of the left and center-left across social media, from YouTube to Facebook to TikTok. Elon Musk turned Twitter, the closest thing the world has to an international public square, into X, a far-right conspiracy dystopia filled with neo-Nazis and Russian bots. Fox News dominates cable news, and Sinclair has taken over much of local TV broadcasting. On the radio, Rush Limbaugh clones and Christian supremacist pastors dominate the radio dials. Anyone on the right with even an ounce of talent or charisma gets extensive checks—sometimes directly from Russia!—to write, create, and produce content.
There is nothing even close to this on the left, and much of what does exist is devoted to bashing the Democratic Party. Instead, the center-left throws billions at paid media and field organizing in the final year of an election cycle for minuscule returns compared to the right’s long-term investments in altering the information landscape.
Combined with social media algorithms that reward outrage farming, this results in an electorate awash in anger and disinformation and locked in a right-wing media bubble that facts and common decency do not permeate.
3) Scripted is the kiss of death in modern presidential politics. The vibes and poll numbers for Harris were best preceding and, in the run-up to the Democratic National Convention, when she and Tim Walz were winging it on messaging and more willing to go off script. No matter what the polls and focus groups may have suggested, “They’re weird” worked better than stumping with Liz Cheney. Trump ran a campaign with almost no discipline, but it didn’t cost him anything. The more disciplined Harris became, the more she struggled. The more carefully Harris sought moderate Republican votes, the less buzz she seemed to receive. She had an exceptional debate performance, which caused Trump to slink away in fear of a rematch, but she reverted to a careful and conciliatory approach. It probably wouldn’t have made enough difference to win, but lessons should be learned.
The last Democrat to win a convincing and unequivocal landslide was a charismatic unknown named Barack Obama. Joe Biden succeeded in 2020 mainly because of his unscripted gaffes, not despite them. Democrats need to learn to embrace authenticity and the risks that come with it. The alternative is far worse.
4) There is still hope. Despite Trump and his allies’ desire to turn the United States into Putin’s Russia or Orban’s Hungary, the American system of government that makes it so hard to create positive change also limits the risks of adverse change. Amending the Constitution is nearly impossible. Federalism means that blue states can offer significant legal resistance to the worst MAGA actions. State laws will still apply to vigilantes doing violence on conservatives’ behalf. Much of the judiciary will not give way to Trump as quickly as Aileen Cannon or Samuel Alito. Republicans do not have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and even if they hold the House, they will be vulnerable to dissenters there. The military will not readily obey orders to fire on American protesters, and anyone who obeys that order will be subject to prosecution once Trump leaves office.
Moreover, Trump is 78 and in declining physical and mental health. There is no question that Trump has a charisma that causes many people who disagree with him on policy to treat him as an economic genius who will help their pocketbooks but not a serious threat to their social rights. Those people are about to find out the hard way—but in any case, Trump’s special gift does not apply to J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, or Ron DeSantis. The public sees them as the far-right goons they are. No obvious popular successor to Trump is waiting in the wings for 2028.
Americans are also forewarned. Half of us see and know Trump for the threat that he is. The broadly liberal American culture that made Barbie an astonishingly successful film, Taylor Swift the biggest pop star in history, and that proudly embraces marriage equality and reproductive choice isn’t about to start doing the bidding of manosphere trolls like Charlie Kirk or Matt Walsh.
Finally, Republicans still must govern an angry and divided country. The GOP has always been much more talented as an opposition party than a governing one. No amount of far-right media will be able to hide the negative consequences of Trump’s misrule. Elon Musk has even promised that Americans will suffer “temporary hardship” due to his economic shock policies.
If democracy continues to exist, and especially if liberals can fight back better in social media spaces, the backlash can and should be fierce in 2026 and 2028. Fascism rarely prevails for long. With strength and courage, we can toss it out of power before it does too much damage—and then hopefully reform the systems that allowed it a chance to win office temporarily. America has found its way out of the darkness before and can do so again.
I very highly disagree with Bernie’s criticism’s of the Democratic Party in 2016 and I very highly disagree with them now.
Trump’s mass deportation plan would cost $968 billion.
Elon Musk was on a call that Trump had with Zelensky. Sounds like Musk is going to be co-president.
There’s going to be an anti-Trump march in DC a few days before he gets crowned king.
The Never Trumpers make a good point.
https://digbysblog.net/2024/11/08/the-never-trumpers-make-a-good-point/
Kamala Harris’ campaign didn’t ignore working class voters.
The Biden administration was staunchly pro-labor, subsidized Obamacare and managed to avoid a recession. But Trump and Republicans sold resentment, and it worked.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/biden-harris-working-class-vote-trump-election-rcna179186
Democrats have no viable left-of-center media creating & nurturing narratives to counter the massive right-wing media ecosystems.
https://bluevirginia.us/2024/11/lesson-from-2024-election-democrats-get-crushed-in-messaging-because-there-is-no-viable-left-of-center-media-creating-nurturing-narratives-to-counter-the-massive-right-wing-media-ecosystems
Correct, Pragmatic. What Bernie Sanders said is UTTERLY absurd.
Lord help us! Donny boy junior is going to be heavily involved in picking out Trump’s cabinet.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/don-jr-says-his-fathers-second-administration-cabinet-must-be-dumber-than-him