There were many theories about how this election would turn out. I catalogued almost a dozen myself.
But in the end it turned out to be about the fundamentals. No party had ever won a presidential election when its incumbent president had approval ratings this low. Joe Biden’s approval hovers around 40%. Most elections are about the economy. So was this one. The economy was identified as far and away the biggest issue for voters. Despite a lot of great top-of-the-graph numbers, too many voters were still smarting from inflation. And finally, no party has won a presidential election when this many voters — three-quarters — thought the country was headed in the wrong direction.
All of that turned out to be more than Kamala Harris could overcome. But I thought she turned out to be an excellent candidate who ran a pretty much flawless campaign. She worked hard. I thought she had the right message. She didn’t lack for money or organization. As Democrats start to point fingers in the coming days, you won’t find me pointing one at her.
Democrats, including me, hoped and thought (turns out there was more hope than thought going into that) that abortion would be the big motivating issue for voters despite how they felt about the economy. I also hoped that Harris had left Biden’s poor approval ratings with him and chartered her own image. And I thought that half of those who thought the country was headed in the wrong direction thought that because a man like Donald Trump could be the nominee of one of the major parties.
We were wrong in all cases.
Now the question becomes the survival of American democracy. Trump has a mandate to do something about the economy, though exactly what isn’t clear. Inflation is pretty much under control now, unemployment is low, real wages are doing better, the stock market is at record highs. It’s not clear to me what exactly the problem is that Trump has to fix. And slapping on more tariffs while deporting 11 million members of the work force will not help.
What Trump does not have is a mandate to dismantle our system of government. I admit that I just can’t get my head around voting for a man who talks about using the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents and using the U.S. military to quash domestic protesters, a man who refers to journalists as “enemies of the people” and uses language reminiscent of Hitler. I get that half the nation is frustrated. But frustrated enough to vote for this guy? Apparently so.
What I don’t know is how many Trump voters just don’t take him seriously when he talks about these things, how many disapprove but look the other way, and how many actually support his authoritarianism. I guess we’ll find out.
Source link
