Let’s face it: We knew that Trump would win back in August

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”
— Richard Feynman

It’s not just about the polling. It’s about the stuff that people didn’t want to talk about. The three big topics? Immigration, Inflation, and Infrastructure.

On the topic of Immigration, this was one of the big reasons that Trump got elected the first time in 2016. Undocumented permanent visitors showed up and competed with the documented for stuff like housing (and when we have a housing shortage, that becomes more and more of a problem). The continual drumbeat against anyone who called for stronger borders, more immigration enforcement, or even a slowdown of immigration, was “that’s racist!” and not discussions of the policies or whether the existing laws needed to be enforced.

People just put up an “IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE” sign in their gated community and talked about how good the food was at the new fusion place downtown.

Ironically, when very strong Democratic strongholds had to deal with an influx of Undocumented visitors, the cries went up. Chicago. Los Angeles. New York City. More humorously, Martha’s Vineyard.

Immigration didn’t stop being a problem; it just stopped being something that people were allowed to talk about. No matter what demographic you were in, it was something that people tried to get you to shut up about. Hispanic, Asian, or, notably, from the Dominican Republic, you got squelched when you tried to talk about immigration.

The “They’re eating the cats!” moment in the debate was embarrassing in the moment but what it ended up doing was bringing a direct focus on the fact that a lot of small towns in a lot of small regions had a lot of immigration despite there being no debate on it. No, not Undocumented Visitors… these were the beneficiaries of an executive order that resulted in Visitors being moved into towns where the Documented Residents were already experiencing troubles.

Factory owners bragged about the workers they brought in as the city leadership was complaining about the stressors locally: education, housing, and whatnot.

And the Documented were not feeling heard.

And that has costs at the ballot box.

Inflation was another huge problem. Over and over again, people would complain about Inflation and, let’s go back to the usual responses:

No, it’s not.
It’s there, but it’s *TRANSITORY*.
Inflation has gone up but wages have also gone up (with an implied “therefore *YOUR* wages have gone up”).

Over and over again, complaints about the economy were hit back with some weird combination of denial and gaslighting. There was even a period where there were two consecutive quarters of negative growth and, instead of acknowledgments that the traditional definition of “recession” was “two consecutive quarters of negative growth”, the argument was that we needed to *CHANGE THE DEFINITION*.

Over and over again, when the topic was brought up, the discussion didn’t happen. “No, it’s not!” was the response. People were having a rough time and the response kept coming back: No. You’re not.

And that has costs at the ballot box.

Finally: Infrastructure. Remember the big 2021 bill that Biden passed? The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act? The fleet of promised charging stations at a price tag of $7.5 billion dollars has, as of December 2023, resulted in a *SINGLE* charging station in Columbus, Ohio. Another $3 Billion was given to California’s High-Speed Rail project that, once upon a time, would have connected San Francisco and Los Angeles and is now much more modestly connecting Merced and Bakersfield. Well, not connecting them *YET*. The estimate is that we’ll start seeing trains running in 2029. There’s other stuff in there, of course. For example: A vaping ban on Amtrak.

Better doesn’t seem to have built back.

The conversations about this were squelched and the promises turned out to have been empty and the conversations about *THAT* were squelched.

And that has costs at the ballot box.

As such, it’s not surprising that the undecideds in the voting booth remembered their concerns being waved away and the tradesmen sighing and pulling the lever for Trump and their wives and sons doing the same (though I will grant that their daughters did dutifully pull the lever for Harris).

The direction that things were going before the disastrous debate in June continued to go on… it’s just that, when Biden was replaced by his Vice-President, the media changed the subject. Or tried to.

What they failed to take into account was Allan Lichtman’s “Keys to the White House“. This is a thirteen-point checklist that has allowed Lichtman to correctly predict the outcomes of each presidential election from 1984 to 2012. (2016, man. The keys didn’t work on 2016.) But they started working in 2020 again and, get this, Nate Silver has argued they now indicate that Trump is going to win.

I mean, the polling wasn’t great… the right track/wrong track never looks good for the incumbent when it’s more than 10 points over on the “wrong track” side and pointing out that Harris was merely Biden’s VP is weak tea because she’s still associated with the incumbent’s team… even if John Nance Gardner was right about what the vice-presidency was (or more precisely was *NOT*) worth.

The polling of the Decideds pointed to Harris… but the polling numbers should have had us looking at the Undecideds breaking for Trump. Which they did.

“I don’t feel like I have a voice at all”, they said.

And that has costs at the ballot box.

On top of all that, we’re not even talking about the Vice-Presidential Debate, and it’s not even mentioning the war between Iran and Israel, and it’s not even talking about the ports situation. Let alone the so-called “October Surprise”.

And, seriously, we should have seen this coming. But we were too busy fooling ourselves.