History Was Made in 2024 Election, Now What?

Luis A. Mendez

Boricua. Floridian. Theist. Writer. Podcaster. Film Critic. Oscars Predictor. Occasional Psephologist. Member Of The Critics Association Of Central Florida, The International Film Society Critics, And The Puerto Rico Critics Association.

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36 Responses

  1. Jaybird
    Ignored
    says:

    To be perfectly honest, I think that the Democrats need to ask themselves “where did we screw up?” and actually come up with an answer this time that isn’t “we cared about people too much”.Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird
      Ignored
      says:

      Being both Black and Female didn’t compensate for also being an empty suit who was terrible at running for election.

      I found all of the happy talk on how super qualified she was pretty jarring. It sounded similar to how Biden was super competent and not affected by age.Report

    • JoeSal in reply to Jaybird
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      says:

      That would require a reflection in the mirror. We have talked about self reflection before at OT, and it is a waste of time. All they will see is the cardboard cut out of what they see as THE GOOD.
      It’s just not worth the time to continue to point that out and continue to get degraded for it.Report

    • John Puccio in reply to Jaybird
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      says:

      I’m watching MSNBC and they are predictably saying Kamala would have performed better if she was a 6 ft tall white man. So, no, don’t hold your breath for meaningful self reflection about how Dem policies, track record and candidate were wildly unpopular. Better to blame democracy itself. Apparently 1 in 4 black men in this country are now white supremacists.Report

      • InMD in reply to John Puccio
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        says:

        I saw a softer version of that when I popped on CNN for a few minutes. I imagine we are still a couple weeks away from the full post mortem, but it’s clear to me that’s pure cope.

        And thats coming from me, someone who was hoping Harris would pull it out. It baffles me how many people can’t see the flaws in that angle.Report

        • John Puccio in reply to InMD
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          says:

          It’s never the one thing, especially in this instance. The reasons for the ass-whoppin are legion. But my guess is that the post-mortem will fixate on the Biden / Harris swap out and neglect the root causes for the landslide. In a lot of ways, the Dems shot their shot by knifing Biden in the back and gave themselves a better chance trying to thread the “joy” needle with Harris. It was the right move. Biden is a vegetable. But it’s not why they took such a huge loss.Report

      • Dark Matter in reply to John Puccio
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        says:

        A white man with her (lack of) talents and (lack of) history would never have been given this opportunity.

        There would have been dozens of obviously more qualified people in that talent pool (various former or current governors).Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird
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      says:

      They screwed up back in 2008 by promising Hillary Clinton that if she didn’t make a stink about Barack Obama winning the primary then they’d support her in 2016. That’s why we didn’t get Sanders back then, and because of the dolchstosselegende we didn’t get to have him in 2020 either, even though he was the right guy for both moments.Report

      • DensityDuck in reply to DensityDuck
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        says:

        Or, maybe less flip: They screwed up by looking at the demographic shift from 2016 Trump to 2020 Trump (as in, “all demographics except White College-Educated Males went more for Trump in 2020”) and saying “oh, that’s just a fluke” and not “uh-oh”.Report

        • DensityDuck in reply to DensityDuck
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          says:

          https://x.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1854168624119877887

          Staggering class realignment/shift in working class

          Harris lost DESPITE major shift of affluent voters her way

          2020: Trump wins voters over $100K, 54-42*
          2024: *Harris* wins voters over $100K, 54-45

          2020: Biden wins voters $50K-$100K, 57-42
          2024: *Trump* w/ voters $50K-$100K, 49-47

          2020: Biden wins voters under $50K, 55-45
          2024: Trump massive improvement w/ voters under $50K, 49-48

          (*) the original tweet had an error in this figure which was corrected by a later tweet; the corrected figure is presented here.)Report

          • DensityDuck in reply to DensityDuck
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            says:

            Kontextmaschine wrote about how Obama’s election was when he had expected Americans would decide that Blacks were White (like with Kennedy’s election, where the Catholic Ethnics – Poles, Irish, Italians – became White) and a lot of people, including him, had been surprised when that didn’t really happen.

            But maybe that’s this election, the one where Blacks become White and we can finally admit that “uneducated poor people who run on emotion will vote by vibes and do dumb things if you don’t manage them properly” isn’t something that becomes Racist And Inherently Wrong if you say it about black people.Report

            • InMD in reply to DensityDuck
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              says:

              I still think it’s early for all of this but I think you’ve got two factors. Factor one is that our demographics are very different than they were in the immediate post civil rights settlement and even pretty different than they were 20-30 years ago. That’s just an objective fact but our political parties and establishment haven’t really pivoted to it.

              Second there’s reason to suspect that we are slowly depolarizing around race. Big picture that’s a good thing, but it does mean that old play books around race are going to be less effective. I mean, the big fact that never seems to enter all of this calculation is that something like 70% of hispanics are (or at least identify as) white, and the fact that someone’s crusty old grandpa may not see them that way isn’t of very limited relevance to their opinions and voting behavior.Report

  2. Derek S
    Ignored
    says:

    Thank God the right person won. I am shocked at how strong a win it looks to be too. I fully believed he would not win the popular vote, but is looks like he will.

    Wow!

    I am glad this repudiates the unprecedented levels of attacks President Trump has endured:
    – Multiple lawfare cases
    – Multiple times by ranking Democrats called him fascist, threat to democracy, Hitler, and other inflammatory statements exciting violence against him
    – 2 assassination attempts

    Yet the blame falls on self inflicted wounds by you guys. The two biggest being:
    1) Not article 25ing Biden a couple of years ago when you knew he was incapable. But being in power meant more than doing the right thing. I found watching the elderly abuse on live TV depressing. If you had done the right thing, Harris or another candidate would have had much more of a chance. And you would have let and elder statesman have his twilight years relaxing and enjoying the incredible 40+ years of service, instead of doping him up on drugs, dragging him on to a dolly and wheeling him out.
    2) It is the economy (inflation), stupid. This above all killed Harris. Because it hits the lowest incomes the most. This happened in two parts:
    – It is all well and good to want a move to green and electric vehicles, but forcing gas prices out of the range of the lowest income and not caring about it in the least breeds resentment and they start to realize you do not give a crap about them over your agenda.
    – 20% inflation on commodities that the lowest income buy of feed their families. If they have to choose between feeding their families and voting for Trump, vs not feeding their families and voting for Harris… You saw who they voted for. Yes, yes, Trump is not going to magically bring prices back to 2019. We all know the damage is done and the US is terrified (rightly so) of deflation. Yet Trump oversaw the surge in wages and they can hope he does the same again. Ironically this is one area that Covid helped, so I cannot say Trump really did this, but belief is belief.

    Still, I thought the abortion issue was going to hurt the Republicans much more than it looks to have. That hit against Republicans seems to have fallen off from the 2022 election. When that decision can down I thought it was morally right, but politically stupid and that it would rewrite the Republican surge all the way through 2024.

    Glad I was wrong about the 2024 part.

    Now for one prediction:
    – Suddenly a cop killing someone of color will being back in the 24/7 news cycle and riots will ensue. Because none of that happened under Biden’s people’s watch, honest.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Derek S
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      says:

      Nah; none of that has anything to do with it. People vote for vibes these days, and they want the vibe Trump’s got. Anyone who’s betting on him having a particular policy beyond What Pisses Off The Guys I Hate Right Now is kidding themselves, but there’s plenty of people who love that as a policy plan, so they voted for him.Report

      • Dark Matter in reply to DensityDuck
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        says:

        People liked the Trump economy more than the Biden economy and don’t really care about “policy”.Report

        • DensityDuck in reply to Dark Matter
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          says:

          Bullshit. If it had been Vance on the ticket instead of Trump then they might have tried to run on “economics” but that wouldn’t’ve been enough to put him over (because they’d have actually asked “so what are you gonna do about it” and he wouldn’t have had an answer.)

          They want Mean America, and Trump promises them that. If you think something else significant is going on, then that’s a lie you’re telling yourself because you don’t want to imagine that the people standing next to you are Mean.Report

          • Dark Matter in reply to DensityDuck
            Ignored
            says:

            and he wouldn’t have had an answer.

            Not engaging in “stimulus” spending when the economy is overheating is an answer. You’ll notice the GOP mostly voted against that.

            They want Mean America

            You telling the deplorables that they’re racist scum for not voting Team Blue has been shown to not work.

            Blue is going to try to rip apart whatever Team Red players tries to be President, so whoever they put up needs to be able to deal with that. Romney’s superior ethics and such didn’t shield him. Trump’s vileness does.Report

        • CJColucci in reply to Dark Matter
          Ignored
          says:

          Trump was handed a healthy economy and, after a while, things went bad — not entirely his fault, but on his watch and, to some extent, because of what he did. Biden was handed a very unhealthy economy, and faced the same problems faced by most of the rest of the world. We hacked our way out of it, better than other countries did, and eventually broke the back of inflation without pitching ourselves into a recession. Now Trump will be handed, again, a healthy economy, which, I predict, he’ll f**k up. And his fans won’t care.
          What people “like” is a false memory. Gas prices are down to Trump-era levels (I paid $2.99 a gallon this past week), egg prices are back close to normal after avian flu (I paid $2.99 a dozen last week), and things are humming. But “vibes” beat reality in the short run.Report

  3. Dark Matter
    Ignored
    says:

    RE: “Now What?”

    Now we all take a deep breath and hope really hard that most of the anti-Trump hysteria is exactly that.

    We drop the various legal cases again him. Yes, he got away with it. So did OJ, move along.

    Trump should be given a chance to govern in a normal way, he won the election.
    If he decides to test the guiderails again we need to make them hold.

    We will see a lot of chaos in the next 4 years, the chaos itself isn’t a threat to the republic.Report

  4. DavidTC
    Ignored
    says:

    So here’s the thing: Kamala Harris did not make mistakes while campaigning.

    This is actually pretty easy to notice, if she’d made mistakes while campaigning would be talking about her failure with a certain demographic group or failure with a certain state. We aren’t. She was just less popular than Trump in a general sense.

    Kamala Harris failed for two reasons, and the one that was her fault was because she was not, in any way, going to solve any problem for the American people. To be clear, neither is Trump, but she wasn’t pretending to, because Democrats have long since given up on actually doing anything that the American people want.

    The Democrats will not learn that lesson, of course. They are paid way too much by corporate interests to not learn that lesson. A huge chunk of them seem to think an ideal world is Democrats and Republicans barely indistinguishable, directly in ‘the middle’, aka, exactly where corporate interests want them.

    The voters are not happy with that, they have not been happy with that since… Well, that’s arguably the reason that Obama won, but he didn’t really change anything that would have gone against the corporate interests, he just did health care, a thing corporate interests _wanted_. And then we got Trump, when it became clear that nothing else was going to happen. And that is why we ping pong between corporatist interest Democrats who don’t do anything, and an insane criminal lunatic who doesn’t do anything.

    Democrats won’t notice that, they will of course blame the left, I’ve literally already seen a post on this site for that. And in an extremely odd and convoluted way they are correct, but they want to blame the left activists, when in fact the people who failed to vote for them are the entire giant swath of the American population who would vote for Democrats if they thought Democrats WOULD F*CKING DO ANYTHING. Instead, they either fell into misinformation and voted for Trump, or they just didn’t vote.

    (The other reason she failed was the media, which completely just decided act like Trump was normal that electing a convicted felon was normal, that he wasn’t almost incoherent, that he wasn’t literally threatening them, etc.)Report

    • DavidTC in reply to DavidTC
      Ignored
      says:

      Rereading that, allow me to rephrase “And that is why we ping pong between corporatist interest Democrats who don’t do anything, and an insane criminal lunatic who doesn’t do anything.” By appending ‘to help people’ to both halves.

      Donald Trump does plenty of things. He will do plenty more. None of them will help the people in the slightest, and in fact some of them are going to seriously injure people in general, in addition to people in specific that either he or bigots dislike and have chosen to target.

      But because he has lied, (because this is how fascism works), he has convinced enough American voters that targeting those specific groups are going to make their lives better.

      That’s how fascism always wins, because they are willing to lie about a solution to a problem that is real, and everyone else refuses to do anything about. (Sometimes the problem is literally unsolvable, but it wasn’t here.)Report

      • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC
        Ignored
        says:

        Trump was elected because voters liked the Trump economy more than the Biden economy.

        Trump did some things that probably encouraged growth (bureaucracy reform, encouraging oil/gas, new free trade deal) so he gets to claim things.

        Biden did something that probably encouraged inflation, that’s what people are pissed about at the moment.

        Claiming “none of this will help/matters” is an invitation for your guy to get fired. Trump being awful probably hurt him. It wasn’t enough.Report

        • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter
          Ignored
          says:

          …new free trade deals? Bureaucracy reform?

          What the hell are you talking about? Please explain how Trump’s trade policies have helped literally anyone at any point, or how enacting tariffs is free trade?

          And the voters are not actually pissed at inflation, despite the media framing it that way. They’re pissed that wages have not followed inflation.

          Which, of course, is because corporate interests have bought both parties, so they will do absolutely nothing to impede corporate interests shoveling money to the wealthy, as they have been since the ’80s.

          Nor will the media actually explain this or call it out, so we are left with enough Americans to vaguely think it is default of immigrants or corporate policies about Black people or something that we get fascism. (Which is actually is the exact same reason we got fascism last time.)

          Edit: Also, people did not like the Trump economy. Like, at all. By the end it had fallen to pieces, although some of that was due to covid, but it already was not doing well. Unemployment more than tripled. That’s why the memes are running around lying and showing covid gas prices, pretending that that means the economy was doing well. If the economy actually was doing well, they’d be showing graphs.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC
      Ignored
      says:

      Donald Trump has demonstrated that it’s possible to win staggered elections.

      The Democrats could run Harris in 2028 (maybe with Shapiro this time) and finish what Biden, the most successful president since FDR, started.Report

  5. DavidTC
    Ignored
    says:

    Incidentally, in 2020, Joe Biden got approximately 6% of the registered Republican voters.

    This year, with actual Republicans on stage, with Harris, her actively promising to put Republicans in the cabinet, making every outreach to peel Republicans away from Trump, and with both the coup attempt and the legal judgements against Trump…

    Harris got 6% of registered Republican voters.

    And lost 20 million Democratic voters that just wandered off somewhere and didn’t bother to vote.

    What could we possible make of this, going forward? I know, maybe the Democrats should move even _farther_ to the right and reject the radical left. Appeal to centrist Republicans who reject Trump _even harder_. GOTV for them. Bus them to the polls, if need be. If they try hard enough, go right enough, maybe they can get that number up to 7% by 2040!Report

  6. Slade the Leveller
    Ignored
    says:

    Among other winners today we have the United States Capitol Police.Report

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