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12 minute read

November 10, 2024, 10:15 AM

That was certainly an interesting election night.  First of all, I couldn’t help but think that the news coverage reminded me of an episode of Deal Or No Deal, in that there was a lot of yakking amongst the talking heads, then it’s suddenly time to make a call, which felt like opening a case.  And then depending on what was in the case, we all went “yay” or “awwww”, and then finally at the end of the night, we open up our own case and find out who the next president will be.  The only thing missing was the banker.

That observation aside, the night felt a lot like election night in 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump.  There, Elyse and I were at home, watching the election results roll in, and we saw a lot more states get called for Trump than we expected to see.  I remember when they called Ohio, Elyse said to me, “Trump is going to win, isn’t he?”  I was doing the math there, and I didn’t want to agree with her, but it was looking like that was going to be the case.  Then the next morning, we found out that it was.

This time around, I was at work, and checked in on the election on my breaks.  I couldn’t help but notice that with every check of my phone, Trump remained ahead of vice president Kamala Harris.  I expected a Trump lead early on due to the red mirage/blue shift phenomenon, where precincts with lower populations, which typically tend to vote Republican, get counted quickly because they’re small, giving an early bump to the GOP candidate – thus the red mirage, because the Republicans get that early boost.  Then as larger population centers, which typically tend to vote for Democratic candidates, get counted, the Democrats catch back up – thus the blue shift.  So when I saw all of the early returns come in and saw that Trump was leading, I was like, okay, red mirage, nothing to worry about here, because it will correct itself later on.  Then after another trip across the line, I checked my phone and was surprised to see that Trump was still leading.  I was starting to think, okay, when is the blue shift going to happen?  As it would turn out, it never came, as Trump ultimately pulled out a victory over Harris.  I would check my phone after each trip across the line, and watched as Harris’ path to victory got narrower and narrower.  Then I watched it some more when I got home.  Once Pennsylvania had been called for Trump, I realized that it was over.  At that point, in order for Harris to make it to 270, she would have had to win in every single state that remained in play, but one of those states was Alaska, which is a very reliable red state.  In fact, Alaska has only cast its electoral votes for a Democratic candidate once in its entire history as a state, in 1964 for LBJ.  Every other time, it’s voted for the Republican, and there was no reason to think that this election would buck that trend.  It was a certain sinking feeling to know that the path to a Democratic victory had fully closed, and a Harris presidency just wasn’t going to happen.

I admit that I was a bit surprised about this result.  I didn’t really think that people would really vote Donald Trump in again.  I didn’t think that we’d see a second president pull a Grover Cleveland and serve two nonconsecutive terms.  I was fully prepared to start this entry by saying, “We finally have our first woman president, and Donald Trump has been defeated.  The next time that I hear his name, it needs to be followed by the words, ‘has died’.”  In other words, I was ready for him to go away and be done with him, and not hear another peep about him until his passing some time in the future.  Allan Lichtman, who devised the “Keys to the White House” prediction system, predicted a Harris victory, because even with the late candidate swap from Biden to Harris, and thus the loss of the incumbency key, there were still enough keys to make a Harris prediction according to Lichtman’s model.  Noting Lichtman’s very good track record, I was satisfied with that, which led to a major case of election fatigue for me.  I fully anticipated that Harris would win, and now it just felt like we were awaiting the inevitable, especially after Elyse and I both mailed our ballots in, meaning that we were officially out of play.

I was initially very surprised that Trump won, with some of the surprise’s coming from Lichtman’s 13 keys model’s missing the mark this time around.  However, in the days following the election, spending a lot of time in the train cab thinking about the results and tossing it all around in my head, it started to become a lot less surprising.  I also gave my Journal entry about Biden’s poor debate performance (you know, the one that seemed to age like milk) another read, and I started to realize that I was onto something with that one.  The more I read my past writings and the more I thought about things, the result that we saw not only became less and less surprising, but it started to feel like it was an inevitability, and that I had largely nailed it in that entry back in July.  And a lot of it tied right back in with things that I had discussed before in my postmortem about the 2016 election.

I think that if I was to point to the moment when the Democrats lost the 2024 election, it would be when the Democrats devoured Biden for that debate performance, and Biden capitulated to their demands.  Nobody seemed to agree with my argument that Biden’s lackluster performance was the result of fatigue from his having presidented really hard in the days leading up to that fateful debate, and everyone wanted him to exit the race.  I considered that whole argument to be somewhat disingenuous, because if his faculties had declined to the point that he shouldn’t stand for reelection, there should have been no issue invoking section 3 and/or 4 of the 25th Amendment over it to set him aside as unfit to serve, either voluntarily or involuntarily, and let Harris function as acting president.  But no one ever called for that, leaving Biden in place until the end of his term, and just replacing him on the Democratic ticket for the next term.  This whole idea of Democrats’ devouring candidates is nothing new, as it’s happened every time a Democrat encounters any bit of controversy.  There were calls for Bill Clinton to resign following the breaking of the Lewinsky scandal.  Then-Senator Al Franken resigned following the revelation of his engaging in some questionable behavior in the past, which led to a lot of calls for him step down.  Then there was Virginia governor Ralph Northam, who was the subject of a lot of controversy following the revelation of some questionable costume choices in his medical school yearbook, and many calls for him to resign his office.  The problem with this is that no human being is perfect.  People make mistakes in life, they learn from them, and they move on.  And if Democrats expect a sitting officeholder to be absolutely perfect all the time, disappointment is inevitable, and if they demand that every single officeholder who has ever made a mistake in their life resign their office or end their reelection campaign, there will be no one left to serve.  The difference between this situation and, say, the one with Al Franken, though, is that this one cost the Democrats the presidency.  Democrats think that they’ve taken the moral high ground, but they forget that nice guys finish last.  They probably need to be reminded that for all of their taking the high road and demanding that their candidates be perfect people, that they just got beaten again by a man who has run multiple businesses into bankruptcy, has had multiple failed marriages, has said some pretty awful things about the treatment of women, and more recently, has been convicted on multiple felony charges.  I don’t know who the Democrats are trying to fool with this whole idea of purity, because they just lost to someone who is no saint in every way imaginable, and, dare I say, is proud of it.  In other words, the Democrats need to get over themselves with that, because it only serves to hurt them.

After devouring Biden, the Democrats made a crucial mistake in nominating Harris: she was a my-turn candidate.  As the sitting vice president, Harris was the ultimate my-turn candidate, being next in line for the presidency and all.  However, historically, voters don’t take kindly to those kinds of candidates, and more often than not, they tend to reject them.  Sitting vice presidents who run for president don’t have a good track record, and when Harris’ loss is calculated in, the success rate since the 12th Amendment was ratified in 1804 is about 28.5%, as five sitting VPs have failed to achieve the presidency while only two have succeeded.  The odds are better for the vice president’s winning a presidential term in their own right if they first attain the presidency following their boss’s death or resignation.  The success rate for those accidental presidents who became their party’s nominee in the election following their accession is 80%, i.e. out of the five accidental presidents in the 20th century, all of them except Gerald Ford were elected in their own right.  So, statistically, Harris’ odds would have been better if Biden had stepped down immediately and let her succeed him under the provisions of section 1 of the 25th Amendment rather than remaining as vice president.  Whether that would have made a difference to today’s voters is another matter entirely, and I am not qualified to assess whether it would have.  But it’s interesting to think about.  It also goes to show what I said in July about the vice presidency, that politically, it’s a dead end job.  You’ve served in national office, so you’re now too high-profile to seek a governorship or a Senate seat.  And if you’re too high-profile for a statewide role, let’s not even think about running for a congressional seat (though it has happened before).  The vice presidency is typically the end of the line, and, historically, the role was used a way to get rid of politicians that others found inconvenient by giving them a role that does nothing, i.e. getting kicked upstairs.

Speaking of vice presidents, I’m sure that I’m not the only one who thought that Tim Walz was an odd choice of running mate.  He had a background that balanced with Harris, but he was from Minnesota, i.e. the safest blue state in the country, a state which has not given its electoral votes to a Republican since Richard Nixon in 1972.  I said in August that Walz was a surprise, expecting to see her nominate Mark Kelly from Arizona or Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania instead, with an eye toward picking up one of those states on account of hometown pride, i.e. “that’s our guy!”  However it is worth noting that, assuming that everything else remains the same, even if Harris had won in both of those states, Trump would have still won 282 to 256, but all the same, it feels like they didn’t even try to make a grab at a swing state with the vice presidential nominee.  In 2016, Hillary Clinton at least picked a running mate from a swing state, i.e. Tim Kaine from Virginia, which ended up being the only swing state that she captured.

Another problem with Harris’ campaign was baked right into it, in that the voters never were given any say in her selection as the nominee via the primary process.  She was just kind of foisted on us late in the process, long after the primaries had all been settled and everyone had pivoted their focus toward the general election.  It really felt like we were subjected to a bait-and-switch.  It seemed somewhat infantilizing as well, because my take on it, at least, was that the grownups decided that Biden was no longer fit to be our president, i.e. they determined that we had chosen the wrong candidate via the primaries, and so now they were unilaterally overturning that result and choosing the correct candidate for us.  This feels like the ultimate DNC wet dream, as they chose the candidate themselves without any input from the voters, just like they had threatened to do in the past via the superdelegates.  And as it turned out, they couldn’t get away with that by the voters.  We all voted for Biden in the primaries, and then the DNC pulled the football away and gave us Harris instead.  It was far too late for the nominee to withdraw from the race and be replaced in order to still do right by the voters.  In order to replace Biden and still do right by the voters, Biden should have announced that he was not going to run for a second term a year before he did.  Then all of the various Democrats could have gotten moving and we could have had a proper nominating process and been able to choose amongst all of them.  But then, considering that Harris dropped out of the 2020 race before the primaries started in earnest for lack of funds, I suspect that she would have been left behind fairly quickly again, and clearly, the grownups wanted her in the spot, even if the voters and the donors didn’t.  And for all of these shenanigans to get her there, Harris performed worse than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, with Trump’s winning the popular vote for the first time ever, and scoring a larger electoral vote margin in 2024 (312 vs. 226) than he did in 2016 (304 to 227).

Will the Democratic Party elite ever learn to trust their voters?  Probably not.  But if they want to win, they really should learn how to trust them.

This especially comes into focus when you recognize that Democrats are not reliable voters.  The conventional wisdom is that higher turnout favors Democrats, while lower turnout tends to favor Republicans.  The idea is that while there are fewer Republican voters than Democratic voters overall, Republican voters tend be a more reliable voting bloc, while Democratic voters won’t come out unless you give them a reason to do it, i.e. they don’t vote in every election as a matter of routine.  Going off of the popular vote numbers that Wikipedia gives, there were 128.8 million votes cast in 2016, which gave us the first Trump presidency.  Then in 2020, we had 155.5 million votes, i.e. about 26.6 million more than 2016.  That unseated Trump and put Biden in the White House.  In other words, higher turnout favored the Democrats.  But then in 2024, there were only 145.5 million votes cast, i.e. just under 10 million fewer than in 2020.  And for that, we ended up with another Trump presidency.  High turnout favors Democrats, and low turnout favors Republicans.  I’ve also noticed that Democratic voters will only really turn out in large numbers when the party is down and out, and trying to claw its way back from irrelevancy after a large defeat.  But then once Democrats are in power, their voters tend to get complacent and sit out the elections, which explains why the Democrats can’t seem to hold onto their majorities for very long.  For example, after 2004, the Democrats continued to be shut out of the presidency and both legislative chambers, as they had been since 2000.  But in the 2006 midterms, the Democratic Party successfully got the vote out and won back control of both chambers, and then in 2008, with Barack Obama as their nominee, they managed to increase their majorities and take the presidency.  But then in 2010, with the Democrats in power, turnout was lower, and the Republicans, with newfound influence from the Tea Party movement, gained control of the House of Representatives.  Barack Obama said on multiple occasions during his presidency that if we wanted certain progressive reforms, that he needed us to elect more Democrats to Congress, but the voters never gave it to him.

All of that also goes to demonstrate another bit of conventional wisdom: if you vote, you get the government that you want, but if you don’t vote, you get the government that you deserve.  The Democrats weren’t able to get out the vote like they did in 2020, and the voters ended up the government that they deserved.  I did my part and voted early by mail, but apparently, not all of the voters understood the assignment.

Notwithstanding the candidate swap on the Democratic side, the political environment was a bit interesting this time around.  This was the third election in a row where the voters rejected the establishment candidate in favor of an outsider.  In 2016, Hillary Clinton was very much the establishment candidate, while Trump was the ultimate outsider, with no government experience of any kind prior to his running for president.  Then in 2020, by virtue of his being the incumbent, Trump was, by default, the establishment candidate, and was defeated by Joe Biden, who at that point, was the former vice president under Obama, who had sat out a term after leaving thew vice presidency.  With Trump as the incumbent, and Biden’s having sat out for a term, Biden could run as something of an outsider, and he won.  Then this time around, Harris, as the sitting vice president, representated the establishment, and she got spanked by the voters, who went with Trump, who, like Biden in the previous cycle, was able to run as something of an outsider after having been out of power for four years.  I don’t know if that shows a longstanding level of discontent with our government, but it’s a trend that I noticed that I haven’t seen anyone else comment on.  The last time that we reelected a president who represented the establishment was Obama for his second term in 2012.

I also felt like the Biden administration didn’t get nearly the credit that it deserved for its successes, and was blamed for stuff that resulted from things that were set in motion before they came on, but where the full effects of those things didn’t manifest themselves until the Biden administration was in power.  Looking at the numbers, the Biden administration was fairly successful economically, with good job growth, as well as a soft landing without a recession when it came to inflation.  However, I suspect that the rise in prices really did them in, even though a lot of that stemmed from pandemic-related disruptions that they had no control over (i.e. their policies didn’t cause it).  But it’s hard to blame the voters for voting with their wallets, seeing the high prices of food and fuel and blaming the incumbent administration for it.  It’s not entirely fair, but it’s understandable.  But at the same time, the voters also just elected a guy who has explicitly said that he is going to raise taxes via tariffs on imports, which will definitely cause higher prices as companies pass on the costs of those new import taxes to consumers.  It’s essentially the wall all over again, as in that case, he said that we would build a wall and Mexico would pay for it, but in reality, any wall would be entirely funded by US taxpayers.  This time, Trump has claimed that the tariffs would be something that other countries would have to pay, but again, the reality doesn’t match up with the statements, because that’s not how tariffs work, and despite this, the voters ate it up once again and voted for him.  I don’t know what to say about that one.

Either way, this is going to be an interesting four years, as the people voted for Trump and gave him something of a mandate, either by voting for him directly, or indirectly by sitting the election out and not voting.  The people have gotten the government that they deserve, and once again, I largely blame the Democrats for it, who botched it up in just about every way imaginable, while the Republicans just kind of did their thing.  With this election done, it behooves the Democrats to start working on their midterm strategy in order to take back the Congress, because historically, the party that holds the White House tends to lose seats in the midterms, and so if the Democrats play their cards right, they could stand to make some big gains.  We’ll see what happens, but I have little faith in their ability to pull it off, though I am willing to be surprised.

Categories: National politics