The 2024 Election Revisited – Some Perspective 11.15.24

When speaking with friends about this past election cycle, many lament on the divisiveness of current politics. Divisiveness in politics is nothing new. We are just more aware of it because of the 24-hour news cycle and social media.  And this has ramped up our anxiety, which feeds into the divisiveness. 

Until recently, it was literally impossible for people to obsess about news and opinion.  The 24-hour news cycle and social media has certainly changed that.  There is a wonderful article written by Joel Miller that describes how his disengagement with the 24-hour news cycle and social media has proven healthy. He states that, “very few of the obsessed seem to be concerned that chugging around this limbic cocktail of dread and disgust might be bad for their mental health- maybe even their souls.” 

I personally love sausage. Even so, I would not want to watch it being made 24-hours a day. So, even if you love politics, which most of us do not, getting drenched with it every day cannot be good for the soul because, like sausage, presidential politics has some ingredients you would rather not see.

Presidential politics have always been divisive in the United States. When the two-party system began at the end of the 18th century, both George Washington and John Adams predicted that the political party system would jeopardize democracy. They had reason to believe this. With most of their support in the North, the Federalists favored George Washington’s and Alexander Hamilton’s policies. Meanwhile, the Republicans, with most of their support coming from the South, were led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

The animosity between the Hamilton/Adams faction and the Jefferson/Madison faction was especially palpable. Allegations made by both the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s would shock most people today.  During the election between Adams and Jefferson, one cartoon showed Jefferson standing before the “Altar to Gallic Despotism” and preparing to burn the Constitution, while an American eagle threatened him. Another cartoon depicted Jefferson as an “anarchist” tearing down the government, with the devil offering to help.

Those shocking allegations, believed by people, divided our society and country. Thankfully, the electorate was not fed these allegations and slander 24-hours a day. Andrew Jackson, our 7th President, embraced this form of politics. When he was elected, fights broke out at polling stations with people being killed. Thankfully, our society has evolved so that this behavior no longer occurs. But has it?

Maybe we would like to believe that our society has become much more civil and that our politicians have risen above such pettiness.  It wasn’t that long ago that Westbrook Pegler, a Pulitzer award winning columnist who used to write for the Chicago Tribune wrote the following about Robert Kennedy. “With luck, some white patriot of the Southern Tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.”  We would be shocked today if any “Newsfeed” said anything like that. Even Clyde Tolson, the Assistant Director of the FBI weighed in on Robert Kennedy when he said, “I hope someone shoots and kills that son of a bitch.”

As history would have it, someone would assassinate Bobby Kennedy right after he won the California primary. However, it would be a Christian Palestinian instead of a right-wing fanatic. The assassin said he did so because of the United States’ support of Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War – a war during which Israel captures the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. And Israel would, despite international restrictions from doing so, start setting up permanent settlements in the West Bank.

Kennedy was a polarizing politician, much like Trump is today. After learning of Kennedy’s death, Eugene McCarthy, a respected but little-known senator from Minnesota, who had just narrowly lost the California primary to Kennedy said, “He brought it on himself.” McCarthy a respected politician, was basically saying that Kennedy deserved it.  So, I cannot even imagine what 1968 would have been like if we had 24-hour news cycles and social media. 

And even if Kennedy had not been assassinated, most people believe that he would not have received the nomination over Hubert Humphrey, who had the Democratic political machine behind him, much like Hillary Clinton did in 2016. And even though Kennedy was popular among blacks and many younger people, he was not liked by many older Americans because he represented radical change. So, even if he had somehow gotten through as the Democratic Party nominee, most pundits believe Kennedy would have lost to Nixon in the general election for some of the same reasons that Harris lost to Trump in this past election.

Before I launch into the reasons the democrats lost the 2024 Presidential election, let me state for the record that I am not a registered Republican or Democrat. During the past 12 presidential elections, I voted Republican 6 times, Democrat 5 times and Independent once, in 2016.  And in 2024, I voted the Democratic ticket even though my stance on most policy issues lined up more with the Republican platform. The reason was simply this – Trump has crossed too many lines. And because he has crossed those lines with impunity, the question must be asked, what other lines will he cross as President?  One friend, who I respect, pointed out, “I can separate the candidate from his policy.” I understand that because I have done the same thing in the past when I voted for Bill Clinton. However, at some point, the candidate crosses a line. 

Although I am going to focus on what the democrats did wrong during this election cycle, my comments in no way should be interpreted as support for the current Republican Party. That party is severely flawed. And like many Americans today – I believe that neither party truly represents me – a libertarian who believes in limited government, free enterprise with some controls, and social justice. 

The Republicans, like the Democrats, have flawed constructs. I am not so cynical as to NOT BELIEVE that both parties want fairness and equality for all Americans. They differ on the definition of equality and fairness. Democrats believe fairness is equal outcomes. This is impossible to achieve, and you create chaos in trying to do so.  Republicans start with a better vision – equal opportunity. However, they then create policies that do just the opposite, creating their own chaos. 

So, how did the Democratic Party get here, and we end up with Trump – again?

Let’s start with the presidential campaign of 2016, when the Democratic Party Machine decided to “anoint” Hillary Clinton as their nominee. Clinton was a flawed candidate. Yet the Democratic leadership refused to believe it. All other candidates were “discouraged” from running against her in the primaries.  However, several much weaker candidates did decide to run against her, including the very liberal Bernie Sanders. Clinton barely won Iowa and lost convincingly to Sanders in New Hampshire. Clinton would eventually secure the nomination. However, Sanders’ ability to take significant votes away from Clinton should have been a wake-up call. Instead, the Democratic Party buried its head in the sand. The Democratic National Committee even manipulated the primary process to ensure that Clinton won the nomination. 

And the Democratic Party buried its head in the sand again in 2024. 

When Biden ran for President in 2020, he promised to serve only one term and would have centrist policies. Even then, he barely won that election. Some pundits say that the only reason he won was because of the pandemic. But he did win. But barely. The democrats should have realized that such a narrow victory over a flawed personality like Trump signaled a major shift in the mood of the average American, much like the shift that occurred in American politics in the late 1960s. 

The 1960’s was a time of extraordinary change, with the Johnson administration shepherding through many liberal reforms and policies. Many Americans felt left behind. As a result, voters were ready to push back against the War On Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement, policies advocated by Humphrey and the Democratic Party. With Nixon promising Law And Order and stability, he barely won the popular vote.  But he did win the electoral college vote by a landslide. Nixon and the Republican Party had realized that the Democratic Party had overplayed their hand – too much liberalism.  And this would carry forward with the Republican Party winning the presidency in five of the next six elections. Even so, the Democratic Party was still considered the party of the working man with solid backing from the unions.

Following the Republican domination of the White House, Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 serving two terms and Obama elected in 2008 serving two terms. One could argue that Clinton and Obama had fairly successful tenures as Presidents. And with Trump running against Hillary Clinton, the Democrats thought they had the 2016 election in the bag. But a fundamental shift had occurred in the country. And that shift combined with a flawed candidate created the first Trump presidency. 

What was that shift?  As in 1968, the average American, especially hard-working blue-collar Americans, felt left behind. They no longer recognized the America they loved. And it was not just blue-collar workers. Most small business owners and many business leaders thought government was getting too big with too many regulations. The average American was beginning to rethink open borders and open trade, realizing that those policies had taken away the ability to live the American dream of a middle-class life. So, Trump’s tough stance on China and immigration resonated. Recognizing this, he ran a populist campaign as an outsider with a message of Make America Great Again. And Clinton did herself no favors by doubling down on free trade and immigration and calling those same hard-working blue-collar workers “deplorables”.

After losing the 2016 election, it seemed that the Democratic Party did recognize this trend. So, Biden, who was thought of as a centrist, promised to be a one term President. He also promised to bring a divided country back together with a centrist White House administration. Neither happened. Influenced by frustrated liberals, Biden’s policies were decidedly liberal, especially on immigration.

And as the self-proclaimed savior of democracy, Biden decided to run again despite dismal approval ratings. And this is when the Democratic Party should have insisted on an open primary process. But they did not, taking away the ability of Americans to have a voice in the matter. Even sitting presidents are not automatically anointed by their party.   Back in 1968, the sitting President, Lyndon Johnson, could run for another term. However, he dropped out of the race after narrowly winning the New Hampshire primary because he realized he was not the best candidate going forward. The primary process made that clear. And a primary process would have done the same with Biden. But alas, we will never know.

Although alleging rigged elections when there is no evidence to support such claims is not the same as avoiding a primary, it is a little hypocritical that the Democratic Party accuses Trump of not following democratic processes.  That last statement does not mean that Trump and other Republicans are off the hook. But the Democrats cannot necessarily claim moral higher ground on the democratic process when they themselves avoid it when convenient.

And we now get to Biden’s age. Wow. That debate against Trump was an unmitigated disaster. But Biden’s administration and his handlers knew months, if not years ago, that his mental facilities had diminished significantly.  And this makes the decision to not run primary races even more unforgivable. But Biden does decide to step down, eventually. And this is when the Democratic Party actually had a chance to recover. And even if you agree that it was too late at that point to run primaries, the Democratic Party could have opened up the nomination process (really open it) before the democratic national convention by welcoming qualified candidates and having open debates. But they were afraid. So, the party leadership and media elite anointed Harris, another flawed candidate.

Why was she flawed?  She was seen as too liberal.  During 2020, when Harris was seeking the democratic nomination, she lost badly in the primaries, dropping out early. It was obvious that she was too liberal for registered democrats. One of the reasons that Biden’s age was an issue is because most people could not get their heads wrapped around the possibility of Harris being President if Biden became incapacitated. Yet, when Biden steps down, Harris is anointed!

So, we now have Harris, a flawed candidate, running at the top of the Democratic ticket. Unlike Hillary Clinton, she is not a flawed candidate because of her personality. She is a flawed candidate because of her history – her history as a liberal candidate in 2020 and as a Vice President in a perceived liberal White House.

Yet, because she is running against Trump, she has a chance. In fact, early polling gives her an edge, despite her political baggage. My theory is that those early polls reflected hope that she would run a race distancing herself from Biden. That maybe she would hear the American people and realize that the country cannot continue down the same path. A path of too much illegal immigration, open trade that is not fair, globalism that was hurting the American worker, cultural attacks and perceived elitism. But instead of running a bold campaign that clearly identified her stance on these issues, she runs an uninspiring and cautious campaign with no clear messaging, other than one – anti Trump. This means that she and her party continued to bury their heads in the sand. And, as a result, she and the Democratic Party lost the election. And they clearly lost, losing all seven battleground states.

I would argue that Harris did not lose the election. Instead, the Democratic Party itself lost the election. And the Democratic Party will blame anyone other than themselves for this loss.  The false narratives that they and some of the elite media will tell themselves will be many. Some may even sound plausible. 

Here is one that borders on the ridiculous.  “Biden should never have dropped out of the race. We should never have pushed him out. It is Harris’ fault.”  In hindsight, Harris should have insisted on an open nomination process for the Democratic Party. But maybe even she had no choice but to follow the will of the party elite. We may never know. My opinion is that if Biden had run, the loss would have been even bigger. 

Here is one that is plausible. “America is not ready for a woman President, especially a black woman.” I think there are still misogynists among us, including our President-elect. However, I do not think that was the reason Harris lost. If that were true, why would the female vote for the Democratic Ticket drop from 57% in 2020 to 54% in 2024? Are women misogynists? And we have elected a black president. So, if some people want to hang onto that narrative, let them. It’s just sad that our 24-hour news cycle and social media is giving that narrative lots of fuel. We do love victims.

Another narrative that is plausible is that the economy cost Harris and the Democrats the election because Biden was blamed for high inflation. Even though the facts state otherwise, (much of the government spending due to COVID that helped fuel inflation occurred during Trump), it is true that many working-class Americans blame Biden for wages not keeping up with inflation.

One thing is true. The Democratic Party has lost the working class. For the first time in many years, a Republican won the popular presidential vote, grabbing higher percentages of votes, even in blue democratic states.  Trump did so because the Democratic Party has now lost both the white working class and the Latino working class vote. And they just may lose the black working class vote (if they have not already) if they do not get their heads out of the sand. 

And why are the Democrats losing the working class? I think they are losing them for the same reasons that many Americans who are not working class voted for Trump – Elon Musk and other business leaders can hardly be described as working class. What else explains why the Stock Market rose considerably (people are now calling it the “Trump Bump”) after Trump won the election. Business leaders like Trump too. 

So, why did Trump win? Two years ago, I told friends that there are four basic reasons that people may vote for Trump. And this seems to be supported by new data from Cambridge University’s Political Psychology lab. Almost nine out of ten voters who supported Donald Trump for US President believe that America’s values, traditions and future economic prosperity are under threat – double the number of Kamala Harris supporters. The study states that, “Our results highlight that part of Trump’s appeal is in the values he communicates, and the way in which he manages to respond more directly to the sense of threat perceived by many US voters,” 

So the following are the four main reasons I believe people voted for Trump. There are surely others, but I believe the following were the drivers. 

Immigration – in many wealthy countries right now, people are worried that too many immigrants are coming into their countries without assimilating. Americans feel the same way. They see it in their communities. My brother, who works at Sam’s Club sees non-English speaking people coming in with their government checks at the beginning of each month.  This is real people.  And if immigrants are entering illegally, it’s even worse. There is no question that Biden’s administration gets a grade F on this one. By the time he realized his mistake, it was too late. The Republicans were not going to let him off the hook, even if it meant blocking legislation that would have helped fix the problem. 

Globalization – in theory, globalization is good for the world. It brings up the standard of living for everyone.  By definition, that means that the standard of living may not increase as fast in the United States as the rest of the world as the effects of globalization set in. This has to happen if we are trying to reach global economic equilibrium. On paper, that sounds ok – until reality sets in for the average working class American. 

As Chinese, South Korean, and Mexican workers get higher paying jobs and their standard of living goes up, Americans get products at a lower cost. However, this means that Americans have fewer jobs, and some of them are high paying manufacturing jobs. This shrinks the middle class in America. This is reality. Combine this with foreign products being subsidized by other countries. Combine this with America subsidizing the defense of other countries. Combine this with other countries blatantly stealing processes and technology from the United States. You get the picture. When Trump says it is time for the Chinese to pay for their unfair trade practices and for Europeans to pay for their own defense, it resonates.

Moral and Cultural Disconnect – this one is tricky. The average American feels that their way of life is changing too fast – that we are losing our values. And the term woke incapsulates this moral elitism with the Democratic Party using identity politics to split our society apart instead of focusing on what we have in common. This trend has become rampant in our Universities, where students are no longer taught how to think, but what to think. Give them credit, the New York Times recently contained an article titled “The University of Michigan Doubled down on D.E.I. What went wrong?” The article describes what goes wrong when an organization or country tries to dictate what to think through a bloated bureaucracy. And in so doing, eliminates free speech, even though it claims the opposite.  Whether they want to admit this or not, the current leadership of the Democratic Party is guilty of this. 

And the Trump campaign leveraged this by associating the Democratic Party with policies that undermine long held values. An example is the ad campaign that ran during the election cycle that accused the democrats of supporting transgender women to compete in women’s sports and tax dollars being used to pay for gender-reassignment surgery for prisoners. These are policies that the democrats seemed neither proud to champion nor prepared to disown. So, they seemed to be caught in no-man’s land. Some analysts believed that those ads alone cost the democrats 2.5% of the total vote!

Intellectual and Economic Elitism – In his new cover story for The Atlantic, David Brooks asserts that a diploma divide is driving American politics and that Trump surged back into power with the support of millions of high-school-educated voters who are furious at the college-educated elite. He claims, and I agree with him, that today’s leadership class is not governing well and is not trusted and respected by a wide swath of Americans. And that today’s leadership class has used the system to lock in its privileges.

And we do not even hide it. For example, our media classify people as being college-educated and non-college educated as if being in one of those categories makes one smarter, more thoughtful, open-minded and better.  And this is so embedded in our society that we do not even recognize it in ourselves when interacting with others. And the Democratic Party, whether justified or not, has been associated with intellectual and economic elitism, and is now being blamed (ironically) for the current economic disparity gap that has only widened during the last 20 years. The following is truly startling – the academic-performance gap between kids who come from affluent families and those who come from less affluent families is greater than the academic gap between white and Black students in the age of Jim Crow.  We do not have a race problem. We have a caste problem.

In summary, Americans are willing to take a flyer on Trump because they believe that his policies and his approach will address these concerns. Time will tell whether that bet was worth the risk. I personally do not think it was. Some of my friends thought otherwise. I sure hope to hell they are right. 

For those of you that are currently in despair, I leave you with the following message from Seth Godin, my favorite blogger. 

We live in a media culture where catastrophe has become a business model. More catastrophe leads to more clicks and more profits. It’s not a surprise that people are brought into a doom loop.  

This sort of amplified catastrophe never ends, and it can easily make us feel helpless. In fact, that’s part of its goal. Endless catastrophes, endlessly examined, magnified and perfected.  

Experiencing failure in advance is only helpful if the narrative causes us to take productive action. Better is possible, paralysis isn’t useful.  If the story isn’t helping you move forward, focus elsewhere. Catastrophizing is contagious, but we can work to stop the spread and get back to work.

So, let’s get back to work in making each of the communities in which we live places that connect us and into societies that stress the things we have in common instead of what makes us different.