I closed yesterday's post by asking why Harris lost the popular vote, when Trump got even fewer votes in 2024 than he did in his losing 2020 effort. Back then, she and Biden beat Trump by about seven million votes. Their 2020 vote count was about ten million more than what Trump got this year. In 2020, Biden and Harris polled fourteen million more votes than Harris and Walz did in 2024. Where did that support go? How did some fourteen million Democrat votes vanish ?
A day's reflection reveals a simple answer that feels utterly persuasive to me, lacking any evidence to the contrary. This racist sexist country just couldn't stomach the thought of a black/asian woman president. So fourteen million people who were willing to accept her as understudy to a tall, elderly but vigorous, white male in 2020, balked at casting her in the lead role in 2024. (In case you're wondering, 91% of black women voters chose Harris.)
Sure, there were other factors, but they all pale in significance to this. Anything that suggests Trump enhanced his appeal to this or that demographic - young white and black men have been suggested as culprits, for example, and hispanics - founders on the facts that these inroads were marginal at best, and that Trump's overall electoral appeal, far from enhancing his base, actually saw its shrinkage. The pie chart of his support may have seen some minor distribution of weight among the pieces, but as a whole Trump's pie was smaller this time around.
To explain why Harris's pie was even skimpier, one other factor that has been suggested makes sense to me. Biden had squandered the loyalty of the generation of younger voters who had powered him into office in 2020. His excessive support for Netanyahu's inhumane and illegal prosecution of the war in Gaza, by continuing to provide munitions for it while contenting himself with tut-tutting and occasional finger-waving at the horrific, arguably genocidal Israeli military tactics and strategy, comprehensively soured younger voters on him. This disenchantment tainted Harris by association. As Vice President she was not directly responsible for Biden's ill-considered, self-destructive policy towards Israel, but neither could she clearly disassociate herself from it without violating the loyalty demanded of one in her office. Anyway, the intelligence of American voters, particularly younger ones, does not generally rise to recognizing such considerations. Presumably this could explain why a bunch of them sat this one out. Various indicators do suggest that younger voter turnout was lower this year than in 2020, and that some of it migrated to Trump.
Do I sound sour? Well, then, I am. A third factor in the debacle was the abysmal performance of the news media. That could and doutbless will be the subject of many books. Here's an example. Today's news highlights the beginning of the inevitable blame game among high ranking Democrats. Some are pointing the finger at Biden for having had the temerity to run at all. The implication is that he left Harris - or whoever might have succeeded him - insufficient time to make their case to the electorate. This runs together with the minor obsession the media showed during the campaign regarding Harris' purported inability or unwillingness to say in sufficiently definitive terms how her administration would differ from Biden's. As if (with the exception of policy toward Israel) there were anything in that generally spectacularly successful record from which she might or should want to distance herself. But really, the whole thing is just too depressingly stupid. Biden was pressed to withdraw not because of any policy shortcomings but because his debate performance gave credence to the canard that he was too old to run effectively. So the only significant difference from him that one might have a right to expect, in his chosen successor, is that she would display the vitality appropriate to someone younger than him. Which, of course, she observably did. Demanding over and over that she further distinguish herself on a policy level, and describing this over and over as a failure on her part, was simply otiose. But such is the state of our political journalism on the national level. Don't get me started!
Finally, having mentioned the Democrat elite's nascent intramural blame game, let's point the finger at them. As a close acquaintance, whose keen observation and pungent way of expressing himself I admire, put it on election day, "This country's favorite thing to do is blame somebody else less powerful than themselves when they fuck up." He went on, "Everybody involved in the Democratic party at a national level should kill themselves." He explained his reasons for recommending this time-honored means of acknowledging failure and dishonor: "Same party that spent 50 years not codifying Roe v. Wade, that repeatedly punted on ERA, that repeatedly betrayed labor rights and the working class and sold out on healthcare." His overall point: "People don't vote when there's nothing they want to vote for. Leftists, Russians, Arabs, etc. can't be blamed for this political party's repeated and constant failure to give people a cogent reason to believe in them or their ability." I'd take exception with this as regards Biden, whose huge accomplishments pretty much eluded the news media's ability to communicate whom to credit for them, but overall it seems a pretty good diagnosis.
UPDATE, November 17, 2024: In writing the above, I did not take full account of the fact that not all the votes had been counted. I recognized that the count was ongoing, but thought that ongoing tabulation would not much change the picture. As it turned out, my overall take on the election, that is, that the undervote for Harris was key, holds up. But I was not correct in saying that Pussygrabber failed to match his 2020 total. In fact, he has somewhat exceeded it, with somewhat over 76,000,000 votes this year, compared to about 74,000,000 for him four years ago. I still maintain that this does not represent a significant expansion of Pussygrabber's support, which remains essentially static. By contrast, Harris, with close to 74,000,000 votes this year, fell short of her total with Biden by almost 8,000,000 votes. The significant change in the electorate, that is, consists entirely of the number of those who previously voted for a ticket with Harris on it, but were unwilling to come out for her when she headed the ticket.
