Had the Democrats picked a different candidate, they would have won. All the talk of realignments, Latinos, blue-collar workers, and whatnot, while interesting, is beside the point.
Around the world, the politicians in office when the bills for the pandemic came in were walloped. Voters in the United States displayed the same selective amnesia about lockdown as everyone else.
The reason inflation took off was because governments paid people to stay home and printed money to finance it. However, when prices and taxes rose, voters did not see it as a consequence of the policies they had themselves demanded. Instead, they blamed whoever happened to be in power.
When President-elect Donald Trump asked whether people felt better off than they did four years ago, he was asking the same question as every opposition candidate in the world. All were relying on people’s unwillingness to revisit those wretched months. Almost all were successful.
The obvious Democratic countertactic would have been to run someone unconnected to the Biden administration. Such a candidate might plausibly have reminded voters that the money-printing began under Trump. He or she might have gone on to explain that the one thing guaranteed to push prices up again was Trump’s deranged plan for a 10% global tariff.
There was no shortage of Democratic contenders, including 49 senators and 24 governors. Instead, the party picked the one person who, by definition, would never be able to distance herself from the administration in which she had served in the second-highest office.
Why? We all know the answer. To a party that had adopted DEI as its religion, leapfrogging a woman of color was unthinkable. Never mind that Vice President Kamala Harris ended the 2020 primaries with 4%. Never mind that she struggled to make it through a sentence or that she crumbled to pieces when she had no prepared script. In the modern Democratic Party, it’s X chromosomes that matter, not where voters put their Xs.
This strikes me as the most under-explored aspect of the whole election. The Democrats argued, with obvious sincerity, that Trump was a threat to the republic. Where Trump voters cited the economy as their top concern, Harris voters cited democracy, and they may very well have had a point.
However, if they truly thought that they were up against a wannabe tyrant who would end the separation of powers and rule in his personal interest, why did they pick a candidate whose policy positions were so at odds with mainstream America? Plenty of people had their doubts about Trump —who has, after all, been indicted four times and convicted once. However, those doubts were forgotten when they saw clips of Harris (from behind a face mask, naturally) declaring her pronouns as she/her.
To put it another way, Trump had a high floor and a low ceiling. He had enough supporters to beat off any Republican challenger but not enough to win against a semicompetent Democrat. Only one of his three Democratic opponents reached that low threshold. In 2020, Biden kept shtum, stood for little, and won comfortably. All the Democrats had to do was repeat the trick with someone who had a pulse.
Incidentally, can we finally drop the nonsense about the 2020 result having been stolen? The strongest refutation of the 2020 truthers is the 2024 result. I am sure that there were isolated instances of fraud. I am sure there have been in every election since 1788. However, that does not excuse those Republicans who, having called for democracy to be respected, later chose to indulge the conspiracy theorists for the lowest and most cowardly of reasons.
The idea of winning by default, faute de mieux as we pretentious Euro-weenies might put it, is unappealing. Trumpies are instead exulting in an imaginary tectonic shift. As one declared: “Fuck unity. We have the votes. And they tried to kill Trump.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Hence the clamor for properly aggressive policies, such as imposing a Putinite peace on Ukraine or imposing Smoot-Hawley tariffs (though I was relieved to hear Elon Musk remind Joe Rogan that it was competition from Germany and Japan in the 1970s that made U.S. carmakers raise their game).
In fact, the election result was less dramatic than it looked. Sure, Hispanic Americans voted like everyone else, which, if you believe in assimilation, is a good thing. Voters of every race were repelled by the extremes of identity politics. However, underneath all that, something very normal happened, namely the clobbering of yet another postlockdown incumbent party. Let’s try to keep things in proportion, shall we?
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
