It has been a little more than a week since the election, long enough to get some better data and put things in perspective. So here are some observations on what happened last week, and what is going to happen next. I’ll give you reasons for despair and reasons for hope. But be warned, the despair mostly comes first.
The Voter Who Wasn’t There
I am a longtime advocate of putting numbers above vibes. But not all numbers in politics are reliable. Polls can be notoriously inaccurate, and that’s true of exit polls that supposedly tell you how and why people voted the way they did. So I’m going to stick to some big numbers that seem unlikely to be off.
The first conclusion we can draw is that Donald Trump did not win a big mandate, though he is already claiming he did and acting accordingly.
When I saw initial results that Trump had won 51% of the vote, it seemed as if there must have been a big shift in his favor over the past four years. If true, this would have ominous cultural implications as well as political ones.
But the numbers help put this in perspective. In 2020, Donald Trump lost decisively with 74,223,975 votes. Last week, he won decisively with 75,173,436 votes—a very small increase. If Kamala Harris had gotten anywhere near Joe Biden’s 81,283,501 votes from last year, she would have won easily. Instead, she got only 71,931,452 votes.
In effect, Trump didn’t win because he rallied a new surge of supporters to the polls. He won because ten million former Democratic voters stayed home.
(The other conclusion we can draw from the numbers is that the Libertarian Party is dead, effectively killed off by a pro-Trump takeover from within. The Libertarian candidate received only 616,800 votes, coming in behind the Green Party’s Jill Stein and even a little behind RFK, Jr., who withdrew from the race months earlier.)
The Biden Curse
There is going to be a period of backstabbing and recriminations among Democrats for losing a close election. Much of this will be guided by the Pundit’s Fallacy: the “belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is [to] do what the pundit wants substantively.” If you’re a Bernie Sanders-style far-left “progressive,” then this election is proof that Kamala Harris was too moderate. If you’re a moderate, this is proof that she did too much to appease the “progressives.” And so on. I’m going to try to avoid this and stick to issues where I have some data to back me up, so I’m not just imputing my own preferences onto the electorate.
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