I have never singled out a single factor that I considcered crucial in Trump’s victory against Harris, because there were so many factors in play. These include immigration, the economy, wokeness among Dems (loudly decried by Trump’s ads), Harris’s failure to choose Josh Shapiro as a running mate, Biden’s failure to resign, the word-salady nature of Harris’s campaign and her refusal to answer questions like “How would your administration differ from Biden’s?”, and, of course, the blame people affix to Republicans, saying that they are simply misogynistic, stupid, and nationalistic yokels. A change in any of these factors might have changed the election’s results, but, in truth, we don’t know. All we can offer is post facto analyses. That’s why I simply post a diversity of takes so readers can hear all viewpoints.
In response to one public post I recently put on Facebook about Laura Helmuth leaving Scientific American after going on an expletive-laden post-election rant that demonized Trump voters as “fucking fascists”, as well as “mean, dumb, and bigoted,” I got one comment that basically agreed with Helmuth:
I think the outcome of the election was abysmal, dreadful, and maybe the trans activists were a small part of the problem, but a much bigger problem is the poor state of American education and the country’s persistent religiosity. Again, not the fault of the left.
In other words, this commenter agreed with Helmuth, throwing into the mix the high religiosity of Americans. I haven’t talked to enough people in my elite “bubble” to know how pervasive this feeling is.
In the 38-minute video below, a segment of Dan Senor’s “Call Me Back” show, New York freshman Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres, only 36, says that the Democratic left basically scuppered the election by infusing the party with progressive ideology, refusing to address the two issues that really mattered to the middle- and lower-class voters: immigration and inflation. Torres represents the South Bronx, and his district is characterized by Wikipedia as “by one measure the poorest congressional district in the United States.”
A couple of quotes from Torres:
“My diagnosis is that we have to Stop pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter and Tik Tok than it is to the real world and start listening to working-class people of color—working class people in general—who have historically been the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.”
“The movement of ‘defund the police’ has done almost irreparable damage to the brand of the Democratic Party. . . . if the objective is to win elections in the real world, then we have to marginalize the far left in favor of working class Americans.”
Torres is not hesitant to criticize Biden or Harris, calling Biden’s actions on immigration “political malpractice”, which aroused clear signs of popular discontent well before the election.
Senor, who comes from a Jewish background, then brings up an issue that most commenters have neglected: the Jewish vote. As he notes, Jewish voters went for the GOP in higher proportions than previously, so that in this election Jewish voters were largely “up for grabs”—unsure about how to vote. Slogans from the far left like “globalize the intifada,” or “from the river to the sea,” says Torres, alienated Jewish voters, most of whom support Israel.
Torres theorizes that the Jewish vote may have been decisive in states like Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona, all of whom went for Trump. He adds that the says far left “chose to wage an antisemitic smear campaign in an attempt to sabotage Josh Shapiro, simply because he was a Jew who spoke out against the antisemitism after October 7. . . . The far left’s hatred for Donald Trump was exceeded only by its hatred for Israel and for any Jew who identifies unequivocally as pro Israel. And that to me was the ultimate example of how destructive the far left can be to our ability to win elections.”
Torres argues that Harris herself wasn’t anti-Israel, but a mainstream, pro-Israel centrist who was falsely painted as anti-Israel by the far left. Nevertheless, as you may know, Harris talked out of both sides of her mouth, always mentioning the suffering of Palestinian people when she defended Israel. As Senor says, Harris was, on the Gaza War, talking out of both sides of her mouth to appeal to both sides. Senor argues that this kind of moral equivalency, or moral equivocation, cost Harris Jewish votes.
Torres chimes in eloquently, saying that in all politics, candidates must espouse “moral clarity”, and Jews didn’t feel Harris’s pious mouthings “in their kishkes“. (Torres gets extra points for the Yiddish.)
30 minutes in, Torres goes on an eloquent tear, including stuff like this:
“The fact that the far left would wage an antisemitic smear campaign against the most popular governor of the most pivotal swing state: that should have been a wake-up call that the far left is willing to sacrifice what is best for the Democratic party on the altar of ideological purity and anti-Zionism.”
Senor adds that pro-Hamas and anti-Israel protests weren’t just a Jewish issue—that others look at people celebrating Hamas and Hezbollah and get turned off by the far left. Torres thinks that the failure to deal with such protests undercut Americans’ sense of safety and convinced them that government cannot keep people safe. This, he sayus, was an indictment of the governments of both New York State and New York City.
In the end, since people of color, both middle-class and impecunious ones, are Torres’s constituents, he concludes that, at least in his district, the cost of living far, far outweighed their concern for a war 5,000 miles away.
I recommend this video not because it gives the reason why the Democrats were routed, but why they were routed in a poor, black district. And, to me at least, having sympathies for Israel, it makes Torres look like a guy with an exceedingly bright future in Democratic politics.
Watch it!
I think he’s right on the money.
Far too many of my friends on FB are still knocking on about: The voters are racist, sexist, stupid, etc. Going further left and further purist is not a winning strategy.
No: The voters are fed up with the far-left progressive agenda. The Dems and Harris did not distance themselves (enough) from this to win. And if they don’t learn from this whooping and align back to the voters of the USA (rather than calling them names), they are doomed to continual failure.
The Democratic leadership and its chief party functionaries will not back away from the “progressive” left until liberal voters and donors make a visible move away from the illiberal left in their professional workplaces. Politicians rarely lead; they follow. The self-silencing, the go-along-to-get-along mentality, the “be kind” ethos, and the herding in opposition to Donald Trump have caused educated people—politicians included—to vastly overestimate the support for the “progressive” left over the past decade. The “trustworthy” media amplifies this effect with steady streams of politicized “news.”
Moreover, why should the Democratic politicians adjust, even when they realize that the progressives have lost their minds? The progressives will walk away, run more extreme primary candidates, sit out the vote, etc., while the overwhelming share of more mainstream liberal voters will keep rewarding with their votes the politicians who cater to the illiberal left—which, for now, is nearly every Democratic politician of national reputation. I suspect we will see little reform in the Party until a politician not named Donald Trump puts up firm majority numbers in a presidential race.
In the meantime, the Democrats’ game plan will be to frustrate Trump’s attempts to govern, try to ensure that he can’t fix any of the problems he rails about, and then hope to peel back some of the working-class voters when they are still frustrated about immigration and the economy—but who then blame the Republicans for not fulfilling their promises. Oh, there will be token moves like removing pronouns from email and maybe wearing the pride flag on the lapel a bit less often. But don’t count on a meaningful purge of “progressive” policies in any of the various states controlled by Democrats until they start losing state and local elections.
This argument ignores the fact that Biden has many supporters and she could not criticize her own President, even if she wanted to, without lose support from many if not most of them.
This argument, that a candidate needs to be careful to maintain the support of their most fervent supporters, is what loses elections. They already their votes for sure, nailed on. Now they need to appeal to the uncommitted center.
“We’re facing Literally Hitler and the End of Democracy, but I’ll turn up my nose and refuse to vote for you because you criticized Biden” — said absolutely no Democrat voters.
I don’t know if David is correct, but it does seem to be true that millions of Biden 2020 voters did in fact turn up their noses and not vote for Harris. Trump made marginal gains across lots of demographic groups and had marginal losses among others, but he got almost exactly the same vote total in 2024 as in 2020. Harris got ~8 million fewer votes in 2024 than Biden in 2020, more than 2x the margin of victory for Trump. It was turnout that sank Harris. IDK if her turnout problem would have been worse if she had repudiated Biden’s policies. The exit polls don’t tell us about who didn’t vote. I haven’t read any analysis of who those missing voters were. But it seems to me that’s the story of the election.
[edit to add: repeating the argument by Phil @ 3]
Mike, the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has looked at the number of votes cast, and he wrote:
Al-Gharbi’s analysis is the most fact-saturated and sophisticated one I have seen so far:
A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives. Nov 11, 2024
All the prominent but obviously false narratives about the 2024 election prepared for burial in one convenient post.
https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/a-graveyard-of-bad-election-narratives
Ooh excellent thanks for the link. MAG doesn’t say how much larger the turnout was in those 4 swing states, just that they were “record” numbers of voters, and the link is to a WaPo article behind their paywall.
He argues that “There’s no reason to believe that voters who sat this cycle out would have gone for Harris [and] there are reasons to think heightened turnout would have been counterproductive for Democrats.”
So I guess I’ll believe him!? This election (and he argues elections going back to 2010) turned on two long-term trends: alienation of normies from the culture of “symbolic capitalists” (a kind of synonym for knowledge worker elites); and backlash against the post-2010 Great Awokening.
I need to read his book…
Excellent point.
She could have simply said that she was going to institute new policies A, B and C without criticizing Biden directly. Or, she could have said that she would fix the border issue by doing D, as nobody would drop her because of that; even Biden admitted that the border was broken. All she needed to do was GIVE SOME policies instead of word salad.
Harris did say that she would bring back the bipartisan border bill killed by Trump.
I think one election result statistic perhaps provides the clearest reason. Harris won among older white voters but lost among young ones. A likely reason is that the older ones get their news from more reliable traditional sources such as the NYT while the young ones get it from social media and Joe Rogan, which are rife with misinformation. Rogan has a larger following than the NYT has subscribers.
This might also be applicable to the other groups mentioned. But it seems clear that the Dems were beaten in social media messaging and didn’t have as many big influencers as the Reps had.
Also, the results are now showing that Trump only got about a million more votes than in 2020, but the Dems had about 7 million less, which means that the reason they lost was, in spite of their massive campaign efforts, they were unable to get their base to the polls. They certainly failed in handling and messaging immigration, and were stuck in a no-win position on Israel and Gaza.
I wouldn’t consider the NYT a reliable source. Stories regarding Israel are a combo of about 30% mis/dis-information and 70% opinion based on aforementioned mis/dis-information.
I don’t know how to judge their reliability on other topics, but I suspect it to be sub-par simply due to their obvious biases.
If I had seen the Times’s unequivocal position on the matter, I’ve forgotten it:
Does the Times hold that transgender women are women, that transgender men are men? Does the Times steadfastly and exclusively utter “pregnant persons” (NPR seems to) instead of “pregnant women”?
Correct. They’re pretty much pro-Hamas. I have a subscription but rarely read their Israel coverage.
That particular detail — that significantly fewer democratic voters bothered to vote — is the key detail, I think. Not enough were not inspired to vote!
Mark, you may want to look at this analysis by the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi:
A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives. Nov 11, 2024
All the prominent but obviously false narratives about the 2024 election prepared for burial in one convenient post.
https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/a-graveyard-of-bad-election-narratives
Her argues that the following cannot explain Harris’ defeat:
1. Racism
2. Sexism
3. Money raised by the candidates (to buy the election).
4. The presence of third parties (Jill Stein, Cornel West, ther libertarian party)
5. Voter turnout
Older voters are afraid of losing Social Security and Medicare now that they are drawing it. They are disproportionately white because black life expectancy is longer. They will vote Democrat (and Liberal in Canada) come hell or high water. Older voters are thought to be of a more conservative bent…until you try to take any government entitlement away from them. They aren’t all white-shoe country-club members living on their stocks and bonds.
B..but Peter Beinart says that Dems lost because Harris doesn’t hate Israel ENOUGH, and if Dems ever want to win they need to pander MORE to the antisemitic progressives. Surely someone as always-insightful and fair minded as Beinart can’t be wrong –can he?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/opinion/democrats-israel-gaza-war.html
Various reasons suggested are probably not independent. Trump did increase support among various religious groups (see below), some probably turned off by extreme identity politics (a biological man can become equivalent to a biological woman) and issues like abortion. Here’s what I gleaned a week or two ago. Some changes probably overlap with ethnicity (e.g., Catholics and Hispanic) and “devoutness” would vary among Christian religious groups other than evangelicals. Would be nice to see the other religious group broken down. Some in there (e.g., Muslims) would be more religious than Christians, perhaps approaching levels of evangelicals.
About 80% of white evangelicals (i.e., born-again Christians) voted for Trump, and even that figure was somewhat higher than in 2020. Trump’s already large share of other non-Catholic Christian voters rose to 62% from 60% in 2020.
An even larger increase occurred for Catholics, with 56% of Catholics voting for Trump, versus 47% in 2020. So overall, Trump won a clear majority of Christian voters, although a finer breakdown of religions would show some dissenters.
Trump also gained a larger share of non-Christian religious voters, with 33% support in 2024 versus 29% in 2020. This was accompanied by a 9% decline in support for Democrats.
Those looking for decreased support for Trump need to look at voters with no religion. Only 25% voted Trump in 2024, down from their already low level of 31% support in 2020.
Trump voters are morons. They complain about inflation and high prices, and so what do they do? They voted for the guy who will RAISE prices by way of tariffs.
I suppose “low information” voters would be a kind(er) way to put it, but I’m sticking with what I wrote above: Republican voters are morons.
As if Republican (and some Democrate) voting was due solely to economic considerations.
No doubt, trying to bring a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian war, and at least modestly decrease the likelihood of nuclear war, is being a “moron.”
May one again expect, out of the blue, the U.S. sending Boris Johnson to Ukraine to attempt to persuade Zelenskyy not to explore negotiations with Russia? (Of course, the current situation was caused by Russia expanding westward into Europe during the last three decades, right?)
To me, it would be very sad if Americans voting for Trump have been motivated by expectations that he would hand Europe to Putin on a silver platter.
Maya, Ukraine cannot win this war if winning means getting back the about 20% of Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia now (part of it occupied since 2014).
Russia’s population is about 4.35 times larger than the Ukrainian population (145 vs 33 million, Source: Wikipedia, data for 2024).
In 2021, the purchasing-power adjusted per capita income of Russia was 2.16 larger than that of Ukraine (US $ 38,938 vs US $ 18,040; Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, data set accessible online).
That means, compared to Russia, Ukraine does not have enough soldiers and it is a poor country. Given these facts, how is Ukraine supposed to beat Russia on the battlefield to get all its territory back?
Peter, winning means that Ukraine continues to exist in the future. That can only happen, if Ukraine gets security guarantees. Without those, men will leave the country as soon as the war ends. Refugees will not return. No investment will flow, if Russia will invade again in 5 years time.
Trump won’t provide a security guarantee. So Ukraine can only hope to fight until the Putin regime collapses.
@Barry, If you don’t understand other people, calling them names only puts your own level of ability to think and function in the company of other people, on display.
The tragedy of this age is that people are so stuck in their silos that they question the sanity of those who are stuck in other silos. Add mis-and disinformation, and they live in different worlds. Unfortunately, in real life, we all live together, and have to find a way to do it peacefully.
I’ll bet Bill Clinton would have won in a landslide with his policies from the 1990s.
Knowing what they know now, would the “working” class have supported NAFTA and the offshoring of their manufacturing jobs which until the implementation of NAFTA provided economic stability and security for them? (So much for Clinton’s, “Ah feeeell yore paaiin.”)
On the other hand, a once-unionized steelworker who now works at Wal-Mart (if he works at all) can afford things on his Wal-Mart salary or disability benefits that he could not have afforded getting a union wage buying stuff made in the United States by unionized factory workers. How many hours did a steel worker have to work to earn to buy a crappy American-made colour TV? How many hours does the Wal-Mart greeter have to work to buy a flat-screen TV with a high fidelity image on a screen twice as big that hangs on the wall? How many hours did a non-unionized retail worker have to work to buy that union-made colour TV? (I know buying their first one was a major financial decision for my parents, long after the Joneses had bought theirs.)
And then there are things everyone can buy today that were not even imagined in the heyday of the industrial unions extracting rents. A computer in your jeans pocket that talks to the world and makes you crazy?
Now it’s true that many people seem to have been displaced by off-shoring. Unemployment rate doesn’t tell the whole story because it doesn’t count in the denominator people who have given up looking for work and are no longer in the labour force. Labour-force participation is an important measure of social stability.
You need to measure all those outcomes to know whether people (on average or in aggregate or at the bottom) are better or worse off with globalized trade, which includes more than NAFTA of course.
Totally, Leslie. Good argument.
D.A.
NYC
Average union steelworker wage: $24/hour
Average Wal-Mart worker wage: $15/hr
He conceived today’s war by forcing Ukraine to surrender its nuclear arsenal, promising (falsely) that the USA would defend it in return – the Budapest Memorandum.
Oh, he recently admitted that he made a mistake, and said that he was sorry. A mistake that cost (so far) hundreds of thousands of lives.
Trump has also lowered the bar on what is acceptable behaviour. I was recently vilified on this site for saying that killing innocent women and children was an atrocity. I was shocked by the amount of pushback I got.
William, you got pushback because it is the strategy of Hamas to hide behind civilians. If you then say that Israel has no right to kill civilians, then Israel has in fact no right to defend itself against an enemy like Hamas, who hides behind civilians. Nobody here is indifferent to civilians being killed. But Israel did not start this recent round of conflict. So you got pushback because you ignored the context of the killing of civilians not because commenters here rejoice in the killing of Palestinian civilians.
Tell that to the commenters.
+1
(sorry, timeout) If Mexicans were attacking Los Angeles the same way Hamas was attacking Tel Aviv, do you think Waskington would curl up and die? Israel is fighting for its own survival. I call that defence justified. I call hiding combatants among civilians COWARDLY, but that is from ancient European warriors’ code of conduct that never caught on anywhere else.
I really must be an outlier. For me, killing innocent women and children is not acceptable anywhere, any time, for any reason.
William, there are others here who agree with where you are coming from. We also understand that questioning Israel’s and Israeli actions is generally not part of the conversations here.
I appreciate Douglas E and William Jenkins reminding us of the impulse to live in a world with no consequences (where Hamas murders hundreds of Israelis, but the IDF does not go to war as a consequence, because the collateral death of any innocent civilian is not acceptable, at least not in Gaza).
Earlier this week Scott Alexander wrote about this impulse and argued that its childish superficial appearance belies its surprising strength and historical importance.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-early-christian-strategy
He reviewed early game theory in the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the discovery that tit-for-tat strategies (punish bad behaviour by an opponent, reward good behaviour by a collaborator) always won over other strategies, and was vastly better than a never-punish approach (turn the other cheek, or what Alexander called “COOPERATE-BOT”).
He then used that discovery to frame the rise of early Christianity as a kind of COOPERATE-BOT on steroids, and noted all the incongruous ways in which the Christian cult philosophy succeeded against game-theory expectations. He did not have a good explanation why it succeeded in the case of early Christianity, or why other COOPERATE-BOT cults didn’t last as long or spread as widely (like the Quakers).
His more important point was that the success of COOPERATE-BOT cults or philosophies is a recurring theme in human history. He suggests that Christianity is its most long-lasting example, and liberalism (in its struggle against fascism and communism) is its current most influential instance.
Alexander didn’t really know what to do with this observation. “The fact that this [liberalism, as well as Christianity] has worked makes me think early Christianity wasn’t just a one-off, but suggests some larger point…Still, I don’t really know what it is.”
Alexander’s somewhat discouraging conclusion is that “the leading ideology of the 21st century thus far appears to be a hyper-Christian bleeding-heart liberalism: COOPERATE-BOT in a bloodstained sweater [an allusion to a Mister Rogers meme that I can’t explain in this comment]. I don’t know why this keeps happening, but I wouldn’t count it out.”
None of that is to say that running COOPERATE-BOT on the Israel-Palestine-Iran conflict is a good idea for any of the parties, but it might partly account for the appeal of a kind of no-consequences idealism.
When the US (and other countries) bombed Germany and Japan in WWII, women and children died. Was it wrong for the US to bomb Germany and Japan? Of course, not. Did the US have the intent to wipe out all Germans and Japanese? Of course, not. Does Israel have the intent to wipe out all Palestinians? Of course, not.
I accept that we are not yet civilised.
In a population of mostly one trait (such as being civilised) the balance of the population who don’t share that trait (such as being barbarians) can seize an advantage that plays out under evolutionary processes. This has nothing to do with morals or ethics only natural circumstances and consequences.
Had the Geneva Conventions (and related protocols) been in place before WW2 (they are all post-war developments), the air bombardment campaigns against German and Japanese cities would have been candidates for war crimes findings, and some, e.g., Dresden and Tokyo bombings, would very likely have been war crimes. The city bombardments did not much matter to the success of the war — they did not hasten surrender or materially degrade the armed forces of the Axis powers. War crimes are separate from genocide.
After the war, Speer (Germany’s industrial minister) estimated that allied bombing had shortened the war by a year. I have seen estimates that 1/3 of German industrial production was devoted to stopping allied bombing raids. The Germans built the (excellent) 88 gun to shoot down allied bombers. At one point, it was suggested that all of Germany’s 88 guns be sent to the front line. That never happened. In his memoirs, Hans Von Luck recounts using an 88 gun to destroy allied tanks. Apparently, he was an exception.
The case of Japan is even clearer. Much of Japan’s industry was cottage industry, in people’s homes. The firebombing of Japan’s cities destroyed those cottage industries. The war in the Pacific ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did innocent women and children die? Of course, they did. Did the war come to a fast end? Of course, it did.
The easy response to that counterfactual is to say that the wartime belligerents would never have endorsed a convention that would proscribe a method of war fighting — incendiary attacks on cities — that was thought to be militarily useful at the time and, for the British, the best they could do, having tried daylight attacks early in the war. (Churchill referred to these efforts in his “We shall fight on the beaches” speech in 1940.) Regardless of military effectiveness, the costly night raids kept Stalin from following through with his bluff to throw in the towel and make a separate peace with Nazi Germany. The daylight attacks, escorted deep into the Reich after 1943, destroyed the Luftwaffe in a few months making the Normandy invasion possible.
There is no supra-national authority that can ban a weapon or method of warfare. It all comes down to inter-national agreement. The nuclear states can easily agree to forswear gasoline and phosphorus incendiaries. If they ever need to incinerate a city someday they can use nuclear weapons, and a ban ties the hands of a non-nuclear adversary. Indeed, the United States does not subscribe to the conventions against land mines and cluster munitions for the simple reason that it might have to use them someday.
That said, the fire raids against German cities caused contemporary dismay among both the British public and American Army Air Force commanders who persisted with their initially unescorted daylight bombing in the (mostly forlorn) hope that they could destroy industrial production with lighter casualties to both their own crews and to the civilians. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris was the only senior British commander not to receive a peerage as a “thank you for your service.” To their dying days, Canadian veterans of RAF/RCAF Bomber Command insisted they they were using their primitive electronic target-finding devices to hit military and industrial targets even though it’s clear from records that “de-housing” with “area bombing” against “morale” was the strategic goal of the night campaign.
Later analysis suggests that the Germans inflated civilian deaths for propaganda purposes. Radar gave the German cities hours of warning to get their civilians out of bed into bomb shelters and subway tunnels. Only when there was a firestorm (as at Hamburg once, and at Dresden), were civilians killed in staggeringly large numbers from fire raids.
People on this site tend to vilify people who defend Jew-murderers. Presenting yourself as an “outlier” saint, and those who are against Holocaust 2.0 as villains, guarantees additional pushback.
I disagree with you that Trump is the reason why many people want Jews to live. I understand that the opinion that Jews deserve to live is extremely bizarre to you, and maybe to people you socialize with, but I assure you that it is very popular in some circles. It has been popular before anyone had heard of Trump, and will be popular long after Trump.
Trump? What women and children did Trump kill?
Even if you are a saint and would not kill a woman your own child’s murderer was hiding behind, this has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
I’m just shocked by your naivete, when you say:
“I really must be an outlier. For me, killing innocent women and children is not acceptable anywhere, any time, for any reason.”
First of all, it’s deeply sexist, since it’s implied that killing innocent men is acceptable.
More importantly, you seem incapable of recognizing a situation, where the choice is not between killing civilians or sparing them, but rather deciding which civilians will be killed.
If you cannot accept the death of innocent children in Gaza, then you MUST let Hamas live, since they intentionally surround themselves with their children (or are children themselves in the case of underaged Hamas fighters who are reported as children killed by Hamas). Since Hamas has openly said they will continue the terror against the Jews and the past decades have shown that 100% prevention of terrorism is impossible, innocent Jewish women and children will get killed by Hamas terrorists.
Maybe you should think about how liberally you apply the term “innocent”. As a German, I still have memories of my grandparents telling me stories about getting carpet bombed in their cities. While there are some cases that I would classify as atrocities (90%+ destruction of an entire city without military industry but with regional hospitals in the end days of the war), I don’t see the German population – my ancestors – as “innocent” victims. In the end, they supported a monstrous regime. Hardly innocent, even though there were no good choices for a single German civilian in 1944.
If you want to discuss this in-depth, feel free to name a time and place (I can offer my discord). I’d be curious, if you can make an actual case for your claim as it applies to Gaza.
Looking forward to watching the video. I’ve seen Torres interviewed a few times (in short form) and have been impressed every time.
I want to add this, although it is somewhat outside of the topic.
What happened to mounting claims that there was considerable democratic voter fraud in the planning? The results came in and Trump won rather handily, so the most massive crime in years goes unmentioned? Why is no one is calling for an investigation?
Yeah, I thought so.
It would be nice to know how many voters were scrubbed from the rolls in red states, and how that number compares to Harris’ lessened popular vote.
I’ve seen quite a few comments from Right-wingers wondering where those millions of additional Biden votes came from last time since his total appears to be an outlier. But according to the Babylon Bee, the only people who want to overturn the 2020 result now are Democrats:
https://babylonbee.com/news/4d-chess-democrats-admit-trump-actually-won-in-2020-and-is-now-unable-to-serve-third-term
Those who want to explain the Dems’ defeat by invoking “the poor state of American education and the country’s persistent religiosity,” also have to tell us
– why these two factors did not prevent Biden from winning the presidency in 2020,
– why they did not prevent Obama to be elected president twice,
– why they did not prevent Hilary Clinton from winning the popular vote in 2016.
People, who do not want to analyze to which extent the Democratic Party’s issue positions align with voter preferences, explain the Dems’ defeat by saying voters are stupid (and, by extension, democracy is bad). These people are partisan in a knee-jerk way. And they are probably woke. Or just very arrogant.
It is true that a certain slice of the electorate thinks about economic conditions during a presidential term in an unsophisticated way, just attributing them to the doings of the president. Sometimes there is a considerable amount of truth to this, sometimes there isn’t. And the president’s popularity benefits if times have been good and suffers when they have been bad (like with inflation during Biden’s term).
But we know that inflation was only one thing that bothered voters about the Democracts. Biden’s border policy and the Democratic brand are other things that mattered – if we go by what voters tell pollsters. And why should we not go by that?
I’m unimpressed by those who say that voters are stupid, easily manipulated by right-wing media, podcasts, Joe Rogan, etc. People who say this usually are communicating that voters are not thinking and voting like they themselves do, and that they consider themselves to be the smart ones, the elect, the ones whose views and preferences should matter (I guess because they have a college degree or a master’s or a Ph.D.). As Biden put it: People who are voting for the other guy are garbage. Hilary Clinton spoke of the “basket of deplorables.” Obama talked of those people who cling to their guns and their bibles. – Can it get more elitist than that? Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is today’s Democratic Party.
As the experienced Democratic political strategist and researcher Ruy Teixeira put it:
The Shattering of the Democratic Coalition. Nov 7, 2024
It’s time to face the facts.
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-shattering-of-the-democratic/
I’m a Canadian with subscriptions to both NYT and WSJ.
NYT readers are solidly Dem (to go by reader comments). Yet on relevant articles, readers were firmly against the open border and men in women’s sports. On Israel a lot take the “genocide” line.
WSJ readers are mostly Republican. Their readers are also against open borders and men in women’s sports. They’re far more sympathetic to Israel.
So Biden’s open border and change of Title IX to be based on “gender identity” were both big losers with few supporters.
Ritchie Torres looks like promising centrist Dem.
RE: “NYT readers are solidly Dem (to go by reader comments). Yet on relevant articles, readers were firmly against the open border and men in women’s sports. On Israel a lot take the “genocide” line.”
This is because most Times readers are not woke. On Israel, my impression is that the Times’ readership is closer to split in half.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2021, progressives, or the woke, made up 11% of Democrats, and 6% of the US population.
That is why, when a party goes woke, it goes broke, electorally.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/the-democratic-coalition/
Right. Biden tacked too far left on some issues. Harris didn’t course correct.
I remember when liberals on the left were complaining that people in poor, ethnic, and/or black neighborhoods were being discriminated against by too-negligent police forces. When residents called to report a crime they would routinely wait and wait and wait. When the cops finally showed up —if they ever did show up —evidence might be gone, perpetrators long gone, and damage already done. Needless to say these complaints were coming directly from these high-crime communities and respected.
So Progressives suddenly deciding to prioritize the smaller number of cases where overzealous police were too aggressive towards potential criminals — and doing this to the point where all the law-abiding victims were supposed to want fewer police on the ground in their crime laden neighborhoods — was indeed guaranteed to create a demographic which became pissed off and stayed pissed off till the next election.
A few years back there was a video showing an agitated black woman using her own can of spray paint to deface slogans written on the sidewalk for a BLM protest, shouting that she and other black folk did NOT want to Defund the Police. They needed law and order to be safe. Then I watched a blog full of progressive leftists gleefully dismiss her viewpoint by pointing out that hey, she was wearing a religious t-shirt from a church so was one of the fascist right wing theocrats, and an enemy. So simple. Cognitive dissonance resolved.
Great example of progressive nuttiness.
Prescient words from Ruy Teixeira (Democratic political strategist and researcher, born 1951 – so he has been around the block a few times), from 1 year ago:
Ruy Teixeira: The Eerie Complacency of the Democrats. Nov 16, 2023
Are they in for a rude awakening?
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-eerie-complacency-of-the-democrats
if the Trump-ified Republican Party is so awful, so beyond the pale, such a danger to democracy and all that is right and decent—why can’t the Democrats beat this mess of a party decisively? Why are they still playing at the 50-yard line of American politics against this version of the GOP with all its many vulnerabilities and the millstone of Donald Trump around its neck? The simplest explanation is that the Democrats themselves are so unattractive to so many voters in so many places that they cannot break the stalemate. This simple truth is the most difficult thing for Democrats to accept since it implies the need for change rather than more aggressive messaging.
We also see a near-perfect inversion of the overall working-class vote and the overall college-educated vote. Confirming the changing-places pattern of Democratic and Republican support, Biden leads by 14 points among all college-educated voters while losing to Trump by 15 points among all working-class voters. Besides the indignity of the historic party of the working class getting trounced among its former base, the simple fact of the matter is that there are far more working-class than college-educated voters nationally and in all the swing states mentioned above. That means that equally-sized advantages and deficits, respectively, among college-educated and working-class voters likely net out to Democratic losses.
‘Torres argues that Harris herself wasn’t anti-Israel, but a mainstream, pro-Israel centrist who was falsely painted as anti-Israel by the far left.’
I think you meant ‘far right’.
By the way, I agree with Torres.
I’m impressed with Ritchie Torres, just from this interview. One to watch.
I hope Richie Torres and others such as Seth Moulton are the future of the Democratic party.
The Democrats handed the Republicans several issues: immigration, defund the police, DEI overreach, and transmania. Then toss in inflation and Gaza/Hamas and Biden clinging to his campaign far beyond his capacity and I think any Democrat would be sunk.
However, I don’t think misogyny can be ignored. The recent spike in “your body, my choice” harassment by young men (porn addicts?) has been inspired by Trump and his ilk.