Democrats and liberal independents are feeling
a lot more downtrodden and hopeless than they deserve to. And while members of the
governing party’s snapping at each other
and claiming they “lost the working class” and “didn’t identify enough with the
everyday American” may find some basis in fact that they need to work on before
the midterm elections in 2026 and the new presidential election in 2028, they should
just stop wringing their hands and listening to the hype about how “disastrous”
the Harris-Walz ticket was for them.
The fact is that in terms of the popular
vote, Donald Trump’s victory was slim. Hillary Clinton, for instance, won the
2016 popular vote by about 2.9 million ballots (a fact that has driven Trump
bonkers ever since), whereas Trump, this time, won it against Kamala Harris by
about 2.5 million. In other words, in popular terms, “the landslide” that he
and his party keep crowing about adds up to some four hundred thousand fewer
votes than Hillary won by in 2016, when she lost the election in the EC. And
with the last few votes being tallied, Trump’s popular-vote win has shrunk to a
scant 50 percent (actually 49.94%), while Harris took 48.4 percent of the votes.
That’s only 1.54 percentage points. Hardly a “landslide”, then, for Trump, and
hardly the crushing defeat for Harris that too many people have been quick to
qualify it as.
Where the Democratic Party (rather than
Harris) did take a veritable shellacking was in the seven swing states. And as
everyone knows, those are the states that make or break an election in the
Electoral College. Trump won them all,
which indicates that the Biden administration, no matter how it strove to
reestablish democracy and decency following the political and institutional
chaos wrought by the earlier Trump regime, was castigated for micro-issues that
anonymous Americans thought were more important.
What the winning votes boiled down to in
those states was precisely the question Trump asked repeatedly at his rallies.
Are you better off now than you were four years ago? The half of the population
who answered that question with their negative ballots did so, not based on the
macro-performance of the US overall—which improved on nearly all fronts other
than inflation—did so, if we cut to the chase, on the basis of the price of
eggs and gasoline. With a second consideration being the fears stoked by Team
Trump about an “alien takeover”.
According to a study by the Associated
press, the ranking of issues voted on was headed up by “the economy” (39%) and
immigration (20%), for a fifty-nine percent influence on voter motive. Abortion
(actually women’s reproductive rights), on which the Harris team campaigned so
hard (on the apparently false notion that the majority of women actually cared)
only garnered eleven percent. Health care—which is apt to become an endangered
species under the Trump administration—was only eight percent. Sadder still,
climate change, which should be at the top of the mind of anyone who wants to
see their children and grandchildren even survive, let alone thrive in the
future on Planet Earth, came in at a
measly seven percent. Other important societal issues like crime and gun
control didn’t make a blip on the radar. And racism and foreign policy— two
other important issues in terms of their effect on the future of American
society and the world—were of negligible importance to swing-state voters.
While many even in her own party and the
media have been quick to hammer Kamala Harris for a “shoddy performance”, the
truth is that, considering what she was up against in her own camp, her
election showing was nothing short of amazing. Basically, a political miracle.
Here’s why. She was an incumbent vice president to a president who, despite
having achieved some major accomplishments in a difficult environment, had been
totally discredited and his popularity ratings were plummeting. The president’s
exceedingly late and pressured decision not to enter the 2024 race didn’t allow
time to, first, put together a Democratic primary, and then, to mount a
successful campaign. Harris was, then, basically tapped as a shoo-in to be the
candidate, which passed on to her the ”no other choice” status of her boss, rendered
her somehow illegitimate in the eyes of some who wanted a primary come hell or
high water, and the same horse by a
different name in those of others, despite her extraordinary qualifications for
the job of chief executive.
Furthermore, the vice president was left
with only one hundred seven days in which to mount a strategy, while already on
the road campaigning, having also had to deal with President Biden’s personal
hands-on approach to governing, which had kept her in the shadows for nearly
four years. That meant she had to start from scratch to tell people who she was
and make them believe in her, all in about three months. Add to that the fact
that, as an incumbent vice president—and a person of impeccable ethics—she had
to separate herself from the Biden administration while not throwing the
president under the bus (clearly, an impossible task, unless, like her
opponent, you’re willing to throw anybody and everybody under the bus).
Seen in this way, it seems almost
incredible that she pulled off a near popular win, and that little of what
affected her in the EC was her fault. Rather, it was the failure of the Biden
administration to see just how important the micro-economy is to winning an
election. The administration was punished by white women, Latinos and black
men, all groups with everything to lose under Trump, but who either voted with
their pocketbook or with their anti-female prejudice. Harris merely did her
very best and took one for the team, which basically let her take the fall.
But let’s look further at Trump’s
“historic landslide”. The only thing historic about it, and let’s be fair on
this point, was that he won big for a non-incumbent. By historical standards for candidates running
against the governing party, there have only been a half-dozen other
non-incumbent candidates since the 1930s who took a larger chunk of the popular votes—namely, Franklin
D. Roosevelt in 1932, Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, Jimmy Carter in 1976,
Ronald Reagan in 1980, Barack Obama in 2008 and Joe Biden in 2020.
That said, while the media and the GOP
alike talk in glowing terms about Trump’s “huge win” in the EC, it wasn’t
really all that big, and if there had been any variance at all in the swing
states, in terms of the sweep he made of their electoral delegates, Harris
might well have beaten him in the same way that he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016,
despite losing the popular vote by a relatively small margin. Again, it was the
punishment vote against the Biden administration due to the inflation and
immigration issues that sank Harris in those states as far as EC votes went.
However, by no stretch of the imagination
was Trump’s Electoral College victory “historic”, “a landslide”, or proof of
the “historic mandate” he claims to have been given by the American people.
True, his 312 electoral votes bested the 306 he got in 2016 and the same number
that Biden got when he beat Trump in 2020. But his EC performance paled by
comparison with Barack Obama’s 365 electoral votes in 2008 and 332 in 2012. Nor
was it anywhere close to the 370 that Bill Clinton got in 1992.
In further terms of the popular vote, if
we place Harris’s loss in context with popular vote percentages in other
elections, by losing at 48.4%, she outperformed Trump’s popular vote tallies in
his two previous elections, 2016 (48.2%)
and 2020 (46.8%), and she surpassed other historical popular votes as well: Mitt
Romney in 2012 (47.2%), John McCain in 2008 (45.7%), George W. Bush in 2000
(47.9%), Bob Dole in 1996 (40.7%), George H.W. Bush in 1992 (37.4%), Michael
Dukakis in 1988 (45.6%), Walter Mondale in 1984 (40.6%), Jimmy Carter in 1980
(41%), and Gerald Ford in 1976 (48%).
Nor was Trump’s razor-thin almost-fifty-percent
enough to talk about anything like a popular mandate. In popular terms, he
barely squeaked by in a performance that lagged in comparison to that of numerous
others, like these percentages: Biden 2020 (51.3), Obama 2012 (51.1), Obama 2008
(52.9), George W. Bush in 2004 (50.7), George H.W. Bush in 1988 (53.2), Ronald
Reagan in 1984 (58.8), Reagan in 1980 (50.7), or Jimmy Carter in 1976 (50.1). The
presidents who were seen as having especially powerful popular backing were,
for instance, Richard Nixon 1972 (60.7)—and just look what happened to him—Lyndon
Johnson 1964 (61.1), and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the longest-serving
president of all time, with 60.8 percent. So, Trump’s popular vote percentage
has actually underperformed that of the majority of presidents elected in the
past century.
So why is rehashing all of these election
figures important when Trump’s popular-vote win was adequate, and his EC victory
was sound and decisive?
First of all, to establish that Kamala Harris
deserves praise rather than condemnation for her performance under the most
difficult and dire of circumstances, while the Democratic Party itself has a
lot of questions to answer about its lack of decisiveness and preparedness in
the face of, perhaps, the most consequential election in American history. She
can’t help but feel sadness, but should feel no personal shame for her party’s
failure to coalesce far earlier behind a winning strategy for 2024 (starting
with knowing what the average, non-MAGA voter was demanding, instead of being
tone-deaf to their complaints). She gave it her all, after being thrown to the
lions on the spur of the moment.
Second, the half of the country that didn’t
vote for Trump—if you add third party candidate Jill Stein’s votes—needs to be
very vocal and active in dissuading Donald Trump and his hijacked GOP of the
apocryphal notion that he has been given “an historic mandate” to do (as he would
say) whatever the hell he wants, in the name of the American people. He needs
to govern as if he were the president of all Americans, not just the ones who
virtually worship him and praise his name as if he were a modern day Caesar.
Otherwise, the phrase “not my president” will take on new and legitimate meaning.
There is no special (or divine) mandate,
and there was nothing special about this election—except its likely
consequences.
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