(Editor’s Note: I presented this lecture twice this week, and a number of people have been interested in reading it; I’d be very pleased if you would too.)
The Election is Over: So, What Happened?
And What Happens Now?
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The most important national election in decades is over. So what’s likely to happen –and what will this all mean for the nation’s future?
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This is not the talk that I expected I would be giving the day before the election. I made the mistake journalists should never make, which is allowing myself to believe that something I believed should happen and wanted to happen would happen. Now, I had some rational reasons for thinking Kamala Harris would win. The polls looked close but favorable. And I frankly, found it impossible to believe that Americans would return the man I regarded as one of the worst human beings in public life, certainly the worst person in politics, to the presidency of the United States. Not only was he a serial liar and a stooge for Vladimir Putin, his administration had been a chaotic mess.
Additionally, he had been indulging in more and outrageous personal attacks, saying things that should have gotten him disqualified from running for dogcatcher in Mississippi. Not to mention that his chief of staff and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he was a fascist and should never be allowed near the Oval Office again.
Then, on the morning of Election Day, I was in another city, in the office of a powerful leader of a banking conglomerate. I was there about a charitable contribution that had nothing to do with politics, not because I was overdrawn. I can’t tell you his name, but he was also a supporter of and an advisor to Vice President Harris.
I asked him what he thought would happen that night. To my shock, he said that he was convinced Trump would win, and that he wouldn’t be surprised if it were almost an Electoral College landslide. I was stunned. I flew home, took my dogs for a run at the park, and suddenly was convinced that he was right.
I tried to persuade myself otherwise, but knew better. The returns were troubling from the start, and by 9:30 I knew, though I stayed because I really couldn’t sleep.
I felt the next day as I would have if someone really close to me had died, which in a sense was true.
I felt as though we had lost the United States of America, as we have known it. Now, it is important to note something. As shocking and stunning as this was, it was not an overwhelming landslide, as some, including an article in Esquire, are calling it. The New York Times has been using the term “decisive victory,” which may be barely true.
In fact, by historical standards, this was a rather close election. Traditionally, a landslide in politics is an election decided by 10 percent or more – 55 to 45. Richard Nixon won by 23 points in 1972 and carried 49 of the 50 states.
Ronald Reagan won by 18 points and seventeen million votes 40 years ago with a much smaller electorate.
Donald Trump won by barely two percent in the popular vote, a number which keeps coming down as millions of absentee ballots in California and elsewhere continued to be counted. As of this morning, the popular vote was about 75. 5 million for Trump to 72.4 million for Harris — 50.2 to 48.2 percent. It is possible that in the end, Trump may end up getting less than half of all the votes cast. This is not a landslide, but we have to say that it is indeed a decisive shift from four years ago, something dramatically illustrated by the maps. And for whatever reason, turnout seems to have been down nationwide, and something like two million Democrats who voted in 2020 didn’t vote.
As you may know, the entire campaign was fought in seven swing states. In 2016, Trump won six of them, losing only Nevada, and won 306 electoral votes.
In 2020, Biden won six of them, losing only North Carolina, and won with, again, 306 electoral votes.
But Kamala Harris lost them all. They were all close — two points or less in almost all of them. The difference in Michigan was only one and a half percent — 78,000. But close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
Where the difference was most dramatic was in Florida and Texas, where Biden lost each by just a few hundred thousand, and Harris lost each by the astonishing margin of more than a million and a half.
Otherwise, the difference wasn’t that great, but in every state except possibly one, Washington, Harris did somewhat less well than Biden.
And so America elected a man who says he wants to be a dictator on his first day, who is obsessed with sharks and electrocution, talks about Arnold Palmer’s penis and exhibits signs of rapidly progressing dementia.
On this Veterans’ Day, it is worth noting that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump years, called the man we have just reelected “dangerously unstable,” and “a fascist to his core.”
Trump’s opponent in this election, a woman who had considerably more experience that Barack Obama did when he ran for President, ran a classy, above-board campaign and had a sophisticated ground game operation to get voters to vote.
It didn’t work. Americans preferred the man an English friend of mine calls the PGP — pussy-grabbing poltroon, a man who in addition to his unsavory personality, threatens to doom Ukraine, to wreck the economy and perhaps destabilize the international scene, even threatening war.
The question is, why?
It doesn’t seem logical. When you-know-who came to power in Germany, unemployment and inflation were soaring, and there was unrest and nightly violence between Nazis and Communists who were murdering each other in the streets.
Today, we have essentially full employment; core inflation has fallen to 2.1 percent, and there are no American troops fighting anywhere in the world.
But people are unhappy and discontented and somehow believed their lives were better in the first Trump administration because stuff cost less. Too many of them also were successfully persuaded that they had something to fear from transgender people. So you could say that the main reasons for Trump’s victory were economics and the culture wars, and to a large extent you’d be right. But not completely.
In my view, there were three major sets of reasons that Donald Trump won this election, which I would roughly categorize as misinformation, misogyny, and the media.
Let’s look at each one. There was all kinds of misinformation rampant in this race. Heather Cox Richardson, the historian whose nightly Letter From an American should be required reading for us all, thinks disinformation technology, including Russian bots on social media, helped create a “false narrative in order to control public debate.”
That was in addition to“pervasive right-wing media (in the U.S) from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by ‘influencers.’
To quote her again, they “have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as ‘failing’” and to allow “MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave, and immigration as an invasion,” and to downplay Project 2025.
Social media was filled with lies about everything from what the Biden Administration was doing to what January 6 was all about. Immigration was probably the Republicans’ biggest and most useful issue.
They lied, of course about how many of what they called “illegal immigrants,” had crossed over in the last four years. Now, as Kamala Harris and other Democrats repeatedly noted – the administration had worked out a strong bipartisan border bill with conservative Republicans in Congress, which Donald Trump ordered them to kill at the last moment because he thought if the problem improved, it would hurt his chances of being reelected.
Forget solving the problem; it was all about him. But somehow, Republicans never seemed to pay a price for that.
They also stoked irrational fears about trans people, who were thought to be obsessing about infiltrating girls sports and lurking in the bathrooms.
One former student of mine, who comes from a deeply troubled background, managed to get her life together, became a nurse and a teacher, and then an education and reading activist in Troy, where the system, especially as far as reading is concerned, often seems to be erratic and not really delivering its best for the students.
I have talked to her a lot about education, and was horrified, but not all that surprised, to learn that she voted for Donald Trump. Why? Because, she said, “I don’t like boys in girls’ bathrooms or playing sports.” Her eight-year old daughter was a good swimmer, she said, but couldn’t possibly compete with a boy her age.
So, even though she said she didn’t like Trump, she voted for him. She’s a good example of a single issue voter. She didn’t think about what this was likely to mean for the world, or the economy, or her daughter’s ability to control her body. She just had to save her daughter from those horrible transgenders.
Raising the great boogieman of trans people was an effective strategy, more so than a rational person might have thought. To her credit as a human being, Harris unhesitatingly defended transgender folks, which made it easier to demonize her.
Donald Trump even said she wanted schools to be able to do sex change operations on children while they were at school, when everyone knows they can’t even give the kids an aspirin without parental permission.
But by far the biggest single issue in this election was the economy. We all remember James Carville’s famous mantra, “it’s the economy, stupid.” Or rather, misguided ideas about the economy. Voters did not feel good about the economy, and thought they had it better under Trump.
That hurt the Democrats. But the bizarre thing was that it was entirely unfair. The fact is that the Biden-Harris administration did a superb job at managing the post-Covid economy. While inflation, which was on its way up in the Trump Administration, spiked at about 9 percent in early 2022, it is now down as I said to 2.1 percent, and they managed to get it down without a recession, something mmmmostmomeconomists most thought would be impossible.
We have something close to full employment. Yet all many people thought about was that prices were higher now than in 2020, and they’re right. What they don’t realize is that most of the inflation was inevitable, as both the Trump and Biden administrations fought to prevent the economy from collapsing during Covid. Trump in fact caused much of it by indiscriminately mailing out relief checks.
My then 96-year-old mother-in-law, who was in a memory care facility and had adequate resources, got a Covid check. We cashed it, but that shouldn’t have happened. And, of course, the checks were all signed with that huge ugly scrawl, DONALD TRUMP. So voters got the idea that they should be grateful to him for the checks. Never mind that Congress had to appropriate the money.
The day after the election, I bought a jar of peanut butter at Aldi. It cost $2.09. When the pandemic began, it was $1.19. That may say it all. Forget economic indices; I’m establishing the Aldi peanut better test.
There was lots of other misinformation too, but the economy and transgender issues were the biggest.
What about misogyny? There seems to be clear evidence that misogyny, perhaps coupled with racism, was a major factor. One of my readers who works in an assisted living facility said the older men who lived there were almost unanimous in their belief that you couldn’t have a woman commander in chief.
You may recall the September 10 debate, in which Kamala essentially wiped the floor with Trump, who at one point appeared to say that she “put out” to get ahead in politics. Trump, by the way, increasingly sexualized his attacks on Harris, laughing along and encouraging someone in the crowd who indicated that Harris was a street corner prostitute.
By the way, the New York Times reported that Trump’s pollster braced himself for bad news after that debate, since he knew his candidate had done a terrible job.
But to his amazement, when they got the survey results back, essentially nothing had changed in the way people regarded Trump. That was partly because it was a cult, and partly because too many voters didn’t think a woman could lead the country.
You can see both things very plainly in Macomb County, a place culturally very receptive to Trumpism. Donald Trump carried Macomb by 48,000 votes in 2016. That fell to a little more than 39,000 in 2020, when he was running against Joe Biden, a white guy from a blue-collar background.
Last week, he carried Macomb by almost 70,000 votes. What’s remarkable is that perhaps as many as 35,000 voters got their ballots, walked into the booth, voted for Trump, and voted for no one else. Elissa Slotkin got only about 3,000 more votes than Harris in Macomb, but Mike Rogers got way less than Trump, and so she lost by a much smaller margin in the county, which helped her narrowly win statewide.
One final proof that she was caught in the rip tides of racism and sexism: Trump, who got only eight percent of the national Black vote eight years ago, got nearly double that last week. He won more than 20 percent of the votes of Black men, some of whom openly said they didn’t want a female president. And despite having an African-American woman on the ballot, turnout fell in Detroit, and Trump got seven thousand more votes in Detroit against a Black woman than he did against Joe Biden.
Latinos, by the way swung strongly toward Trump. For the first time in the modern era, a Republican got a majority of the male Latino vote; he became the first Republican to carry Miami-Dade County since 1988.
Know what the one group was who swung towards Harris and the Democrats? College educated whites. Trump won small majorities among male members of that group before, but not this time and Harris almost doubled Biden’s margin among college-educated women.
Then there was the media, who in this campaign even more than the first two Trump campaigns utterly failed to figure out how to cover him adequately.
We failed for three reasons:
Journalists are taught to report what candidates say, analyze it and look for inconsistencies.
‘Candidate X says we should raise emissions standards by 5 percent; candidate Y says lower them, and this is what that would mean. Et cetera.
But we have never figured out how to cover someone who lies constantly and whose statements often have no connection to reality. We don’t know how to treat a candidate who shows serious signs of mental illness.
What we did too often is what came to be called “sanewashing.” We took the incoherent word salad that emerged from Trump’s mouth and tried to tell people what he really meant. As if even he knew
Newspapers did somewhat better at putting this in perspective than broadcast media, but most people don’t get their news from print anymore. Even when print did its best, even papers like the New York Times, were guilty of two mortal sins in this campaign. One was sanewashing; the other was a misplaced and misguided and, in this case, totally inappropriate drive to be “fair and balanced,” what we call “bothsidesism.”
As in, … so, Donald Trump is clearly an unstable wannabee dictator whose policies might start wars and would wreck the economy and destroy democracy. BUT Kamala Harris changed her 2019 position on fracking.
So they’re the same.
Yep, it’s “what about her emails” on steroids.
Two, thanks to the repeal of the fairness doctrine, we have whole networks – Fox for one – dedicated to broadcasting right-wing lies and propaganda suppressing the truth, and brainwashing their viewers and listeners.
Finally there was another even more terrifying problem we faced. No matter how many times we demonstrated that Trump was and is a scary pathological liar who often seems deranged, millions and millions of voters didn’t care.
They did not care that a major party candidate for the most powerful position in the world was a convicted sex criminal and felon. They did not care than he wanted to talk about sharks and electrocution and stood there silently durong one rally, swaying to music for 38 minutes.
Republican Party leaders knew very well, many of them, that this is an unstable and dangerous monster, but they did not have the will or the guts to try and stop him, except for a very few courageous people like Liz Cheney. They enabled the cult.
I am 72 years old, and have been a journalist since the 1970s. For most of my life, doing a single one of the things we’ve seen Trump do would have ended the career of anyone running for Farmington Hills dog catcher.
Much less President of the United States. I voted against Ronald Reagan every chance I got, but when I met him and whenever I was in a room or event where he was, I was fully conscious he was President of the United States and the head of the most sacred secular office in our country, that he sat where Lincoln and FDR and JFK sat.
I knew, as he did and they did that carved into the mantel of the State Dining Room in the White House is a quote from John Adams, “may none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”
Well, guess what.
A week ago, I thought, we could all think that the first Trump term had been an aberration, and that his defeat marked the restoration of the country we knew.
Joe Biden thought the same thing. When he took office in January 2021, he called a series of world leaders and sid, “America’s back!” But more than one of them replied, “For How Long?”
We now know the answer. The anomaly, a brief throwback to the past, Biden, who was born in 1942 as American forces fought at Guadalcanal and shaped by the war and the Cold War and the legacy of the New Deal will be our last postwar President. He was a President worthy of respect and honor who will be ranked far higher than he is now.
That is, if the country survives.
What happens next to NATO, to Social Security, to the Middle East and our system of alliances, none can say. That doesn’t mean we are powerless.
My guess is that Democrats should recapture the House of Representatives in two years. While a lot of us want to retreat into our homes and private lives, we cannot and must not give in to that. The next few years will be difficult ones indeed – at the very least.
Trump and those around him have already poisoned the process and our democracy and are very likely to destroy it again, if we don’t stop them.
But you never can tell. There used to be a saying that “God looks after fools, drunks and the United States of America.” It would be nice if that were so.
And in any event, it is really up to us.
By the way, just as a footnote: One of the little-noted ironies of this election is that the result may have revived the Presidential prospects of Gretchen Whitmer, who because of term limits has to leave office at the end of 2026.
If Harris had been elected President, she would have been the expected nominee in 2028, and by the time the next election rolled around in 2032, Whitmer would have been out of office for six years, which is an eternity in politics.
But now, that’s not happening, and Whitmer will easily be able to jump into the race, if she wants to.
However, I have to say that after what’s now happened twice, I sadly don’t expect to see another woman nominated for President, certainly not by the Democrats, for a long, long time.
