It's not over yet, but things are looking grim for Kamala Harris. Was it all down to inflation?
Every incumbent party around the world when the post-pandemic inflation began has lost, regardless of ideology and regardless of where inflation was at the moment of the election.
— David Dayen (@ddayen) November 6, 2024
Here's what the exit polls say about inflation over the past year:
Needless to say, this is crazy. It's perfectly sensible to see big partisan disagreements about abortion or guns or taxes. But a huge partisan split on how much inflation has hurt you?
I think we can say that, obviously, inflation affected everyone roughly the same. It didn't affect Republicans any more harshly than Democrats—not by more than a handful of percentage points anyway. And yet a huge number say it was a severe hardship over the past year. The past year! There's hardly been any inflation over the past year.¹ Maybe Annie Lowrey has it right:
Since I've been a reporter, so since the GWB administration, it's been clear that headline economy statistics have become less and less of a clear guide in terms of telling you what average families are feeling.
— Annie Lowrey (@AnnieLowrey) November 6, 2024
Perhaps. But even assuming that people interpret "the past year" as "ever since Biden took over," it still doesn't make sense that the partisan divide would be so big. This isn't the kind of question that automatically triggers tribal identification, the way some questions do.
In the end, it might be the simplest of things: inflation made people mad. And when they're mad they vote for the out party. They don't care whose fault it was or anything like that. They're just mad, so they vote for a change.
Or maybe it was Fox News banging away about inflation 24/7.
Or maybe there are still just too many men who simply can't bring themselves to vote for a woman. Especially among Latinos.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
¹2.4% to be exact, almost exactly the average from 2000-2019.
Inflation was the sundae, the hate was the cherry on top. Ignorance was the chocolate sauce. All three played a role in Trumps win. I'm hungry hence the food metaphor.
It's quite a delicious food metaphor.
Misogyny was the whipped cream.
And we all know who the nuts on top are.
I kind of want the GOP to be in full controll just so the working class people can experience what it's like when you vote against your own interests. But then again a good majority of people are susceptible to Trumps propaganda that they'd welcome things like weakened unions, less worker protections in general and less social safety programs. It's amazing how shortsighted and vindictive our fellow Americans are. They'd cut off their nose to spite their face with a smile on it. Here comes another four years of a bloviating, arrogant and unethical orange turd. Yippee!
No. Not inflation. Jimmy Carter was right about malaise.
We are NOT better than this.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/11/06/trump-wins-2024-presidential-election/75942805007/
+1. Hate and bigotry triumphed again. We have shown exactly who we are. Its a most depressing realization. One I've managed to avoid facing for far too long.
Yeah, that's the first thing I said to my husband this morning "This is NOT who we are."
If this is who we are, I can't be an American because I am not a lying cheating, bigoted, selfish, white supremacist, christian nationalist. If this is America, and it appears that it is, I'm out.
It's depressing but unfortunately not many can afford to leave or want to. This is just as much our country as it is a Trump supporters. Hate is a powerful thing to overcome. Unfortunately Harris wasn't able to overcome that and inflation.
Maybe the Exit Polls should had asked- "In the last year have PRICES caused . . . "
Biden should resign immediately.
But not before launching a missile barrage at ....
Harris offered no policies for the working class. The story of her defeat is the smaller turnout compared to these voters in the states Biden won in 2020. America's decline should accelerate with a Trump presidency and now is the time to organize for real change to the political economy when the markets and imperial policies fail catastrophically.
Meanwhile in the REAL FSCKING WORLD as opposed to your fantasy land:
https://x.com/ptcherneva/status/1854191065110286628
money shot
"
While the sample size is small, red states voted for pro-worker policies: wage increases and paid sick leave. CA and MA didn’t, though in CA voters supported measures to strengthen healthcare, schools, infrastructure.
"
I have been talking about this for SIX MONTHS, how party polarities have flipped; R are now the party of labor, D are the party of the elites; and you lot refuse to deal with it.
Like it, you got exactly what you deserved.
I'm gonna guess MA and CA already have higher wages and sick pay so calling them the party of elites is really rather ignorant. For red states they probably were already way behind on both. The fact that it took them this long should be the point of your post.
Mass voted down increasing the tipped minimum wage to be the same as the normal minimum wage (which has only been enacted in 8 states - AL, CA, MI, MN, MT, NV, OR, and WA). But they voted to allow ride-sharing workers to unionize. So a mixed bag on pro-worker policies at worst.
More actual FACTS:
https://x.com/BarneyFlames/status/1854160368559608039
Trump gained among women, massively among hispanics and asians, massively among the youth (18..29, and 30..34). Gained somewhat among blacks.
Only losses were among
- white college women
- 65+ (So much for that nursing home inhabitants watching Fox News stereotype).
Honestly, it's almost exhausting watching the Dems shoot themselves in the feet again and again, because everyone on team D is so convinced they know reality that they keep making STUPID errors.
- Encourage the youth vote -- then learn that they youth hates you and your dystopian vision for their future.
- Generate one ad after another mocking men -- then discover the only women in America who actually hate men are the indoctrinated white college women (who, don't worry, will generate their own miserable lives; they don't need to be punished by anyone else, they punish themselves every day).
- Try to encourage massive immigration (legal or otherwise) from South America, only to find that Hispanics don't share your enthusiasm for latinx and pretending that boy-girl distinctions don't exist.
Truly a master class in stupidity.
"Truly a master class in stupidity." Judging by your biased posts you seem to be an expert on the matter. They are dripping with right wing propaganda and talking points.
To me, the horrid loss to Trump is for 1 main reason, compounded by 2 dumb things Harris said. That main reason is that Biden has been a terribly weak and ineffective President. Half of the job of President (or any leader) is to be an effective communicator to his/her constituents - he absolutely stunk at that. Inflation wasn’t his fault, but I can’t think of anything Biden did to convince the masses he had a plan to deal with it, and he certainly didn’t indicate he “felt people’s pain” like a Clinton would have done. The couple of good bills congress passed early in his term didn’t resonate with the masses is largely because he couldn’t explain consistently and effectively how they would be of benefit….he didn’t market his achievements. And, his general weakness was heightened by getting completely emasculated by other world leaders such as Netanyahu.
The two dumb things Harris said and were played over and over again in Trump commercials (at least here in PA) were: 1) an interview from 2019 where Harris said she’d offer transition surgery to any inmate who wanted them, and 2) when interviewed in the summer, couldn’t think of a single thing she’d have done differently as an administration the last 4 years.
Bottom line, Biden was historically bad. That’s why Harris lost.
My father, ardent R, complained non-stop about gas prices. He can't drive, he's blind, but his friends would tell him about $7.00/gal prices. Maybe premium which he's never paid for in his life. My father is worth almost 2 million and 93.
One year of inflation caused by all kinds of things and it gets laid on the president. To be fair the D's would do the same thing.
We badly need education on basic finances and especially about federal spending. For christ sakes, Trump promised a $2T cut in federal spending, something that would be a disaster in so many ways because people don't know better.
4 years of hell, at least I'm a white guy.
The Nazis hauled away non Jewish collaborators too. Your politics could make you vulnerable to the same treatment as "the others".
Kamala's campaign was almost as centrist as it could be. The majority of voter's said they didn't want that. Trump's campaign was extremely to the right. The majority of voters said they wanted that.
At this point, I don't want to hear one more "centrist" drone on about "Democrats need to move to the right to capture the centrist vote". There has never been any evidence to support this claim and now we have definitive proof that the majority of the electorate has no interest in a centrist government.
Since the majority of voters support an extreme right government, arguing from the technocratic center is worse than useless. I don't think that a majority of the electorate would support a progressive government right now either but arguing from the left at least has a chance of dragging the Overton Window back from where it sits now, firmly on the right.
Voters don't really support an extreme right government economically. Polls show overall support for most Democratic economic positions, such as higher taxes on the rich. People want government services, they just don't want those services to go to the "wrong" people. For many lower-income white people bigotry outweighs economics but they will certainly not admit this in polls or interviews.
There is not one left-right spectrum, there are two, economic and "social", and the "social" part is dominant among a lot of people who would belong to the left if it were only economics.
+1
I made that point earlier. Inflation was real and groceries and gas are more expensive now than 4 years ago and I believe most people were dealing with it. But Republicans repeatedly crowed about Biden (Harris) sending money to Ukraine, giving "illegals" money for housing and free healthcare and forgiving student loans all the while Americans were paying $5 for gas and $8 for eggs. They successfully tapped the dark side of most Americans and it translated into votes for the felon.
Right, but that's pretty much my point. People may support more liberal economic proposals but who cares? What good is that if their bogus social/culture war views are so extremely right that they override their economic views.
Currently, those extreme right social views are treated as normal in the mainstream press so any centrist social views are viewed as extreme left by those same "social conservatives". That Overton Window needs to be dragged back in a more sensible direction. Why water down left/liberal ideas to try and woo centrists when that strategy has failed over and over and over and over.
Stand up for your views and principles and argue for them on their merits rather than concede to the extreme right. Again, I'm under no illusions that this will win elections in the short term but moving to the center has definitely not won elections either. Let's at least stand for what we believe.
Nor do voters support a far Right agenda on social issues. All the successful pro-abortion initiatives, and the general acceptance of SSM, show that. Note that Trump, to the extent that them an can be coherent, ran as a centrist on most of social issues, quite POing the SoCons with his abortion comments. And again to the extent he's coherent he was our most gay=friendly president before Biden.
Exactly. Class and economic interests (beyond the most basic impulses) take a distant back seat to the far more emotionally resonant concerns of nation, religion, race and family. As the left becomes more divorced from existing predominate notions of these among working class voters the more they will vote against the left regardless of how much it is in their economic interests. That said the lefts positions on these things are (mostly) right and shouldn’t be cast off to win the working class. It’s a matter of finding messages that work.
Also Biden was (unfairly) really unpopular and Teump tried his best to not look scary on abortion and other things that might scare low information voters off.
Democrats need to move to the right to capture the centrist vote". There has never been any evidence to support this claim
In fact a number of prominent centrist Democratic congressional candidates outperformed the baseline of the election. Also, Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama—the two most successful Democratic politicians of my lifetime—are centrists.
a walk through a grocery store shows that the results of inflation are with us. it's a weekly insult.
Insult? Sorry, this is just how inadequately regulated capitalism works.
It's amazing how few people understand how a true unregulated capitalist economy would operate and exactly how bad it would be.
The results of PAST inflation,. That was true in 1984 too, but the voters that year did not hold it against Reagan that prices had failed to fall down to their levels in the previous decade.
"The people have spoken; God damn them"
--Mo Udall
+!
Oh FFS.
This attitude is EXACTLY why the Dems lost -- and more importantly, deserved to lose.
I have spent the past six months giving, once a week or so, an analysis of how the Republican party has changed, and why one group after another has shifted to the Republicans (or shifted the other way).
Quick quiz:
Who did Caitlyn Jenner vote for? That's right, Trump.
Who did Richard Spencer vote for? That's right, straight Democratic ticket.
The response to every one of these analyses has to be to tell me that I'm a racist sexist fascist. That is what political understanding and interpretation on the left has become - scream "racist, sexist, fascist" at anyone saying anything you don't want to hear. Close your ears, disconnect your brains, and trot out the same tired excuses as have been used for the past 20 years when you don't get your way.
Will the Left change as a result of this defeat? I don't think so. The rot is too deep, the disconnect from reality, the inability to understand that other people actually think differently, for one loss to affect anything. Instead we will get industrial strength levels of the same copium as in this post.
Maybe 8yrs of Vance following Trump will finally get the message through?
There's another interesting detail. You'll note that every battleground state except Minnesota broke for Trump, or (if not called yet) is trending Trump. Miami-Dade, and FL as a whole broke much stronger for Trump than expected, as did Ohio Hell, even NY and NJ look like they could become battleground states in 2024.
I put it to you, simply as an intellectual proposition, that it's somewhat remarkable how, with generally much more aggressive watching of the polls, and substantially improved voting infrastructure in many places (most obviously FL) so many supposed coin tosses went in one particular direction. Does this mean that Harris was even more disliked than we thought? Perhaps so. But it also raises the uncomfortable question that perhaps when Trump talked about a "steal" in 2020, he wasn't simply being a sore loser as generally believed? We'll likely never know the truth.
But the behavior of the media in the run-up to this election, and the way the numbers have played out, have flipped more than a few minds from "Trump has his flaws, and refusing to concede was one of the worse" to "perhaps it takes a lunatic who refuses to be reasonable, to break through and destroy a system that *is* in fact corrupt and is constantly tweaking the electoral system to add a percentage here or there"...
Caitlyn Jenner is a self loathing conservative who voted for a person who would gladly refer to her as he and pass laws making her existence unbearable if not illegal. Who the fuck cares why Richard Spencer voted for and why? I wouldn't even attempt to figure out what motivates such an asshole. "But it also raises the uncomfortable question that perhaps when Trump talked about a "steal" in 2020, he wasn't simply being a sore loser as generally believed? " lol. Please enlighten us as to what other reason there could be for the big lie other than Trump being a sore loser. "We'll likely never know the truth." You'll never admit the truth. JFC this election has proven that a good portion of America is full of ignorant hateful people with a small percentage of them being apologists and revisionists.
Like I said, utter inability to learn from anything.
https://x.com/bungarsargon/status/1854145177427791914/photo/2
Nice link to a conservative who thinks Donald Trump dressing up as a McDonald's fry cook means he supports low wage workers. FFS I didn't expect much from you but this exceeded my expectations. Great job! Are you normally that naive or are you willing to sound stupid to prove a dishonest point?
Xitter, the go to source for all things stupid, ignorant and hateful. What a wonderful job Leon did turning Twitter into a cesspool of right wing bullshit.
"Please enlighten us as to what other reason there could be for the big lie other than Trump being a sore loser." I'm still interested in your responce, if just for the shits and giggles aspect of it.
Now Bernie is saying what I said:
https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1854271157135941698/photo/1
"It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry
and want change. And they're right."
But I guess that, like the bizarre claims that Arabs in Dearborn and Hispanics in Texas are the new "white supremacists" I guess you guys will be claiming that all along Bernie Sanders was a closet fascist.
But yes, feel free to make your stupid jokes about "Xitter" and to pretend that your media bubble represents reality.
As Bernie says later in the letter:
"Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? ... Probably not."
It's remarkable how many writers ignore the real nature of the problem, at least from the point of view of those who did not vote for Trump. How did people like Trump, Vance and the whole crew of their slavish and knavish supporters ever get close to controlling the country? Aside from their personal deficiencies, Republican economics clearly does not benefit lower-income people, whatever their race.
Even if Democrats had made none of their alleged mistakes or some other supposedly critical factor had swung the election in Democrats' favor by a hair the MAGA movement would still be there. And when Trump is gone there will be others to take his place - a lot of people now know how to get elected without really knowing anything.
I don't have a magic formula but denying the dominant role that racial, religious and sexual bigotry play in American politics is not a constructive path. The reaction to Trump's win seems to be to pursue a multitude of red-herring paths to avoid acknowledging racism in particular.
I've thought about this answer, and I think it goes back to fundamentals. As in over the last seven or eight Presidential elections.
If you were coaching someone on how to get elected as a politician, sadly, the dark arts would be (1) find a problem, (2) blame the problem on your opponent, and (3) squeal long and hard about "something needs to be done."
Note that I did not include (4) propose a sound solution to the problem. If we are talking about Trump, it has been proven that you don't even need an actual problem if you can make one up. Nope, (1) through (3) is good enough.
Dems have proven that campaigns at the national level based on a sound, factual analysis of what policies would benefit the most people are called, for shorthand "losing campaigns."
Kevin's inflation point is thus, its a problem, you blame them Dems, and you say something should be done. I have never heard Trump point out what exactly he thinks would be done on this, or, for that matter, on any issue.
Clinton and Obama were excellent at conveying to voters that they understood the problems of the voter. Biden was OK at it. Kerry, say, Dukakis if you go back that far, Gore, Hillary and now Harris ran campaigns based on what they would do in terms of policy. Which is a sure loser.
We are like Charlie Brown with Lucy holding the football. We would like to think that this time the voters will pay attention. But we end up on our ass again.
See also every post by name99. Could not find a better example to prove your point.
Not sure if anyone is still reading this, but I think if one wants to West Wing this its take a damn hard look at Florida. The following things/people got 57% of the vote:
Trump
Legalize Marijuana
Right to abortion.
So about 13% of Florida voters voted "yes" to codify Roe and "no" to Harris which means "yes" to Trump. Unless 13% of Florida voters left the presidential pick blank or something, I don't think there is any other explanation.
In Florida, Harris's position on abortion was irrelevant. One wonders what OTHER positions Florida voters found as irrelevant. Maybe all of them?
No wonder he doesn't want to be asked about abortion. He won't until the bill banning abortions nation wide is put in front of him. He'll sign it while saying he had no choice.
I get the need to lash out or find blame at a time like this, but when you do it, remember that the allies you're lashing out at are also hurting. So do it gently if you do.
Have no fear, most of their suffering will be the direct result of how they voted.
Of course it was mostly inflation.
Now that the people angry about inflation have voted for a guy whose economic plan is massively inflationary, things will get very interesting.
Retribution politics.
"I think we can say that, obviously, inflation affected everyone roughly the same. "
Why on Earth would you think that? It's like taxes. If you're living hand to mouth, inflation hurts you astronomically more than it does a surgeon.