One of the candidates in the 2024 presidential election organized an uprising to storm the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 election result. There was a conspiracy to substitute slates of fake electors for the real ones. That candidate phoned Georgia's Secretary of State and asked him "to find 11,780 votes". He took home classified documents without any authorization, an act that would normally result in prison time for a government employee, and kept them in his bathroom. He attempted to coerce Ukraine President Zelenskyy into supporting a conspiracy theory about President Biden, an act that resulted in his first impeachment. He has been convicted of felonies for falsifying business records in the State of New York. He has been indicted for 52 charges in Florida, Georgia, and the District of Columbia. He has threatened violence against journalists and political opponents; he said that former Rep. Elizabeth Cheney should be put in front of a firing squad. During his first term, he mismanaged the COVID pandemic; he suggested drinking bleach or injecting disinfectants as a form of treatment, and later accused Dr. Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of costing the U.S. economy "one trillion f**king dollars." He appointed three justices to the Supreme Court who lied when they said that Roe v. Wade was "settled law", and once they were on the court, they voted to overturn it. He said that Adolph Hitler "did some good things" and that he needed Hitler's generals. He has threatened to pull the US out of NATO. When the existence of Project 2025, a platform with, among other things, serious restrictions on civil liberties, was revealed, he initially claimed that he had nothing to do with it. A week later, in front of a different audience, he praised it.
In one speech, Trump talked about golf star Arnold Palmer's genitalia, saying "When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there." Trump should have been a candidate for a nursing home, not President.
The Vice-Presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, said that the U.S. is being run by "childless cat ladies".
Any rational person would think that it would take a lot of talent to lose an election to such a man. The Democrats nominated excellent candidates for President and Vice-President. They ran a excellent campaign, and raised over a billion dollars to pay for it. They conducted an extensive get-out-the-vote effort, and got an impressive list of celebrity endorsements, from Bruce Springsteen to Beyoncé, as well as support from several prominent Republican politicians, such as former Reps. Cheney, Joe Walsh and Adam Kinzinger.
So, why did Kamala Harris and Tim Walz lose? The obvious answer is, Harris is a black woman.
There are, however, a number of other factors that increased the likelihood of the Trump/Vance win. Here goes:
Trump/Vance took advantage of an uneducated electorate. Case in point; a lot of Trump/Vance voters said that inflation was a major concern. They were either unaware that Trump proposed a lot of tariffs on imported goods, or they were unaware that such a policy would cause serious inflation. I learned about tariffs in the seventh grade. Trump doesn't actually know what a tariff is, and neither do most of his supporters.
The press and media did a poor job of informing the public. Case in point; tariffs again. MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell reported on it several times, saying that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 caused the Great Depression, and that tariffs are ultimately paid by U.S. consumers, not by the country of origin. Trump even said at one point that he would abolish the income tax and replace it with revenue from tariffs, thus shifting the tax burden from wealthy people to the middle-class and the poor. It goes without saying that this went unmentioned on Fox News. It only got a passing reference in the Wall Street Journal. I don't know if it was covered by CNN, because I don't watch it.
53% of white women voted for Trump. The fact that he is a serial rapist didn't bother them. Were you surprised that he appointed Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General? You shouldn't have been.
Voter turnout was lower in liberal strongholds. A lot of people who voted for Biden in 2020 didn't even bother to show up this time.
37% of Puerto Ricans voted for Trump. At a Trump rally, a comedian referred to Puerto Rico as a "floating island of garbage¨. The crowd loved it. A lot of Puerto Ricans live in Pennsylvania, and the votes Trump got from them helped him carry this swing state.
33% of Mexican-Americans voted for Trump. Trump recently said he will deport as many as 20 million people, by rounding them up, putting them in concentration camps, and flying them to some other country. Some Mexicans hold the belief that these deportees will be "someone else". In particular, they believe that only non-citizens will be deported. Problem is, it says in Project 2025 that the Trump administration will denaturalize immigrant citizens, and Trump has insisted that he will end birthright citizenship. So, it's wishful thinking for these people to think that their citizenship won't be revoked. And if they don't like the idea of living in a country with a smart woman as President, they could well end up Mexico, which has a smart woman President.
Fewer Arab-Americans voted for Harris. In Michigan, a key state with a large Arab-American population, Harris got 22,000 fewer votes than Biden got in 2020. Did anybody explain to these people that efforts by the Biden/Harris administration to stop the killing in Gaza were rejected by Hamas? That Trump kisses Netanyahu's ass on a weekly basis? And that in February, Jared Kirshner was already talking about Gaza's "waterfront property" as a real estate opportunity after the Palestinians are removed from it, and relocated to the Negev Desert?
24% of black men voted for Trump. You're kidding yourselves. People like Trump like you when you're playing football or basketball, or shining their shoes. The rest of the time, you're a gang member or a crack addict, and they sure as hell don't want you living in their neighborhood.
Wokeism is a vote loser. Very few people like the idea that it's OK for boys to play on girls' athletic teams. The idea that a child could get a sex-change operation after being dropped off at school in the morning is ridiculous, but it didn't help that Harris said that she supported access to medically necessary gender-affirming care for federal prisoners, and the Trump campaign made effective use of this in their advertising. Various liberal people and organizations, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have promoted use of the term "latinx", without even knowing whether it should be pronounced ¨latin-eks" or "latin-equis". Latinos and Latinas have said "nosotros no queremos esto", and liberals have refused to listen. Comedian/commentator Trae Crowder weighed in on this:
Climate change and the environment were non-issues. A month before the election, Asheville, NC was devastated by Hurricane Helene. Residents of Florida and the Gulf Coast have become accustomed to destruction from increasingly powerful hurricanes, but what happened in Asheville, 300 miles (480 km.) inland, demonstrated that nobody is safe. The Republicans continue to chant "drill, baby, drill", and show no interest in the topic of climate change. And yet, the Democrats weren't talking about it. And there's no shortage of other issues they could have brought up. Here's one recently identifed by Bill Maher:
Reducing dependence on fossil fuels and internal combustion engines is not only good for the environment, it's good for the economy. The same applies to the infrastructure program started by President Biden.
So what's next? Every fact presented in this article except for the Gaetz appointment was known prior to election day. We have to address the fact that the press and media cannot be counted on to tell us what´s going on, and even if they did, not many people are listening. We know that Twitter and Facebook are manipulated by Elon Musk and troll farms. Fox News is ridiculous, but CNN isn't all that great either. CNN and major publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post are heavy purveyors of both-siderism, and, like the general public, have short attention spans. And while there's no shortage of podcasts, they mostly preach to the converted. (Maybe Harris should have agreed to appear on Joe Rogan's podcast, though.) Billboards would be good, because they are impossible to ignore. Talk radio was a major factor in building Republican support; I listen to the Randi Rhodes Show several times a week, but programs like Democracy Now! do more harm than good. The Democrats need to figure out how to get their message out, and the effort has to be ongoing; a lot of Trump's support was "baked in".
