Donald Trump has been re-elected to be President of the United States. I find it hard to even type those words. But this was no fluke. Nor was it the consequence of the quirks of the Electoral College. He won every swing state and a majority of the popular vote. It was a clear-cut and unambiguous loss for our side. And one that I fear will have dire consequences for the future of this country.
But enough. I already went through all of this in my prior post: Shattered.
This time, I am penning a memo mainly to myself — suggesting ways I might have thought about things differently, perhaps done things differently and hopefully learn something — so that I can do better going forward.
Truth is not necessarily persuasive
If you’re a Trump supporter, the first thing you might say I should learn is to have some humility. Our side lost. Big time. Accept it.
Agreed. I do accept it. It is humbling…and shocking.
Trump smeared Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals — and now threatens mass deportations. And yet he captured nearly a majority of the Latino vote. Trump hosted dinners with known white supremacists and Nazi sympathizers. And yet he drew significant support from Jews. Trump has repeatedly attacked unions and said striking workers should be fired — and unions could hardly have had a more supportive President than Biden. And yet much of the union rank and file voted for Trump. And on and on — in nearly every demographic.
And, of course, Trump was the perpetrator of an insurrection against our own government. He stands justly accused of (and convicted of) numerous crimes. And yet…he won.
For all this to have happened, something has clearly gone very very wrong.
Throughout this election, there was a voice inside me that kept saying: “Trust the American people. There’s no way that they will return someone as terrible as Trump to the White House.”
That voice was wrong.
Frank Bruni similarly put it: We were confident that “Americans — at least the ones whose minds weren’t firmly made up — would surely abandon Trump now. There was a limit to the cruelness and craziness they’d abide.”
It turns out there was no limit.
This is the thing that keeps punching me in the gut. Yes, the economy was uppermost on many voters’ minds. But shouldn’t saving the country from an autocratic take-over trump (pun intended) the economy?
Trump voters did not agree. “If you actually sit down and talk with many Trump voters, you’ll hear some version of this: ‘Look, I didn’t like Jan. 6 — and I don’t want it to happen again — but it didn’t affect my life nearly as much as the price of eggs, milk and gas.’”
In the end, “persuadable” voters were never sufficiently persuaded that Trump was the existential threat we claimed he was. In some sense, they didn’t believe Trump would do what he said he would do. So they either voted for Trump or they didn’t vote at all.
I don’t think there is a single explanation for this. But one explanation is that just because something is true doesn’t mean you can convince people that it’s true — especially if people have a vested interest in believing otherwise.
Back in the mid-20th century, when the dangers of smoking were first becoming clearly evident, anti-smoking PSAs began appearing on television. Many of them attempted to scare people into not smoking — using graphic depictions of the consequences of getting lung cancer. It turned out the ads were a complete failure. Why? The ads were too scary, too anxiety-provoking; smokers refused to watch them or simply rejected the truth of what the ads were saying.
The strategy was a mistake. But it did not alter the basic fact: Cigarette smoking was dangerous. Just because smokers refused to believe it, didn’t mean they wouldn’t get lung cancer.
I believe the same is true for Trump. He remains a “clear and present danger” — even if a majority of the country finds reason to minimize the danger.
So, what, if anything, could I/we have done that might have been more convincing? I’m not certain. Perhaps nothing. Or perhaps (even though it pains me to say it) we should have talked about “democracy issues” in a way that was less “scary” — as they eventually did with cigarettes. Maybe. But that doesn’t imply that discussion of these issues should have been avoided altogether — as some have claimed. That’s a bridge too far for me.
Regardless, in the end, I placed too much faith in the belief that enough people would ultimately vote for Harris because they would vote against Trump.
The truth is definitely not “out there”
A related reason our arguments were not persuasive enough is that persuadable voters too often never got to hear them. They were too insulated in their TikTok or Fox News bubbles.
An avalanche of disinformation and outright lies — plus the sane-washing and normalizing of Trump by mainstream media — led to an environment where truth got lost in the rubble. Legitimate concerns about Trump were too easily discounted as partisan hyperbole and hysteria.
Added to that, as Frank Bruni points out: “Those of us who get hourly updates, have nightly freak-outs and can hold forth on Trump and the shark, Trump and Hannibal Lecter, Trump and windmills aren’t normal, but we’re arrogant: We assume our experience is everyone’s and our knowledge ambient.” In other words, most people were completely oblivious to the news items that consumed our days; so there was no chance of any sort of persuasion.
And so you wind up in an incredible world where, as you probably know, nearly two-thirds of Republicans — even now — believe the 2020 election was stolen. “Fact-checking” does nothing to move the needle. That’s why Trump can lie about immigrants who eat pets and not lose any support. Attempts to “censor” disinformation are not going to work either; the First Amendment will rightly prohibit most of it.
OK, I didn’t exactly learn any of this as a result of the election. I already knew it. And I still have next to no idea how to effectively combat it. But what I did relearn…or at least confirm…is how devastatingly effective these lies continue to be. I can laugh at how ridiculous they are; but many voters taken them very seriously. And so I should too.
Don’t ignore the warning signs
Up until the very last minute, I/we remained “cautiously optimistic” that we would win. How could this be? Easy. I believed the hype coming from within my own bubble. I didn’t take the signs (and there were many) that pointed to a Trump victory seriously enough. Certainly they would not be determinative — or so I thought. And I overestimated the effect of the good things that Harris was doing. I need to be less myopic next time.
Stop shedding constituencies
In the wake of the 1960’s Civil Rights movement, the Democrats lost almost the entire South. From the Reagan Democrats in the 1980’s to the Latino and Arab votes in 2024, we seem to be losing more constituencies over time than we are gaining. We can’t keep doing this — and expect to win. It’s simple arithmetic.
Democrats claim we represent the majority. We believe Republicans only succeed by manipulating the system, via gerrymandering and the electoral college and such, which allows their minority to retain power. We believe our numbers will continue to grow over time — as the demographics shift to a minority majority — and we will wrest control from the GOP once and for all. Perhaps it will play out that way eventually. But it certainly didn’t work out this way in last week’s election.
That’s why, going forward, I want to make a greater effort to reconnect with and repair our relationship with the groups that have left us — starting with the white non-college-educated working class. I’m not saying that no effort has been made to do this; but the efforts were clearly not successful in this election. Certainly, I should not condescendingly dismiss these voters as too ignorant to realize they are being duped. As much as possible, I’d like them as an ally — not an enemy. We need their votes.
The ground game is less effective than we would like to think
At the Presidential/national level, when it came to our “ground game” (canvassing, phone-banking and such), nothing we did this year made a discernible difference. By that I mean, Kamala Harris did not get a single electoral vote that she would not have gotten had we stayed home and binge-watched reruns of The West Wing instead of making phone calls and knocking on doors.
Of course, one side is always going to lose — no matter how much of an effort they make. And one can try to make the case that our work made a difference even if it wasn’t sufficient to alter the outcome. I remain skeptical.
Yes, it’s true that there are vast numbers of people who did not vote. If we could find a way to significantly mobilize those non-voters who agree with us — and our opponents did not do the same, at least not as effectively — we could potentially make a difference. But there is little to suggest that we were doing that. In fact, in this election, everything I read suggested that our ground game was far superior to that of the GOP. And still we lost.
There was probably a time, decades ago, when grass roots efforts had much more influence than they do now. But in the age of the Internet, social media, mobile phones, targeted ads, Fox News and disinformation, that time has largely passed.
This is not to say that there is nothing we can do to advance our cause. There are. Especially at the state and local levels. As well as by influencing Congress. But, if we want to affect the outcome of a Presidential election, I believe we are best off shifting away from traditional ground game actions. [I know there are good people who disagree with me here; I am open to talking about it.]
Give up waiting for the backlash
There are those who believe that, after Trump and the GOP screw things up, as they will inevitably do, the electorate will throw them out. Voters will see how Trump failed to deliver on his promises: prices will not come down, tax cuts will benefit only the wealthy, the immigration problem will not be fixed and tariffs will be an economic disaster. And Trump’s autocratic goals will become too evident to ignore. The voters will have buyers’ remorse; they will dump Trump and MAGA.
Unfortunately, I consider this to be magical thinking.
I know I am repeating myself a bit by now. But it bears repeating. Over and over again, I/we have kept waiting for Trump’s day of reckoning. From the Access Hollywood tape to January 6 to the criminal conviction in New York to the Madison Square Garden rally, there was always something (or collection of things) that we assumed would make Trump so toxic that all but his most loyal supporters would abandon him.
It hasn’t happened yet. It may never happen.
Trump won in 2016, almost won (except for the pandemic) in 2020 and won again “more bigly” in 2024. The country wants what Trump is selling even when it seems to us like they shouldn’t. Trump’s America is who we are right now. It’s not going to change just because Trump messes things up. If that’s all it took, Trump would have been forced off the stage several acts ago. Trump supporters will find a way to make peace with whatever negative news emerges — and still maintain their support for him.
Trump will be as bad as he said he will be; probably worse
Some pundits are already hedging their bets: “Don’t worry…Trump won’t be as bad as you thought. He will turn out to be a lot more normal than you feared. He won’t try to do all those terrible things he promised. We survived Trump last time without serious consequences; we’ll do it again. Democracy is not in any real danger.”
I call bullshit. Trump will be exactly as bad as we feared. Probably worse.
As these headlines show, the hurricane winds are already forming — and it’s barely been a week since Election Day:
I would caution against expecting too much success in efforts to block Trump from carrying out his agenda. With the GOP having achieved the trifecta of the White House and both houses of Congress — plus already having control of the Supreme Court — they will have a clear path to accomplish almost anything they set out to do. They won’t succeed in everything. And there may be a few things we can stop — or at least slow down. But that is cold comfort.
From making MAGA judicial appointments, to dismantling the education department, to radicalization of health services, to weaponization of the justice department — Trump is poised to take a wrecking ball to the structure of our government. And he is much better prepared than he was 8 years ago. What makes it especially egregious is that, even if democracy somehow survives and Democrats retake control of everything in 2028, so much long-term damage will have been done that it will take decades to recover from it. There is no sugar-coating this; we are in for a very bad time.
It remains tragic to me that what lies ahead could so easily have been averted if Trump had lost. What a better world we would be living today if November 5 had produced a different outcome. But it didn’t. And now we have to pay the price.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by all of this — and slide down into a pit of despair. Frankly, I am quite near that point. Especially because, given my age, I likely won’t be around long enough to see any big turn-around.
But I am determined not be overwhelmed. And I am heartened that I am far from alone here. Change will come eventually. Just not anytime soon. In the meantime, we need to hold on to any life raft we can find — and do whatever we can to work our way to shore.
