Fear and Loathing in America '24

2024 Election Analysis pt. 1 - My First Thoughts

Kamala Harris has lost the 2024 Presidential election in the worst possible fashion. She has lost the popular vote, she has lost every single swing state, Democrats have lost the Senate, and most likely the House as well. This is worse than 2016. This is a monumental collapse at a time of utter jeopardy. The prevailing mood online has been dread and despair. Also Anger, in muted forms, at the usual suspects. Liberals angry at non-voting left wingers. Left wingers pretending that they could’ve won had we only Just Stood For The Right Platform. Gloating, smug Trump voters replying to any and all pissed off or fearful woman or trans person with some combination of lurid or gleeful threat.

What are my initial reactions? Fear and Loathing.

Fear. Trump has been delivered a trifecta. In time for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act through which myself and my wife get insurance through. To get his economically destructive tariffs through which will make inflation worse, the issue which carried him into office. To make permanent the naked robbery of the people he calls tax cuts, to make our soil, air, and water more polluted. With his trifecta, the mass deportation, salivated for so long by the right, shall finally become a reality. The Bush era conservatives on the Supreme Court will be replaced by Trump and his choices will either be the entire majority or virtually the entire conservative court. Given the ages of the Democratic justices, a 7-2 right wing court installed with the median age of the Republican justices under 60.

With an electoral mandate, he will have the flexibility he didn’t have in 2016 to push his agenda. I suspect he will try and avoid fights on healthcare and abortion, for he is an effective political operative in regards to political third rails.

I’m afraid for my trans friends. I’m afraid that the political consultant class of the Democratic Party will see this as the opportunity to jettison these people to fend for themselves. I fear for my old college roommate, a DACA recipient who now is a high school science teacher and coach. Wide eyed dread fills my friends. There is less open crying this time around. Just The Fear. And the only thing one can do when faced with this kind of facing-down-the-barrel-of-a-gun political circumstance is take intoxicating and mind-altering substances until relieved of any and all good senses. That tab of acid sitting in the freezer has been feeling awful tempting lately.

Loathing. As I have lamented before, right wing political correctness abounds and it is never stronger than after a Republican election victory. The victory of “Kamala Harris for they/them”, spawned from the “transgender illegal aliens” commercials which defy parody. If I were to create a political satire with that as an ad for the GOP candidate, I’d be mocked as a histrionic liberal elitist. Yet, if post-mortem polling is to be believed, these anti-trans messages had an impact. I still would chafe at these results since the phrase “rather than helping the middle class” is added, but nevertheless the needed justification is presented for hackjob politics.

The endless parade of “look at these degenerate freaks” compilation videos that right wingers marinated in the last 8 years has become nothing short of a Two Minute Hate rally turned permanent lifestyle. Bedecked with “Fuck Your Feelings” and “Fuck Joe Biden”, sorry I should say “Let’s Go Brandon”; these pyschos will get mad at you for pointing out the obvious consequences of what they vote for.

Worse yet are the endless examples of “I voted for Trump but he won’t deport these people I care about, he doesn’t mean it”. Truly nothing more vile and despicable than to vote for a man you think will help you while believing the words coming out of his mouth are pure lies. People who vote to hurt your friends, your family, and to hurt me above all else.

And you can’t tell ‘em off for doing it.

So What Happened?

There are several hypotheses that have emerged from this defeat and I will be analyzing each one in due time in full articles. Some that have emerged and lets lay them out.

Hypothesis 1: It’s the Economy (And Border), stupid.

The first, most obvious, and most logical answer for a national uniform swing against the incumbent party is inflation. Inflation is the top economic issue according to voters. It affected everyone so the national, largely uniform swing can be explained by such term. Border security is a highly salient issue and Trump’s view is more popular. Without bonafides as a border hawk and a program for inflation, you’re toast. Even if you did, the fact it occurred at all under your administration is enough to destroy you.

You can’t point to job numbers when it takes 100 applications to get a job you don’t expect to have in 5 years. Most people didn’t lose their job but they felt the inflation. You can’t point to healthcare when even when you have it, your out of pocket costs shoot into the thousands. Even Democrats had to concede that the general economic conditions people are in aren’t great. Abortion lost its salience as state level ballot measures and the successful “its up to the states” line. Abortion on Demand wins 57% of the vote in Florida, while 56% vote for Trump who allowed the state’s 6 week ban to become possible!

Hypothesis 2: America Is Evil.

Cribbed from Hunter S. Thompson, much like the header image, but edited lightly for modern readers.

"It is Donald Trump himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. If the current results are reliable... Trump will be elected by a majority of Americans who feel he is not only more honest and more trustworthy than Kamala Harris, but also more likely to end the wars abroad. And that he might carry all swing states... This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 325 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that Kamala Harris, for all her mistakes... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Trump. Harris made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Donald Trump does every day of his life, on purpose."

Hypothesis 3: It’s the Media, stupid

All the above is nothing if you can’t broadcast what you stand for, fight back against attacks, or be visible in the eyes of the voters. The economy has record low unemployment, wages for low the bottom half grew faster than inflation, and even on discrete issues Democrats were getting sandbagged. Billion dollar union pension bailouts and proactive labor policy fell on deaf ears. Why? The median Teamster thinks Democrats turned the price dial up too high, Kamala only cares about those crazy liberal feminists, and they’re flooding the nation with killers and thieves at the southern border. Fake news about disaster responses, about the military evacuation of Afghanistan. On and on, the same story. Total bullshit sold by propagandists pumped down the throats of every single person, the right totally frames all issues.

Sinclair media dominates local news stations while Fox dominates national news. Right wing framings are treated as sacrosanct by legacy media, a legacy media that is financially rewarded by the GOP’s tax policy. It’s not just the TV and the death of newspapers, social media and the internet is infested by the right. Twitter was bought by right wing mega donor Elon Musk and turned into a megaphone for Trump. The most engaged and followed Facebook pages are right wing media personalities. Instagram deprioritized political content. The entirety of 4chan. Most of the Spotify top 10 podcasts are also right wing. And not just in the “Joe Rogan is a right wing guy” definition, I mean people like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and Candace Owens. Underneath all of this was a maelstrom of bad vibes and anti-Democratic memes. Biden’s stutter being exploited, “I Did That” stickers and attendant genre of blaming everything on the president, and quite literal fake stories grew like mold the last 4 years. It was unbelievable the things Trump voters told me as I was at early voting sites and on election day handing out palm cards. The disconnect between ballot measures and Democratic votes is staggering.

Hypothesis 4: Democrats Didn’t Turn-Out

Shocking to me is that Harris has done far worse in virtually all states vs. Biden and Clinton. Clinton and Biden won Illinois, for example, by approximately 17%. Harris is cruising in at about 8.5%. And what is even more interesting about the Illinois result is that rather than Harris getting beaten downstate and only carrying Cook County, she did far worse in Cook County and still held on in the Collars and the I-74 belt. Even Rockford - Winnebago County, a right leaning swing area, was close. While this will need to be confirmed by precinct results, Democrats clearly didn’t turn out. Trump got 22% of the Chicago vote. She did worse in New York, California, and elsewhere. This is a further argument for Hypothesis #1 but could be taken another way: Dem strongholds didn’t come out which is necessary for the national popular vote victory. What caused this? Was it disaffect left wingers not voting at all because of Gaza? Or was it Jewish Democrats feeling betrayed over Israel? Was it dissatisfaction for not giving them a primary? Much to explore.

Hypothesis 5: Trump’s Stone Crazy Vote Wins Again

Remember in 2020 when porn star Brandi Love wrote an article asking the GOP to stop attacking people like her because they love Trump? People who you’d think support Democrats but for whatever reason have, to again be politically incorrect, batshit politics love Trump. Conspiracy theory people, fad exercise and diet users, grifters, of all walks of life, and disengaged people of all kinds flocked to him. See it in the undervoting in the those midwestern swing senate races. Democrats equal or beat Harris’s vote totals but GOP candidates are far behind Trump. Clearly, a lot of people came out and voted for Trump and no one else. No poll captures them. No non-Trump GOP candidate can get them. But they are out there. And they win.

Conclusion

So I will get to work on these next 4 articles diving further into these reasons. I think media and economy are the two reasons I’m gravitating toward. If you can’t sell yourself and you can’t defend yourself, you’re toast. And the program you run on has to be real. It can’t be telling you to never mind the bad stuff, think about the baby in the bathwater.

Donald Trump’s first term was a series of near misses, negative long term consequences, opportunistic jabs at vulnerable people, and a demonstration of some of the most naked corruption and graft seen in American politics. I expect the same to happen again but with even more naked graft and evil.

God Save America.

I’ll see you in the next one.