What Went Wrong

Many things, but here are three of them.

I wish there was some great big conspiracy I could point to, to tell you why the United States may have just lost our democracy once and for all.

I would love to believe that the 2024 election was rigged, and that 51% of Americans didn’t vote for a fascist. I wish I could tell you that Putin and his goons broke into our voting machines and made them do everything for Trump that Trump claimed they were doing for Biden in 2020.

That would be amazing. I want that to be true. But I don’t think it is.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far, I’ve seen no compelling evidence that the 2024 election was rigged for Trump, any more than the 2020 election was rigged for Biden. If I see any, I’ll let you know right away.

Right now, I believe that a large number of Democrats sat out the election for some reason, and a large number of Independents and all the expected Republicans voted for Donald Trump— even though they ought to have known that he was a convicted felon with no respect for the rule of law.

Why?

Why would anyone do that?

The first reason is plain old bigotry.

We can’t overlook or discount that. The fact is, America has a whole lot of racists and misogynists. A whole lot of Americans refused to vote for a Black and Indian woman. If it were not for them, Kamala Harris would be the president-elect right now. A lot of Americans decided it would be funny to stick it to the feminists who were terrified of bleeding out from a miscarriage and to all the “Me Too” movement women, because they are misogynists.

To ignore that is to bury your head in the sand. Trump was elected because a huge number of white men, a shameful number of white women, and a shocking number of Latino men, are bigots. This is their fault. They are too blame.

But I think we might have been able to do an end run around the bigots if not for two other factors:

The reason is inflation.

This is a distant second, but it still gets the silver medal.

And this is entirely unfair and irrational. Biden didn’t cause the inflation; he brought it down. But “inflation” is a magic word that makes poorly educated people vote against the incumbent.

I wonder how this will look in history books.

The hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic was catastrophic, life-destroying inflation. People were pushing money to the market in wheelbarrows and using worthless Papiermarks as scrap paper. A loaf of bread that cost 160 Marks in 1922 cost 200,000,000,000 Marks in 1923. And that still wasn’t an excuse for what happened afterwards.

The inflation in the United States in 2021 was a much, much more genteel inflation, less than five percent, and by 2024 it was down to about two percent. Five percent inflation is irksome if you’re well-to-do. It’s harsh if you’re middle class. It can be agonizing if you’re poor, but then again, everything is. But is that something to lose your democracy and make everything worse over?

Apparently so.

The third reason is a communication issue that Democratic politicians often have.

And again, this is a DISTANT third.

And yes, nit picking this is completely unfair. Donald Trump can barely communicate at all. It’s ridiculous to hold one major political party to the standard of a political party while holding the other party to no standards. But I didn’t choose the playing field. This is how it works. Democrats have to give a flawless performance and Republicans just have to look like bullies. So, in doing the post mortem on Kamala’s performance, we have to look for flaws we’d never look for in a Republican.

The communication issue is this: Democratic politicians tend to not answer the questions they’re asked.

Do you remember when Hillary Clinton was asked, right to her face by the Town Hall participant with the monotonous voice, “"The Affordable Care Act is not affordable. How are you going to make it affordable?"

Hillary didn't answer with plans to make it affordable. She started defending the ACA as better than what had come before it. And, to be sure, the ACA WAS BETTER. But that's not the point. The point is, he wanted an answer to his specific question.

This time around, Harris was better than Hillary at answering questions, but Democrats and their surrogates still weren’t good at that.

People would say something along the lines of “the price of groceries is surging!”
And somebody would answer, “the stock market is soaring!” That’s not an answer. You can't eat a stock market. You can’t cook it for supper. You can’t pack a stock market in your children’s lunch or bake it for a birthday treat. You can’t use a roll of stock market on the toilet or wash your hands with a stock market when you finish. The stock market has absolutely no apparent bearing on poor and middle class people whatsoever. The stock market is a jaggedy line that makes rich people nervous.

Similarly, "I can't afford my rent!" was met with "but look at all the new green energy jobs in the Rust Belt!" and that's great. But you know what happens in the first wave of people swooping in to take new jobs? Rent goes up in the economically depressed town. That's what happened when the Haitians moved to Springfield. Rent went up and the cost of living with it, through no fault of the Haitians themselves, even though that was the beginning of an economic boom their labor was fueling. You can't talk economics with a person who can't afford a place to live.

Harris was better at this with her concrete ideas for making housing more affordable and banning price gouging and such. But it was just too late. She only had a hundred days. Biden and everyone else trying to help kept pointing to "Look at the economics!" when people wanted a concrete answer, EVEN IF THE ANSWER WAS A LIE.

Democrats need to learn to stop defending what they ARE doing and answer the question. Then answer to "how can I afford to eggs?" is "Honey, elect me and I'll drive down the price of eggs by $1.73 a dozen guaranteed. In fact, I’ll drive it down by four dollars a dozen. The grocery store will PAY you to take away the eggs." That's stupid, but it's true anyway.

Now, none of that really matters because, as I said in Point One, there are a critical mass of racists and misogynists in this country who would rather elect someone who violates women and brags about it than a woman.

They are the problem. Without them, we would be safe.

But since we're stuck with the racists and misogynists, those other two factors tipped the balance.

And now, I don't know what we do.