Day After Tabs
- Via the Des Moines Register: Pollster J. Ann Selzer: ‘I’ll be reviewing data’ after Iowa Poll misses big Trump win. I expect she will given that Trump won the state by 13 points (as of this morning).
- Carlos Lozada has a depressingly accurate list in the NYT: Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are.
- Via Axios: NC Democrats break GOP legislative supermajority.
- Via NPR: Sarah McBride becomes the first openly transgender person elected to Congress.
- Via The Hill: Florida’s abortion amendment fails, leaving 6-week ban in place.
- Via the AP: AP VoteCast: Harris voters motivated by democracy, Trump supporters by inflation and immigration. I think a lot of people are still mad about inflation and also think that it is possible to reverse it. Not only are prices not coming to come down (it doesn’t work that way). If Trump does what he says he wants to do, they are going to be going up.
- Jonathan Bernstein: Ugh. BTW, I think this is on target, all while agreeing we don’t really know for sure at this point.
I will speculate a bit. Incumbent parties have been doing badly around the world in the last couple of years in the wake of the pandemic and the fallout from the pandemic, economic and otherwise. Democrats did better than the Conservatives in the UK, or Macron’s party in France earlier this year. Everyone will want to attribute the election results to choices made by the candidates. But it’s quite possible – in fact, I strongly suspect it’s the case – that the Democrats ran a solid candidate who ran a good campaign, and the Republicans ran a terrible candidate who ran a mediocre campaign, but all of that only made it into a competitive race and couldn’t put the incumbent party over the top.1
One more time, however: We just don’t know yet.
- Julia Azari: Be wary of anyone claiming an election mandate. And I agree with this:
Others have been quick to observe that “Trump is who we are” – and that, too, is a truth that needs to be wrestled with. But “who we are” is not and never has been a single thing. The country has always had people pushing for change and justice, people putting all their efforts into maintaining unjust hierarchies, and all sorts of people in between. And this is where the attempt to construct a “mandate” for a single person chosen to lead a complex nation shows its impossibility. Whoever wins in a given election, the reasons are complicated, and there are lots of people who voted the other way.
And also,
As I wrote in 2018, elections are both complicated and simple. We are already seeing confident takes about what happened – the campaign, the Biden presidency, the misogyny and racism. And these can all be true. The fundamentals also explain what happened pretty well in the end – the post-pandemic status quo has been painful, and the public memory of the Trump presidency contains a lot of positive elements (mostly about the economy). As we wait to learn more, we can understand what happened yesterday as both very complicated and also very simple.
This one struck me particularly hard.
I have a lot of thoughts on nihilistic “who we are statements” for the reasons she listed above. I probably won’t have time to post again until next week, but I’ll explore them more then (once I’ve had more time to reflect).
@Tony W:
It may well be time for me to resurrect that bumper sticker from the Nixon days: “Don’t blame me. I’m from Massachusetts.”
The juxtaposition of
Carlos Lozada has a depressingly accurate list in the NYT: Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are.
with
Via Axios: NC Democrats break GOP legislative supermajority.
makes for a hopeful situation overall. Maybe the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the 8:14 out of Chicago.
I’m surprised there is more information available about the Russian fake bomb threats and their potential impact.
Well, let me just note that Trump does not define who I am. And he never will.
Driving in this morning, I was musing about what I can do to make things better, even if a tiny little bit, in the oncoming years.
“Not only are prices not coming to come down (it doesn’t work that way). If Trump does what he says he wants to do, they are going to be going up.”
At which point, these morons will absolve Trump (and themselves) of any blame and insist it’s all Biden’s fault.
@Matt Bernius: On the topic of “This is who we are,” someone I know put one aspect of that harsh reality very succinctly: No woman good enough, and no man bad enough.
On the one hand I hate her for giving me hope, on the other hand a few days of hope was a nice respite. (It’s a gentle hate)
I didn’t think Iowa would fall into Harris’ column, but a very good pollster showing things moving in Harris’ direction when things had been stagnant for so long was a bit of a relief, even while I knew in my head that she could be wildly off.
I fear that may not be true. Prices can fall in a recession and Trump’s likely to start one. His stated policies, if implemented, would do it. Musk has as much as promised a recession. Also, IIRC, every GOP president going back to 1900 has had a recession in his first term, and this is sorta Trump’s second first term. Once again, he’s inherited a strong economy and Everything Trump Touches Dies.
@gVOR10:
They can, but they don’t always do. Especially not if the recession is due to tariffs imposing extra costs.
You also may see shrinkflation as a way to lower or maintain prices.
BTW, I think the polls were way off. Most had a close election, and this one seems to have been a blowout.
@Kathy:
I dunno. Harris got more than 48% in the key swing states of PA, MI, WI, and GA. And the popular vote gap will narrow in the coming weeks as millions more votes are counted–there doesn’t seem to be much of a hurry in states like California that don’t need the vast majority counted to be called.
@Kathy: Most polls had it as a tossup. It was far more likely that the swing states would all or mostly swing in the same direction than that they would split. So, an electoral blowout, but on the margins in terms of actual voters.