Trump's Triumphant Return

The Dust Settles, The Poo Still Stinks

Where do we start with all this? I think first of all, we have yet another election where the polls told a completely different story to how people actually voted. I'm sure the pollsters were working very hard to be as precise as possible but polls are vulnerable to people lying. And when you think about people voting for Donald Trump, there is something shameful about it in exactly the same way that voting for Kamala Harris would be virtuous. This is exactly the bias that Trumpets object to, as they denounce the Left. They lie to pollsters and cast their votes to a convicted felon. 

I imagine the Democrats are in intellectual disarray. Let's face it, they have been found out to be phonies by their own side. The working class voting block they used to count on decamped from the Dems and voted Trump. If Democrats and disaffected Republicans chased out from their own party by the Trumpists, together cannot beat the Trumpets in number, we've turned a corner in history. Things are desperate in middle America, and they really wanted to poke the 'woke' people in the eye with a sharp pencil. And I have to say as somebody somewhere sitting on the Centre Left, I do appreciate that sentiment. If Kamala Harris candidacy can be reduced to 'woke', it means she's the candidate for transgender women who are born men, turning up in women's toilets. Compared to that, maybe leaning into fascism is penny ante stuff?

DEI - Disenfranchisement, Exclusion, and Inequality

The working class stiffs in the Rust Belt did not stick with the Democrats. They went back to Trump. That is to say, in 2020 they voted out Trump because of his incompetence and generally ramshackle style of government which created chaos everywhere. They came back for the Dems to vote in Biden-Harris. If this vote is any kind verdict, it's a resounding denunciation of the Democratic Party.  

One way to look at it is that even though the US Democrats are ostensibly a Centre-Left party, they clearly are not one. Their economic policies are not really as left-leaning as you would think by the way the Republicans demonise them. You would think they were communist-adjacent but in reality they are more Republican-adjacent, and they only look left to Trumpist Republicans because Trumpists are fascists. The democrats by their very nature can only make gestures towards the working class vote. It can't deliver a whole bunch for them; things like socialised medicine and universal healthcare as Bernie Sanders bangs on, are actually not really on offer. 

If you thought their health policy was unambitious, their position on taxation in general is decidedly capitalist if we're being polite. They don't dislike capitalist exploitation any less than the Republicans - they like it quite a lot.  

Because the Dems are not properly of the Left, their claim on being the part of the worker has to go back 100 years to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to find any proof. The Dems have had long ties to unions, and the illusion that they are a kind of Labor/Labour Party equivalent in the American context, but the reality of their policy making and governance has shown time and time again this is a delusion. The working class in America have taken note, and they have become massive swing voters in the Rust Belt exactly because the Democrats have very little credibility left as the working man's party. The working class in the Rust Belt have been alienated and disenfranchised. They have been excluded from the prosperity enjoyed by coastal elites, and the inequality is flat-out killing them. 

It's understandable they vote Trump.

Baby Boomers Continue Their Reign

It's getting weird how American politics is stuck in this gear. We go all the way back to 1992 with Bill Clinton, and all of the Presidents have been Boomers since. Even if Kamala Harris had won, she too was a young Boomer. If Trump dies in office, they jump straight to Millennials with JD Vance. That would even be okay if Vance himself weren't such a crypto-fascist, liar, and all-round-hatable schmuck. Maybe Trump will be the last Boomer President. It's hard to see how the Democrats are going to jump with their next candidate in 2028. I'm betting they will choose yet another Boomer. 

There were attempts to cast Kamala Harris as a Gen-X type. She was born in late 1964, so she's close enough! Maybe that's so for some people. Did anybody believe for a moment that Harris spent the 1990s listening to Nirvana and Red Hot Chilli Peppers? Yeah me neither.   

What Kind of White Woman Votes Trump?

This was the same question back in 2016. The hard to thing to fathom back then was the white woman demographic. This time around, 90% of black women voted Harris; 60% of hispanic women voted Harris, but only 45% of white women voted Harris. This echos the same voting pattern as the women who voted for Trump and Clinton back in 2016. Black women overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton back then too, which contrasted greatly with the underwhelming support Clinton got from white women. 

Back then, the question was "how can these women be (stupidly) voting against their own interests?" 

Turns out, they were voting for their disenfranchised sons - and they turned out much stronger in that vector this time around. So much for all the talk about this election being about women's bodies and choices. These women looked at all these university-educated women going on about women's rights and thought about the zero-sum game of the gender war. To open space for women, men have to lose space. For women to climb, a man has to lose a spot to her and step down. So not-for-first-time, they decided to vote against a woman who would take the top job from a man. 

I don't know what the Democrats can do about this gender war schema. When it gets boiled down, their agenda is such that they have to rob from Peter and Paul to pay Mary. If Peter and Paul don't want to vote for that arrangement, they've got a tough sell. I personally don't think having a female POTUS is any kind of issue, but twice now, the US electorate has given that notion a big thumbs down. It begs the question, what the hell will the Dems do about that electoral reality?