2024 Election Recap: Presidential

Never have I wanted to post something on here less, but enough time has passed and I should get it over with.

In making my pre-election prediction, in which I took Kamala Harris to win 276-262, I made it very clear that the race was a Tossup, and that I would not be surprised if Donald Trump ultimately won every won of the seven swing states. That is indeed what happened. I was wrong on Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. So were a lot of people. Some even thought he would lose more states. Everything else in the Electoral College, I predicted correctly. In the days and weeks ahead, I will also run down my relatively small number of incorrect predictions and offer some analysis on the Gubernatorial, Senate, and U.S. House races.

Should I just wrap this up right here? I have had about fifty days to think about this after all and have so many thoughts about what happened in this cycle. There is no way I can present them all here. This result is hard to come to terms with. I actually found it even more depressing than when Mitt Romney, a candidate I truly believed in and supported, lost in 2012. A lot of people feel the same way I do, but the results are what they are. Donald Trump won the election "fair and square." He even won the popular vote, which I definitely would not have anticipated. It is also true that he fell just short of an outright popular vote majority and that the national popular vote, like the results in the swing states were pretty close. This was not a textbook landslide and this is not a mandate for MAGA domination. Still, a win is a win, and this was a race that Democrats and frankly all of us who have opposed Trump and Trumpism for years, never should have allowed to happen. There is so much we need to ask of ourselves as we move towards the future politically and in a larger cultural sense. The next four years are going to be difficult and upsetting in many ways. The last month plus already has been, but I still have faith in America, though disappointment in it as well. This is all on us. We get the government we deserve. Elections are always a mirror held up to a nation. Some people like what they saw in November and many do not. I do believe we will have other elections to focus on, local, state, and federal, in 2025, even more so in 2026, and then especially so in 2028.

If I had to estimate, I would say that among Americans who bothered to cast a vote, 25 percent of them are with Donald Trump no matter what and there is literally nothing he can do to lose them. Literally nothing. No President or any American political figure has ever come into office with that strong of a devoted base. At the same time, I estimate that an even larger number of 45 percent of Americans, myself included, are against Donald Trump and cannot be won over by him personally. No President or political figure has ever entered office with that many people against them. I would say there are also about five percent of voters, a fairly small number, but people who do not deserve to be ignored, who did not vote for Trump, but are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and who might start out optimistic about what the next four years may bring. That leads to about 25 percent of the rest of the people. Clearly, these were Trump voters in November, about half of his total support. He may be able to keep them, but he may also lose them. I happen to think that so many of them voted for him and are not going to be pleased to see him focused on political retribution or somehow his new obsessions with acquiring Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. Many of these people probably did not expect him to name some of the people he has nominated to key positions. There will be continued fights on Capitol Hill over those nominees, but he will get most everything he wanted in regards to those people. While many will be surprised, it is not as if he did not warn us what he would do and the people he would pick.  People chose to just not take him seriously about some of those things. They probably should have though and may deeply regret those votes.

There is a distinct anti-incumbent pro-populist sentiment in democracies all across the globe these days and that helps explain what happened in the United States. It is also true that there has been an anti-incumbent party sentiment in Presidential politics here for decades now. The last time an incumbent party won a national majority along with a large electoral victory was way back in 1988. Most recently, the party out of the White House has won four out of the last five elections. I happen to think that it might have been five out of five if not for Hurricane Sandy interrupting things late in the game in 2012,

Donald Trump can never run for President again. For those who support the Republican Party he has reshaped, that is both good news and bad news. If he is an unpopular President, as the last Presidents have been, that will make it tough for his party to win again in 2028. At the same time, there are clearly voters who have been showing up to vote for Donald Trump and only Donald Trump. The incoming President is elderly. While he seems to many to be full of energy and downright indestructible in some ways, he may very well not serve out his term. JD Vance could become President sometime quickly down the road. As it is, he will be considered the frontrunner for 2028, but frankly, seems to be largely sidelined now and Trump may find a way to turn on him before the next primaries. It would be in character. As has been widely noticed, Elon Musk, the South African born businessman who is the richest person in the world, has far surpassed Vance in influence and may even already be more powerful than Trump himself. After all, Trump cannot run again. Musk is still rich and has a huge megaphone. The dynamic between the two men will be fascinating to watch in the months and years ahead.

The bottom line is that Democrats should not have lost this race to Trump, but lose they did. They lost it more than he won. Four years ago, mostly due to a deadly pandemic, the American people decided Trump should not be entrusted with four more years and he lost to Joe Biden. Four years later, we seem to have largely gotten past the medical dangers of Covid, but the economic and especially psychic scars remain. People forget the particulars but just came to the conclusion that their lives, and especially their economic well-being was better when Trump was President. So, they gave him another chance, without any real concern that he was a convicted felon or a lousy person. In 1992, James Carville, the chief strategist for Bill Clinton, another low-character lying politician, made clear that "it's the economy, stupid." and Clinton won two terms because of that. Issues like national security or the moral character of the nation and its leaders, or even ideological consistency, have receded into the background. Decades later, our politics and culture have changed, I think greatly for the worst, and it all really began with 1992.

Joe Biden was lucky to win in 2020. He had no business running for reelection at the age of 81. That should have been clear early on. After he entered office, he began to decline physically in ways that have been impossible to ignore. As I have repeatedly stated, I think his political opponents overstate the extent of his mental decline, but his defenders have greatly understated it as well and gaslight anyone who tried to raise questions about whether he should have been running for an additional four years. While Biden deserves credit for eventually ending his campaign, after he clearly had no other option, and had he not, his party would have suffered far greater losses down the ballot, it was probably already too late. Whomever encouraged Biden to seek reelection for every day that he was a candidate for reelection have contributed to a terrible result for America which could have enormous consequences. I do not feel like kicking Biden too hard on his way out, but frankly, his legacy is a shambles. I voted for him in 2020 to not be Donald Trump and not to try to be FDR. I voted for him to return to normalcy, not to pardon his son, an unprecedented step of political nepotism that he promised not to do. I guess I knew deep down that Biden was lying about that at the time, but I have known Joe Biden to be a political liar for decades. Yes, he is a better person than Trump, but that is a low bar. It should not be enough. The number one reason that Trump is turning to power is because of the failure of the Biden Presidency. Democrats really have to ask themselves why the policies of Obama and Biden both ushered in a Trump Presidency. By pardoning Hunter Biden, the outgoing President has horrifically given tremendous legal and political cover to Trump to abuse the office even worse.

I would also note that Alvin Bragg's successful conviction of Donald Trump in a New York courtroom also did so much to elect Trump this year. There are many legal cases, now a foregone memory against Trump that were valid and serious. The technicalities of what he was convicted on in New York did not rise to that level. Bragg took on Trump politically to try to politically harm him, and the exact opposite occurred. It also rendered the serious and important work of Jack Smith and also the January 6th Committee to be seen as also being political and "unfair." Those of us who have felt Trump has been a criminal for years got played, not because he is not, but because enough people in this country just do not give a damn. I think those people are very, very wrong, but that is the reality we live in, and we let ourselves down by this focus.

Sunny Hostin, a left-wing co-host of "The View" also contributed to Trump's election, though it was not really her fault. Late in the campaign, she asked Kamala Harris a perfectly fair question, and one designed to be a political softball to help the Vice President's campaign. Instead, Harris swung and missed. "How would you be different than Joe Biden?" There should have been a simple canned answer there that she could have said and repeated over and over again across the campaign trail.

Clearly, Americans have short attention spans. Harris had a strong campaign rollout, a strong convention, and in my view, easily got the best of Trump in their one debate. Yet, the late breaking voters went heavily for Trump. According to the Harris campaign, they never led at any point in their surveys. Despite all this, many in the party and in the media were convinced Harris would win because Trump was so terrible. Picking Tim Walz for Vice President instead of Josh Shapiro was a mistake. It showed a fear of the anti-Jewish voters on the left flank of the party who promised to boycott the ticket if it happened. She picked Walz instead and most of those people still boycotted and a chance to appeal to voters in the middle was lost throughout the entire narrative. Looking back, Harris probably still would have lost with Shapiro, but might have saved a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, and three House members, enough to flip the House blue, if she had him on the ticket.

The bottom line is that the policies of Joe Biden were not popular with America. Democrats will quibble and say that is unfair, but it is reality. The Biden Presidency started going downhill after the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal and never recovered. Whatever they said about how the economy was better or how crime was down was just never believed. People were against the status quo and there was probably no way for Kamala Harris, who refused to say she would do much different than Biden, was going to win the votes of the people who wanted change. Trust in our leaders and institutions are at an all time low. Trump has clearly played a part in that and frankly prefers it that way. Democrats insisting for months that Biden was capable of serving a second term as President only contributed to how much Americans would tune them out.

I get that it is difficult to throw the person who made you Vice President under the bus, but there were gentle ways Harris could have done so, especially on the issue of illegal immigration. Looking back, reasonable people can determine that the Trump policies at the border were inhumane in many ways. Biden and Harris came into office and were determined to do the opposite of all of them. That was a mistake. They were far too stubborn in just being the anti-Trumps that they missed out on the reality. The illegal crossings and incidents of "migrant crime" just played a huge part in their political demise. When an executive order was finally signed, the situation improved a bit, but it was signed too late, and at the minimum Harris could have acknowledged that. She could have found a way in every interview and in every speech to put in three sentences about being tough on the border and her desire to deport criminals in this country illegally, and she probably would have won the election.They were just too stubborn to do it. Both ideological bases on this country refuse to give an inch and thus we are forced to be as polarized as we are.

Harris was far from a perfect candidate. As mentioned, her struggles in interviews and unscripted non-debate moments were real, but she had a tough hand to play. As we know, she had taken positions as a primary candidate in 2019 that continued to haunt her and the unpopularity of the Biden record and policies was just too much to overcome. She became the nominee without any sort of primary process and a lot of Americans were troubled by that. If nothing else, she would have gotten better politically for having earned the nomination. For weeks after emerging as the Biden replacement, she declined to do interviews and it looked like she was scared. Even if she would have been bad in some early ones, she might have gotten better later on. I wrote at the time about the missed opportunities she passed up to win people over by a bad interview on Fox News and what I thought was a bad Town Hall on CNN. In spite of all of this, I think if Trump proves to be unpopular, Kamala Harris may find herself with a chance for redemption in 2028, but that is a long way off, and she would have to do major work to learn from the failures of 2024. This is certainly not an endorsement of her. After all, I am a conservative. I am just saying that I can almost envision the comeback arc.

 

To wrap this up, it is clear we are in for chaos and uncertainty starting on January 20. This country is still worth fighting for. For years I was a proud Republican who remained steadfastly loyal until Donald Trump took over the party in 2016. The years after saw me hoping that somehow this would be a temporary blip and I might get my party back. The year 2024 has taught me that is not happening. Thus I am no longer a Republican. I am also reminded, often, that I have never been a Democrat, and based on the state of that party today, am not about to become one. I think America deserves a new party, where those of us on the center-right and center-left can unite against the extremes, but for now, we are living history as it comes at us.

There are a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump and I find that tragic. I have to understand why they did though. In every story, the "bad guy" is always supposed to eventually get what they have coming, and for Trump that should have been a loss this year and perhaps time locked up. That did not happen. Eternal justice is always in the hands of a higher power though. I am also deeply disturbed by many other things in America these days. One of them is how so many of my fellow countrymen, most, but not all of the people I am speaking of who did not vote for Donald Trump, have cheered or made excuses for the cold-blooded murder of a businessman on a New York street. Many have even declared folk hero status on the accused murderer and his terroristic intentions in order to send a political message. Much of this is because he is white, good looking, and privileged. Neither Donald Trump nor Luigi Mangioni should be anyone's hero, especially the latter, because at least for now, he is the only one of the two who has ever shot someone on a street in New York.

Let us hope that 2025 leads us to a place where Americans can find their souls again. All of us should do the appropriate soul-searching these times require. I will not quit on this country or hope for failure or suffering for anyone simply because I despise the President. While I am no longer a Republican, and have never been a Democrat, I have always been and will always be an American.