EARNED OUR WAY OUT: We can't believe we lost to this guy!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2024

And yet, explanations abound: Just to establish a factual record, here's where matters currently stand, according to CNN's count:

Nationwide popular vote (to date), 2024
Candidate Trump: 75,536,884 (50.2%)
Candidate Harris: 72,390,344 (48.1%)

That's where matters stand to date. That said, consider this:

Based on CNN's reckoning, well over two million votes remain uncounted in deep blue California. Something like an additional one million votes remain uncounted in three other blue states—Washington, Oregon, Maryland. 

Something like a half million votes are still uncounted in the state of New York, with a quarter million additional votes outstanding in New Jersey. Something like 300,000 votes remain in Illinois.

Based upon CNN's account, the redder states seem to count a lot faster! That said, Ezra Klein's estimate may turn out to be right:

On a nationwide basis, it may turn out that this election was lost by less than two points. Ezra has estimated that the margin will end up at 1.5 points. Prevailing Storyline to the side, that may turn out to be right.

This very morning, in the 6 o'clock hour, Joe Scarborough said that Candidate Biden won the 2020 election in "a very close race." For the record, Candidate Biden won that year by 4.5 points nationwide. 

At present, Candidate Trump's win this year is frequently being described in a different way, usually with no numbers offered. For example, here's the inexplicable Mark Leibovich, novelizing for The Atlantic, dual headline included:

In Praise of Clarity
There is no ambiguity here.

[...]

If nothing else, the party’s electoral battering last week should provide a clarity that Democrats clearly lacked before. They were shocked by the results. I knew a bunch who were indeed predicting a rout, but with Kamala Harris doing the routing. “This could be glorious,” a Democratic operative friend said to me last weekend after the now-ingloriously wrong Des Moines Register poll that showed Harris leading Trump by three points in deep-red Iowa was released. Trump wound up winning the state by 13 points.

At minimum, the prevailing sentiment was that the election would be very close. Pundit consensus seemed to place the race at the cliché junction of “razor-thin” and “wafer-thin” (personally I thought it would be “paper-thin,” but then, I was an outlier). The contest, many predicted, might take many days to call. Election lawyers swarmed battleground states. I don’t recall speaking with more than one or two Democrats in the final weeks who foresaw the ultimate beatdown the party suffered.

Then came the knee-buckling curveball that electorates have a knack for throwing.

[...]

First, listen to the results: They were not close. Trump won all seven battleground states and the popular vote; made big gains with Black and Hispanic voters, as well as with young people; and even polled 52 percent of white women. Republicans took the Senate and kept the House.

As it turned out, Democrats were much closer to delusion than the reality that voters would impose. 

"There is no ambiguity here," the headline absurdly says.

Here within this vale of tears, Storyline will often function that way. A 4.5-point win can be said to be "very close." A loss of something less than two points can be said to have been "an electoral battering." 

Explicitly, it can be said that the narrower margin wasn't "very close." It can even be said that the election results in question were "not close" at all! 

Leibovich presented almost no numbers in support of his Great American Novel. He didn't precisely say what he precisely meant by his eye-popping formulation.

In fairness, he did present that one statistic concerning the way white women voted this year. Candidate Trump "even polled 52 percent of white women," he said, thereby fleshing out his claim that this year's election result wasn't close.

Almost surely, exit polls are less reliable—are less precise—than are competent pre-election polls. That said, white women always favor the Republican candidate, according to the exit polls! 

Here are the numbers, such as they are, for every election of the current century:

White women nationwide, presidential elections:
2000: 49-48, in favor of Candidate Bush
2004: 55-44, Candidate Bush
2008: 53-46, Candidate McCain
2012: 56-42, Candidate Romney
2016: 53-43, Candidate Trump
2020: 55-44, Candidate Trump
2024: 53-45, Candidate Trump

Based upon the exit polls, Candidate Trump has won the vote among white women in all three of his elections! This year, his slightly narrower victory margin among that group is somehow supposed to convince us the rubes that this year's election wasn't close.

Was this election "close?" If we're looking at the nationwide popular vote, we'd say it pretty much was. If you're writing the latest American novel, you can fabulize it however you please, without feeling any need to explain, with any precision, what you precisely mean.

(Also, without feeling any need to confuse your readers by reporting the nationwide popular vote.)

Editors will wave your copy into print. In such ways, Storyline grows.

So it goes—and goes and goes—as present-day Storyline continues taking form. That said, a second major question obtains:

Should those of us in Blue America be surprised by the fact that Candidate Harris lost?

Should we be surprised that Harris lost? In many respects, we'd have to say that the answer is no. We'll mention two obvious points:

First reason: As has been widely reported, incumbent parties have been driven from power all over the developed world. In the most immediate sense, this seems to be a reaction to the dislocations brought on by the global pandemic. 

(We'd be inclined to assume that other global phenomena are part of this pattern as well.)

Second reason: The second reason goes something like this:

In one of the most clownish phenomena in modern political history, the Democratic Party's candidate decided he wouldn't seek re-election in late July of this year! This meant that Candidate Harris had to mount a full-blown campaign from a standing start with just over three months to go!

Under those circumstances, should anyone be surprised that this replacement candidate didn't win? If anything, we should perhaps be surprised that she came so close.

(Almost surely, the narrow margin nationwide is a measure of the un-electability of the other candidate—of the Red American candidate who rather narrowly won.)

Why did Blue America's candidate lose this year? As of yesterday morning, we had listed four possible reasons. We'll return to our list tomorrow.

In general, it seems to us that the cluelessness of us the people provides a large part of the answer. More specifically, we refer to the cluelessness of us the people of our own Blue America, "where the children are all above average.".

The woods are lovely, dark and deep—but as with all known human tribes, our deeply self-assured Blue American tribe just isn't preternaturally sharp. Also, as with all human tribes, we tend to have a very hard time understanding that basic fact about our spectacular selves. 

According to experts, we human beings are wired to be blind to such states of affairs. Did that wiring help take us down this year? Stating the question a different way:

Through our hard-wired human shortcomings, did we perhaps, in some array of ways, manage to "earn our way out?"

"I can't believe I'm losing to this guy!" So said SNL's version of Candidate Dukakis, way back in 1988.

This year, we lost to the most unelectable candidate in the history of modern politics. Does tribal denial keep us from seeing the ways this (surprisingly narrow) defeat disastrously came to pass? 

Tomorrow: The list continues to grow