A BLUE LAGOON: How did we Blues perhaps earn our way out?

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2024

The text of a second list: How did we ever lose to that guy? It's a perfectly sensible question.

Once again, we didn't exactly lose by much. According to the Cook Report, here's where matters currently stand in the nationwide popular vote:

Nationwide popular vote (to date), 2024
Candidate Trump: 77,287,591 (49.79%)
Candidate Harris: 75,002,294 (48.31%)

Candidate Trump's victory margin now stands at less than 1.5 points! For the Democratic Party, that represents a six-point swing from 2020, when Candidate Biden won the nationwide vote by roughly 4.5 points.

As we noted a few weeks ago, a six-point swing isn't especially large, as these vote swings go.  That said, how did Democrats lose those six points? Let's list a few of the basic ways a party can lose its electoral standing over the course of four years.

Why didn't Candidate Harris match the performance of Candidate Biden? Here are some of the basic ways the two parties can gain or lose votes:

Some of the ways the Democratic Party may have suffered that six-point swing:
People who voted for Candidate Biden in 2020 were no longer living in 2024. 

People who voted for Biden in 2020 decided not to vote in 2024.

People who voted for Biden in 2020 decided to vote for Candidate Trump in 2024.

People who were too young to vote in 2020 decided to vote for Trump in 2024.

People who chose not to vote in 2020 decided to vote for Trump in 2024.

Those are some of the ways a political party can lose standing over the course of four years. 

That said, why didn't a larger number of people decide to vote for Candidate Harris? Why did so many people decide to vote for a person like Candidate Trump?

Indeed, why did anyone decide to vote for Candidate Trump? Why would anyone do such a thing? Why did anyone do that?

Frequently, we denizens of Blue America find ourselves puzzled by that question. We can't imagine why anyone would have voted for Donald J. Trump.

Why would anyone have voted for Trump? Limited in a major way by the poverty of our imagination, we may be inclined to invent a sweeping answer to that question:

More than half the American people are "deeply racist," we may find our tribal thought leaders saying. We may hear our neighbors saying that Trump voters are just amazingly dumb.

We may hear our leaders saying that "this nation" won't vote for a female presidential candidate. Half of such people fit in the basket of deplorables—are irredeemable—we may even hear someone say. 

Locked within our tribal blindness—swimming in the soothing waters of a type of Blue Lagoon—we may feel that these statements make an obvious type of sense. Especially at times of major tribal conflict, we humans have reasoned in such ways since before the dawn of time.

We voted for Candidate Harris ourselves. We would never have considered voting for Candidate Trump.

That doesn't mean that we can't see that there are reasons why someone else might have disagreed with our assessment. At this point, a basic fact must be noted:

It's true! Denizens of Red America will never be as morally pure or as intellectually brilliant as we Blue Americans are. The perfection of our spotless minds and unblemished souls creates the burden we Blues are forced to live with!

That said, let's state what is blindingly obvious. There are plenty of reasons why members of "the lesser breed" might have decided that they didn't want to vote for Candidate Harris—for the candidate who'd been put forward by our own Blue American tribe.

Voters who reached some such decision weren't as brilliant or as principled as we Blue voters are.  But anyone with two brain cells to rub together can surely see some of the reasons why members of "the lesser breed" might have reached that decision.

(We're quoting sacred Chekhov there. Fuller text below.)

The election was held on Tuesday, November 5. Three days later, Tim Alberta of the Atlantic went on Washington Week and listed three possible reasons why the lesser beings among us might have misjudged in the way they did.

In this Tuesday's report, we once again showed you the text of what Alberta said. Today, we're going to show you the text of what Bret Stephens said.

Alberta and Stephens hail from a rare demographic. Culturally and politically, they hail from the warrens of Red America, but each of these commentators has long been anti-Trump.

Stephens says he voted for Candidate Harris, but he wasn't happy about it. On November 7, he published a column in the New York Times in which he offered his assessment of why the candidate he voted for lost to Candidate Trump.

In fairness, she didn't lose by much! On the other hand, it may seem amazing to the purer among us that Candidate Harris, or anyone else, could have lost to Trump at all.

In the past two days, we've shown you the beginning and the end of what Stephen said in his column. Today, we'll show you the meat of his essay—the part of the column where Stephens listed some of the reasons why a less insightful person might have decided to vote for Candidate Trump.

Why would anyone have voted for Trump? Unpleasant headline included, Stephens rattles a lengthy list of possible reasons:

A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat

[...]

Why did Harris lose? There were many tactical missteps: her choice of a progressive running mate who would not help deliver a must-win state like Pennsylvania or Michigan; her inability to separate herself from President Biden; her foolish designation of Trump as a fascist, which, by implication, suggested his supporters were themselves quasi-fascist; her overreliance on celebrity surrogates as she struggled to articulate a compelling rationale for her candidacy; her failure to forthrightly repudiate some of the more radical positions she took as a candidate in 2019, other than by relying on stock expressions like “My values haven’t changed.”

There was also the larger error of anointing Harris without political competition—an insult to the democratic process that handed the nomination to a candidate who, as some of us warned at the time, was exceptionally weak. That, in turn, came about because Democrats failed to take Biden’s obvious mental decline seriously until June’s debate debacle (and then allowed him to cling to the nomination for a few weeks more), making it difficult to hold even a truncated mini-primary.

But these mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America—and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance—capital R.

Regarding the first, I’ve lost track of the number of times liberal pundits have attempted to steer readers to arcane data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve to explain why Americans should stop freaking out over sharply higher prices of consumer goods or the rising financing costs on their homes and cars. Or insisted there was no migration crisis at the southern border. Or averred that Biden was sharp as a tack and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a jerk.

Yet when Americans saw and experienced things otherwise (as extensive survey data showed they did) the characteristic liberal response was to treat the complaints not only as baseless but also as immoral. The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues... 

The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.

Good God! Stephens, who voted for Candidate Harris, went on and on and on. Like Alberta, he cited the "migration crisis" and the "sharply higher prices of consumer goods [and] the rising financing costs on their homes and cars."

Like Alberta, he cited President Biden's alleged "obvious mental decline." Like Alberta, he cited the way Democratic pols kept insisting that none of these alleged situations actually existed—for example, the way Dems kept saying that President Biden "was sharp as a tack" until the June 27 debate seemed to show something quite different.

In those ways, Stephens had cited the possible points Alberta would list the next night. But he went well beyond Alberta's list as he rattled off possible reasons why the lesser breed might have made the inexplicable decision to vote for Candidate Trump.

In the headline which sat atop his column, Stephens indulged himself in a bit of name-calling. (As far as we know, New York Times columnists compose their own headlines.) 

We Blues! Our political party is composed of "prigs and pontificators," Stephens unpleasantly said.  

In that impossibly strange assessment, Stephens was plainly letting his Red American freak flag show. Even today, Stephens seems unable to acknowledge the obvious moral and intellectual superiority which so plainly prevails Over Here. 

Yes, he decided to vote for Candidate Harris—even said so in print! But he still can't seem to acknowledge the obvious fact about the way the gods decided to parcel insight and goodness to those of us in Blue America, and to nobody else.

For ourselves, we'll only say this:

We agree with many of the possible reasons Stephens listed. We agree! Imaginably, a person could have decided to vote for Candidate Trump—or perhaps to vote against Candidate Harris—on the basis of the reasons he rattled off in his column.

That said, we're willing to say what Stephens wouldn't. Any person who made that decision would plainly have come from the lesser breed. They aren't as smart as we Blues are, and they aren't as morally brilliant.

We Blues have been handed the caretaker role with respect to people like these. This time around, we got outvoted, though not by all that much.

Tomorrow: A consolidated list

Chekhov used the key term first: If only in translation, sacred Chekhov used the key term first. He did so in the story, Lady with Lapdog, describing his protagonist's attitude toward the people he thought of as women:

...[Gurov] almost always spoke ill of women, and when men discussed women in his presence, he described them as the lower breed.

He could not help feeling that he had had enough bitter experience to have the right to call them as he pleased, but all the same without the lower breed he could not have existed a couple of days... 

And so on from there.

Sad! But so wrote Chekhov, translated by David Magarshack for Penguin Classics (Magarshack's italics). We misremembered the term in question, but the basic point remains. 

Chekhov's protagonist grows in this story; he moves beyond the blinded person he initially was.  According to the leading authority on the story, Lady with Lapdog is "one of Chekhov's most famous pieces of short fiction, and Vladimir Nabokov considered it to be one of the greatest short stories ever written."