A BLUE LAGOON: Is there a way we Blues could improve?

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2024

That very long second list: How did it [ever] get this far? How did we lose to this guy?

More specifically:

How did the Democratic Party go from a 4.5-point win in Campaign 2020 to a 1.5-point loss this time around? Where have all the voters gone, as PP&M might have said?

Where have all the voters gone? Some of the answers lie right there in this year's exit polls, as published here by NBC News.

Exit polling is of course subject to error. But according to this year's exit polls, first-time voters favored Candidate Trump by a substantial margin—by 55% to 44%.

Presumably, some of those voters had become old enough to vote just in the past four years. Presumably, some of those voters had simply never bothered to vote in previous elections.

According to the exit polls, these first-time votes constituted 8% of the total vote. So why did those people favor Trump?

You'd pretty much have to go ask them.

How did we ever lose to this guy? Another set of statistics jumps out from the exit polls. Those statistics involve people who voted in 2020 and 2024 but changed their party preference this time around.

According to the exit polls, 44% of this year's voters said they voted for Candidate Biden in 2020. This year, five percent of those people say they switched over and voted for Candidate Trump.

Why would a voter have made that change? You'd pretty much have to go ask them! Meanwhile, four percent of voters who say they voted for Trump in 2020 say they voted for Harris this year. Our general conclusion would be this:

There may have been "eight million stories in the naked city." But there were something like 155.2 million stories (and counting) floating around inside the heads of this year's (very large) collection of American voters.

Those (imprecise) numbers offer one way to address the question we're asking. But for many of us in Blue America, the larger question is this:

Why did anyone choose to vote for a person like Donld J. Trump? Why would a person like Candidate Trump ever get any votes at all?

Why might someone have voted for Trump? This very morning, we encountered an explanation which is general over Blue America.

We refer to the very first comment to this post by Kevin Drum. A commenter who was fully sincere offered this explanation:

Two words explains all: Racism and Misogyny.

That's the way we frequently score it here in Blue America. We offer that simple explanation. Other observers, Red and Blue alike, may sometimes seek more nuance.

Why might someone have voted for Candidate Trump? On November 8, on the PBS program Washington Week, Tim Alberta—he's anti-Trump—offered three possible reasons.

On Tuesday, we posted Alberta's full statement. We'll offer a paraphrase here:

Tim Alberta's possible reasons
1) Democrats claimed the southern border was secure. That claim was plainly bogus.

2) Democrats claimed the economy was great. Many people disagreed.

3) Democrats claimed that President Biden was sharp as a tack. Many people believed that claim was transparently false.

According to Alberta, many voters believed that those three claims were false. Such voters "might not trust Trump," Alberta said, "but they don't trust Democrats either."

We're inclined to agree with Alberta's assessment. In fact, we'd say it's obvious that some voters cast their votes in response to those three situations.

(Of course, all such people were also "deeply racist." That's a primal religious belief of our Blue Fundamentalists.)

Alberta, who is anti-Trump, ticked off those three possible reasons—three reasons which help explain why some people could have decided to vote for Trump.

He did so on Friday, November 8. One day earlier, Bret Stephens had published an angry and acerbic column in the New York Times—a column which included a lengthy list of other possible reasons.

Stephens has long been anti-Trump too. He's been anti-Trump from the start, and he voted for Candidate Harris.

That said, he generally hails from Red America, as does Tim Alberta. Imaginably, this may allow him to see us Blues as it may be that we actually are.

We humans! We tend to have a hard time seeing ourselves in the way Others do. That doesn't mean that we're bad people. It's just the way we're wired.

In our view, this wiring sometimes seems to leave us Blues swimming in a Blue Lagoon, borne up by the soothing waters of tribal self-regard. 

In our view, the tribal delusions are even worse at the Fox News Channel, but the delusions can also be found Over Here. And having said that, dear God:

As we chronicled yesterday, here's the way the Harris voter named Bret Stephens sees us! 

In his column, Stephens cited the trio of reasons Alberta would cite the following night. But as he went on and on and on, he cited quite few more:

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.

What could have led some people to vote for Candidate Trump, or perhaps to vote against Candidate Harris? When Stephens began to count the ways, his suggestions went on and on:

According to Stephens, Candidate Harris made the wrong choice for VP. She herself was an "exceptionally weak" candidate.

She unwisely referred to Trump as a fascist. She failed to (adequately) separate herself from (the unpopular) President Biden. 

She failed to forthrightly repudiate some of the more radical positions she took in 2019. Also, she was undermined by the way her party ignored President Biden's "obvious mental decline" until it was very late.

Those were the alleged shortcomings of Candidate Harris herself. But then there were the other possible reasons why people may have voted for Trump—reasons this Harris voter attributed to Democrats and liberals more generally:

We're constantly calling the Others names—"racist" and "transphobe" and such. According to Stephens, we're inclined to call those names as a way of underlining our support for positions which take us far out of the American mainstream as it exists at this time.

Stephens cited the trio of reasons Alberta would cite—the insistence that President Biden was OK, the insistence that his policies at the southern border made perfect sense.

That said, Stephens added liberally to that list, calling is "prigs" as he did so. He also offered this passage—a passage we didn't post in yesterday's report:

The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.

Last, liberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat him not as a normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy ideas but as a mortal threat to democracy itself. Whether or not he is such a threat, this style of opposition led Democrats astray. It goaded them into their own form of antidemocratic politics—using the courts to try to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot in Colorado or trying to put him in prison on hard-to-follow charges. It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact.

Along with everything we showed you yesterday, Stephens made those additional claims:

He said we liberals are (way too) heavy on "group identity." In his view, this "explains [or may help explain] how a figure like Trump...could be re-elected to the presidency."

He also says this! He says we helped Trump get re-elected by the way we tried to get him locked up—even by "trying to put him in prison on hard-to-follow charges."

Could any of those perceptions possibly be accurate? is it possible that some voters decided to vote for Trump on the basis of such unwise, unattractive behaviors?

Nationwide, we lost by less than 1.5 points—and we lost by even less than that in the three Blue Wall states. Is it possible that votes were lost because of the things we did?

Over Here in our Blue Lagoon, the waters are always warm and soothing. Over There where Stephens lives, the potential disaster of this election seems to have many possible mothers and fathers.

Will Trump's election produce a disaster? In our view, that's completely possible. 

Keeping that potential disaster in mind, is it even dimly possible that we ourselves—we denizens of Blue America—have somehow managed to earn our way out? Is it possible that this year's (narrow) defeat could conceivably track back to something we have done? Perhaps to a form of doubleplusungood as practiced by our tribe?

Well-intentioned commenters will stick to our tribe's simplest tory. Next week, we'll suggest that we Blues should work hard to find a way to emerge, sopping wet, from our Blue Lagoon. We'll even suggest that the story in question tracks back at least sixty years!

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Is there a way we Blues could improve? Are we likely to buy some such story?