Stand with Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan -- with democracy and civilization against tyranny and barbarism
06 November 2024
Initial post-election reactions
Obviously, this election did not follow the pattern of the state and local elections since Dobbs, as I was expecting. There was no swing toward the Democrats relative to earlier historical patterns; there was no blue wave.
The presidency is not settled yet, but that's a technicality. Assuming the AP is correct on the states it has called -- and it usually is -- at this moment Trump has 267 electoral votes. To win, Harris would need to carry all six of the remaining un-called states, including Alaska -- and Trump is currently leading in all of those six except Maine. That's not impossible, but it's vanishingly unlikely. Trump might even win the popular vote this time. As for Congress, the Republicans have already won fifty-one Senate seats. It's too early to call the House, but if the Democrats take a majority there, it will be a very narrow one.
Abortion rights remained a potent issue. So far it appears that all of the abortion-rights referenda are passing except in South Dakota and Florida, and even the one in Florida got 57% of the vote; it failed only because amendments to the state constitution there require 60%. But apparently many people will vote for abortion rights while still voting for politicians who oppose them.
So what was different? Why didn't this election follow the post-Dobbs pattern? Two probable major factors suggest themselves:
1. Trump was on the ballot this time, unlike in any previous post-Dobbs election. Polling has long shown that Trump is more popular than the Republican party in general, and can motivate millions of supporters to turn out who wouldn't bother if he weren't there to vote for. Apparently there's truth in this. Of course, once those Trumpists were at the polls to support him, they also voted for other Republican politicians.
2. The immigration issue trumped the abortion issue in importance to voters. Immigration is strictly a federal responsibility, so in the state and local elections since Dobbs, it wasn't much of a factor. In a federal election, it is. Trump won his surprising initial Republican support in 2016 largely by talking bluntly about immigration -- expressing what so many Americans feel but had been inhibited from saying. Yes, anger at abortion restrictions was a powerful motivator in this election. But anger at an out-of-control influx of migrants, legal and illegal, was an even more powerful one, for an even larger number of voters. Trump promised tough, even harsh action on the issue, and it resonated. At first assessment, I think that this was the largest reason for yesterday's outcome.
I knew immigration was a big concern to a huge part of the electorate, but I thought the abortion-rights issue would outweigh it. Evidently I was mistaken.
There's a more fundamental issue which this election result shows we need to confront head-on.
I am fucking sick and tired of people constantly saying they just can't understand why anybody would vote for the other side. You had damn well better start trying to understand -- to really understand, to ask, listen, learn, and comprehend -- as opposed to mindlessly smearing half the country as stupid, racist, fascist, insane, etc. Being unable to understand something is not a virtue. Nobody ever won an argument by standing around slack-jawed with shock that anybody could be so depraved as to have opinions and priorities different from their own. You're not going to win elections that way either. The most profound problem with politics in this country is that so many people, at both political extremes, refuse to read or listen to or expose themselves to any argument or source of information that comes from a viewpoint different from what they already hold, as if contact with heresy would somehow contaminate them. If you want to appeal to people, and ultimately persuade them to vote differently than they have in the past, you need to put away the name-calling and lecturing and be willing to learn and listen. You don't need to agree with them. But you do need to understand them. Whichever side is more willing to do this will gain a substantial future advantage. And it's the only way we're ever going to overcome this accursed polarization which has turned politics into a nightmare for that majority of us who just want peace and quiet and pragmatic solutions, not this constant shrieking hysteria about how evil the opposite party (from whichever viewpoint) is.
I'll have more to say about this in another day or two after I've had more time to think about it.
Well, here we are at last. If you haven't already, vote now or forever hold your peace.
It looks more and more to me like my assessment of two weeks ago was correct and we're going to see a genuine blue wave. Even some in the media are starting to talk about the possibility; the Selzer poll in Iowa seems to have made them feel more open to doing so. The fact that Selzer has a history of being so accurate suggests she's the one pollster who is not failing to pick up on the Dobbs effect. Trump carried Iowa by eight points in 2020. If Harris is now three points ahead, that's an eleven-point shift relative to four years ago. That's very large, but it's consistent with the shift toward Democrats in all those local and special elections all over the country since Dobbs. And if that shift is going to show up in this election as well, it certainly won't be confined to Iowa. It's just that Iowa has a pollster accurate enough to detect it.
I suspect that Dobbs will be remembered as the political equivalent of Pearl Harbor -- a shock attack that seemed like a huge victory for the right wing, but in reality triggered a massive backlash that ended up crushing them.
Anyway, take comfort in the fact that this interminable, grinding slog of a campaign will finally be over. It feels like it's been dragging on since forever, but win or lose, today is finally the last of it. No more political ads, no more rallies, no more polls, no more breathless MSM headlines about polls, no more experts parsing the latest gaffe or analyzing how the left-handed Albanian-American Gen-X bisexual vote is trending. It's going to feel like the sudden end of a year-long migraine.
FFS do not get your election info from chatbots or any other bullcrap "AI" thing. They're just generating incorrect information the same way they do about everything else.
Extremist groups such as QAnon and the Proud Boys are running out of steam, and less likely to mobilize to support Trump in fighting the election results.
Fortune and LifeSite News are predicting a big win for Trump and the Republicans. I'm seeing the same on right-wing websites and blogs generally. None of them mention the shift toward Democrats in post-Dobbs elections, nor the early-voter surveys strongly suggesting a high Republican vote for Harris. I think they're in for a shock next week.
Theodore Roosevelt understood that the president is simply one bureaucrat among many, not the exalted and almost king-like figure our modern (and profoundly un-American and anti-Constitution) sensibilities have made him.
One district in Idaho is so swamped with anti-vax nonsense that all its public clinics have stopped offering covid vaccines. At this rate our red states will soon be sinking toward Third World levels of ignorance and superstition and disease.
Trump has become too boring to inspire another insurrection.
In Oakland CA, a Jewish man was harassed and kicked out of a café for wearing a hat with a star of David on it.
The gender gap among young voters is huge, with Harris leading by thirty points among young women but only by ten points among young men. The early vote is trending very strongly female.
Project 2025 would entirely ban porn and imprison the people who produce or distribute it (NSFW blog, requires Blogspot login). The issue may work to sway some young male Trump supporters.
A quarter million Washington Post subscribers have canceled since Bezos quashed the paper's Harris endorsement, about ten percent of all its digital subscribers.
Even in Kansas, it feels like we're not in Kansas any more.
Chicago police have finally filed terrorism and hate-crime charges against the jihadist who murdered a Jewish man last weekend. They had faced severe criticism for initially failing to do so, with Jewish leaders describing Chicago as an "openly hostile" environment.
This analyst predicts Harris will win big, partly due to her innovative approach to defending abortion rights.
The head of the Heritage Foundation calls Harris the most "anti-faith" presidential candidate in history (I wish). His predictions for what will happen if she wins are a morass of delusional thinking.
This journalist almost died because he was on Medicare Advantage instead of real Medicare. Some insurers will automatically enroll you in their Medicare Advantage plans unless you opt out.
Political must-read of the week: Democrats often ask why so many working-class whites "vote against their own self-interest" by voting Republican. They don't realize that, for many of those voters, cultural and social issues are more important than economic self-interest -- and on many of those issues, the left is basically off in orbit around Neptune somewhere. The same applies to immigration, though the linked post doesn't mention it. This is part of a broad re-alignment in which sex and education are of growing importance (women and the more-educated more Democratic, men and the less-educated more Republican), while older voters, traditionally Republican, are trending more Democratic due to Republican threats to Social Security. The political world is evolving into something quite different from what we've been used to.
Now that Israel has wiped out most of Hezbollah's leaders and crippled its fighting ability, the Lebanese themselves are starting to clean out its remaining thugs from their territory.
UNRWA confirms that a Hamas leader was its employee. We need to stop deluding ourselves that the UN is something other than an evil jihadism-enabling criminal gang.
So, we have to change the clocks again. If there's one thing pretty much all Americans, left or right, agree on, it's that we all hate doing this twice a year. So why can't Congress put a stop to it? Can we get some action on this? Results not excuses, please.
With recent talk on the right about a mass deportation of illegal aliens, and polling evidence that a large majority of Americans would support this, I've seen people on the left cite this article claiming that such a mass deportation would cost around half a trillion dollars and take several years. The dollar figure is hugely inflated by including the cost of twenty years of post-expulsion border enforcement, which would need to be done anyway. More broadly, the claim just makes no sense. After the end of World War II, Poland expelled the ethnic German population of Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia, a total of fifteen million people (compare with eleven million illegals in the US). This operation took just a matter of months and didn’t involve unreasonable expense. One can debate whether such a mass expulsion is advisable or moral, but it is not impossible or impractical.
People nowadays are so busy recording their experiences that they don't seem to actually experience their experiences. If you visit the Parthenon and spend all your time there taking selfies in front of it, then years later when you look at those pictures (do they ever actually look at them later?), will you really have the same memories of being there as someone who just looked and absorbed the moment? Then there are those people who go to live performances and record them on their smartphones. If you want a video recording of a band, there are professional ones available, but the experience of simply seeing them perform live is unique. Just watch, listen and be there.
I'm now more convinced than ever that my "blue wave" prediction will be vindicated, based on an emerging pattern of the early vote going overwhelmingly for Harris, both nationally and in individualstates, even though the numbers of Republicans and Democrats voting early are nearly equal. This shows that huge numbers of Republicans are voting Democratic, at least on the presidential level. As my earlier post pointed out, this continues the pattern seen in elections and referenda since the Dobbs ruling -- major shifts in favor of the Democrats and abortion rights, which were not anticipated by polls.
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How important are endorsements? I'll offer myself as one data point. I always know enough about the "big" races (for president, Congress, and governor) to know which candidate I prefer, but for lesser races I often don't, and researching all of them would be an onerous task. In such cases, I do look at endorsements. If a candidate is endorsed by a bunch of labor unions, for example, I can safely assume that candidate is the one to vote for.
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I've been glad to see that there's very little concern being expressed about what would once have been a serious question -- whether the country is ready for a woman president. In a sense, the question was answered in 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote even though the Electoral College thwarted the will of the people. Beyond that, female leadership is no longer a rarity among democracies. Italy, Mexico, and Thailand have women leaders right now. Germany and Taiwan did until recently. The UK elected Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Israel elected Golda Meir in 1969. One might ask why the US is taking so long.
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All week the racist insults aired at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally have been the talk of the left-wing internet. Personally, I doubt this event will move the needle much in the overall election, though it may have some marginal impact by motivating Puerto Rican voters (especially in Pennsylvania and Florida, which have substantial Puerto Rican populations), particularly since several Puerto Rican celebrities have forcefully called attention to it. It might even slow down the trend of Republican gains among Hispanic voters, though US Hispanics are far from homogenous in ethnic consciousness. But the idea that it's an election game-changer strikes me as more of a blogosphere concept than a real-world one. Trump already has a long history of ethnic slurs, including slurs targeting Hispanics. Any needle-moving that such utterances could do, probably was baked in long ago. In this case, the offensive remarks weren't even delivered by Trump himself, and his campaign rushed to repudiate them.
However, I think the slurs at that rally may do the Republican party considerable harm in a more subtle way.
As noted above, early-voting patterns suggest that the Dobbs effect is indeed producing a "blue wave". However, the polls are still showing the race very close (despite this bearing no resemblance to the actual vote so far), and the media are still pushing a close-race narrative. If the actual result is a blue wave, with the Democrats overwhelmingly winning the presidency, Senate, and House as well as state races that were expected to be close, the right wing will suffer a profound shock. The dumbest and most delusional among them will start bleating about the election being stolen, rigged, etc, but there may not be very much of that -- there wasn't in 2022 when the poll-predicted red wave failed to materialize (probably also squelched by the Dobbs ruling). Most of them, including the leaders, will realize something went very wrong, and will focus on determining what that something was.
The religious hard-liners will be desperately trying to fend off the obvious answer -- that it was the party's attacks on abortion -- to avoid that issue being jettisoned as the ballot-box poison it in fact is. If the celebrating left is trumpeting Trump's racism as the game-changing factor (which many will -- leftists try to make everything about racism if they can find a remotely-plausible pretext for doing so), they'll seize upon that as a diversion -- it wasn't forced-birthism that sank the party, it was Tony Hinchcliffe. And a lot of the leaders will want to believe this, to avoid the agonizing internal conflicts which would result from throwing forced-birthism overboard. It may well become the accepted explanation for the unexpected loss. Thus the Republicans will suffer a major defeat and loss of power, and will not even gain the benefit of correctly understanding their weaknesses so they can correct them.
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Individualist, pro-technology, pro-democracy, anti-religion. I speak only for myself and not for any ideology, movement, or party. It has been my great good fortune to live my whole life free of "spirituality" of any kind. I believe that evidence and reason are the keys to understanding reality; that technology rather than ideology or politics has been the great liberator of humanity; and that in the long run, human intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe.
