A last few election notes

The most frustrating thing about this is that I had seriously thought we would get a Democratic trifecta and start to move the country forward in a big way -- universal health care, DC and Puerto Rico statehood, some first steps towards restoring sane tax rates on the wealthy, a minimum wage more in line with other rich countries.  Instead we're getting four years of struggling to avoid going backward.

The real problem was turnout.  Trump actually got slightly fewer votes than he did in 2020.  Harris got thirteen million fewer votes than Biden did that year (though the figure may improve a bit when California finishes counting).  So there was no growth in support for Trump, but rather a shortfall in Democratic turnout -- this in spite of all the talk about surging new-voter registrations.  The number of votes Harris got was similar to what the Democratic candidates got in 2008, 2012, and 2016; the 2020 turnout represented an unusual surge.  Still, one would have expected the turnout for Harris to be higher than it was -- the US population has grown since 2016, and the threat of Trump was on the ballot again.  The shortfall fits with my post yesterday -- apparently a fair number of people who would normally vote Democratic are getting turned off.

I have some hope that this election will help the mainstream left start to get over its coddling of Islam. A substantial number of Muslim voters followed through on their threat to "punish" the Democrats by voting for Stein or even for Trump, and in any case US Muslims have been trending more and more Republican over time, based on shared hostility to gays, feminism, secularism, etc.  The Jewish vote, of course, remains overwhelmingly Democratic.

After losing the 2020 election, Trump tried to pressure Pence into using his presiding role at the counting of electoral votes to sabotage the count and deliver victory to him.  It's fortunate for him that this bizarre idea -- that the Constitution empowers the outgoing vice president to nullify an election result -- never won wide acceptance. 

Looking around the left-wing blogosphere, a lot of people seem to be engaged in a grimly determined round of point-missing, insisting that Harris lost because too many people are closet bigots who won't vote for a black or female candidate.  It's the old leftist curse of interpreting everything in terms of identity politics, believing that the general population is as obsessed with race and gender as they themselves are.  It ignores the fact that Obama won the presidency twice, and Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016.  It also ignores the fact that the same low-turnout problem affected Democratic candidates across the board, not just Harris.

The outcome makes me wonder whether things like money and GOTV actually have much effect any more.  The Democrats far outperformed the Republicans in both areas, but it didn't seem to help.  On the other hand, maybe the results would have been even worse without them.

It also appears that "shocking" gaffes don't have much real impact.  Many expected that the "floating island of garbage" joke, and Trump's vile rhetoric about immigrants, would be fatal errors -- but he and the Republicans got more Hispanic votes than ever.

And apparently we can no longer put much stock in traditional ways of forecasting election results.  We had endless polls and there were critical things they all got wrong.  Florida and Texas were supposed to be close; they weren't.  Surveys of early voters showed them breaking massively for Harris even though many of them were Republicans; the final election results strongly suggest that this was not accurate.  Even the vaunted Ann Selzer got Iowa totally wrong.  Similarly, there was a lot of talk about seeing more Harris lawn signs than Trump ones even in Republican areas, and about Trump's rallies drawing meager and unenthusiastic crowds compared to Harris's; yet obviously this didn't tell us anything about actual voter enthusiasm.  For future elections, I don't see how we can really claim to know anything in advance.

For a typical US male at age 78, the average remaining life expectancy is about eight years.  Given Trump's obesity, horrible diet, refusal to exercise, and histrionic temperament, his real life expectancy must be quite a bit less; and seeing how his dementia is advancing, I wouldn't be surprised if he becomes obviously unable to function as president mere months from now.  Get busy learning all you can about JD Vance and his views.  He'll probably be president for some or even most of Trump's term.