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.