On the afternoon of Election Day before a single vote was counted, I flushed all my hopes down the toilet that Kamala Harris might pull off a victory. No, I wasn't disillusioned by one of the plethora of polls that made me see the light, or dark if you prefer, nor was it a commentary written by one of the great thinkers of our day. Rather, it was talking to a friend who was set to vote for Donald Trump when he got off work. I asked him why and he told me this: "Because the economy is so bad."
I foolishly set about trying to convince him that the economy really wasn't that bad, and that Donald Trump was by far the lesser of the two candidates because of the many threats he poses to this nation.
My friend was unmoved.
I've had countless arguments with Trump supporters who more or less are just like me in that they spend a lot of time thinking about politics and are just as passionate and strident about their views as I am about mine.
But I've never really talked politics to folks like this friend, that is to say, people whose world doesn't revolve around current events, especially what's going down in Washington, not to mention the rest of the world. The fact that until Tuesday afternoon we'd never discussed politics illustrates that point.
Simply put, folks like my friend are doing their best to get by one day at a time, struggling in his case with health issues, living in a not always safe neighborhood, and especially having enough money to live a reasonably comfortable life. After having worked hard and honorably through his mid-fifties, he certainly deserves it.
So it shouldn't be much of a surprise that my friend and the tens, perhaps the hundreds of millions of Americans like him, don't make their electoral decisions based upon any ideology, but rather personal experience. And he feels his life was better under the Trump administration than under the Biden/Harris administration.
Quite frankly, who am I to tell him otherwise?
After our brief encounter Tuesday afternoon, it dawned on me that Kamela Harris didn't stand a chance to win the presidency, not because this country has taken a sharp turn to the right, but because more Americans are moved by the words "five dollars for a dozen eggs" than by these: "existential threat to democracy."
In post after post, I tried to make the case that this attitude was selfish and myopic, that we were better to follow JFK's famous words "Ask not what your country can do for you, ,,," than Ronald Reagan's famous question to the American people during one of his debates with incumbent president Jimmy Carter in 1980: "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"
Compounding it was the realization that from what I consider any reasonable viewpoint, the policy proposals of Team Trump, namely mass deportations and imposing blanket tariffs on all goods coming from abroad, would only exacerbate inflation and have other disastrous impacts on the economy.
But what do I know?
Since the election I've read dozens of reasons why Harris lost.
In a post-election podcast by New York Times writer and commentator Ezra Klein. Klein places the blame squarely on the shoulders of Joe Biden who Klein says, should have withdrawn from the presidential race long ago, so there would have been enough time to have a proper primary to pick his successor as the Democratic Party nominee. I agree that Biden should have stuck to his pledge in 2020 not to seek a second term because of his advanced age, but would that have made a difference?
I don't think so.
We have history as a model. In March of 1968, Lyndon Baines Johnson announced he would not seek re-election, leaving open a field of Democrats, including Robert F. Kennedy, to seek their party's nomination. Kennedy was assassinated in June of that year and shortly thereafter came the contentious Chicago convention in August which left the party in disarray. Johnson's vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey was nominated standard bearer and as the representative of an unpopular administration, lost the November election to Richard M. Nixon. Another vice president who unsuccessfully ran to replace an (at the time) unpopular boss was Al Gore in 2000. Granted, both elections were extremely close, but as they say, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
At least, some say, the Democrats should have had an honest-to-goodness primary which included Biden with other candidates challenging him. Well, the last time an incumbent president was seriously challenged by his own party was in 1980 when Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter in the Democratic primaries that year. Carter ended up losing the November general election to Ronald Reagan. That one wasn't at all close. Why? Well yes, Americans were still being held hostage in Iran, but the overriding issue of that election and the reason that Jimmy Carter was a one term president, as was his predecessor Gerald Ford, was inflation.
I remember it well.
The interesting thing about all the finger pointing is that it seems to come from folks who have a particular bone to pick about something or other. Some claim that Harris lost because she refused to rebuke the Biden administration's policy on the war in Gaza. Had she been more open to the suffering of the Palestinians and the need for their own homeland they say, she would not have lost many progressive voters who refused to vote for her.
Other progressives were offended when Harris joined forces with never-Trump Republicans, especially the Cheneys, whom they hold in particular disdain. Surely, they say, she might have won had she kept the whole lot of them at arm's length.
Bernie Sanders and others blame Harris, and the majority of Democrats for abandoning the working class.
Others claim she lost because of her gender and her race, claiming that Americans are too sexist and racist to elect a woman whose heritage happens to be black and Indian.
Folks both left and right of center blame Harris for not distancing herself from the president, whom they point out has desperately low approval ratings, especially on issues like the economy and immigration,
Sam Harris (no relation to Kamala), whom I've quoted here extensively in his latest podcast, before completely eviscerating Trump and his supporters, takes a good deal of time eviscerating the Democrats for losing the election because of their allegiance to identity politics, singling out in particular the Party's defense of transgender rights.
As I see it, these issues may have cost Kamala Harris votes but, they are all break even issues. Had Kamala Harris spent more time addressing the plight of the Palestinians, which admittedly I think she should have, she would likely have lost Jewish votes. Had she followed the avowed Socialist Sanders' advice, she would have lost the votes of some of the centrists whom she picked up with her alliance with Liz Cheney.
I don't honestly see any credence that she lost many votes because of the Cheneys, but I have no doubt she did lose votes because of her race and her gender. On the other hand, I think it's likely that she won at least as many votes because of those two undeniable facts, so there's another break-even issue.
And had she thrown Joe Biden under the bus, as many suggest she should have, that would have left her vulnerable to accusations of disingenuousness and hypocrisy (being an integral part of that administration), and would have caused a tremendous rift in the Democratic Party who still by and large believes, as I do, that when all is said and done, Biden will go down in history as having been a very good president.
I had an equally illuminating conversation with another friend the week before the election. We shared our disbelief, given Trump's record, his policies and his lack of decency, that anyone still supported him. This friend had a one-word solution to the problem, education. It's no secret that Harris won the vote of people with college educations quite handily, while his shall we say, unorthodox style late in the campaign, led some to believe that Trump was speaking directly to male voters without college degrees. Given the vulgarity of some of his rants, that should be considered a tremendous insult to male voters without college degrees.
Now this particular friend and I by and large share political ideologies although I would have to say he is to the left of me. He also comes from a background of undeniable white privilege as do I, only more so in his case if you factor money into the equation. And he married into a family of even more privilege if you catch my drift.
So it's easy for him to say that education is the answer as he and his wife had the means to send all four of their children to good colleges, paying their way in full.
By contrast, the friend I spoke with the day of the election is neither white nor privileged.
But privilege transcends both race and money. My definition of privilege includes a child having parents, family, friends and an environment that encourages curiosity, critical thinking, and above all, a love of learning. I had all that in spades when I was growing up, but unfortunately many people do not. Having money, and the ability to afford going to college alone, do not necessarily grant this important privilege.
That's not to say people who grow up without the privilege of having been taught a love of education, cannot develop one, they just have to work harder.
I agree with my friend about education being the key to a well-functioning society, especially as we've been seeing lately, populists with bad intentions can easily manipulate people without a sense or desire to think critically.
Unfortunately, curiosity, a love of learning, and critical thinking are not things we as a society can expect of everyone, as education is just not everyone's bag.
It's likely that more Americans are like my friend the Trump voter who thinks about politics most likely only during election season if then, rather than me, someone who for better or worse, thinks about it on an almost daily basis.
In the aforementioned podcast, Sam Harris points out that all of the Trump voters he knows were not concerned about the nuts and bolts issues that directly affect people's lives like inflation, but rather culture war stuff like trans rights. If that's the case, I have a sneaking suspicion that he doesn't know too many people like my friend the Trump voter whom I can assure you doesn't lose sleep over the culture wars.
This is not just an American issue. At the beginning of the piece I mentioned above, Ezra Klein points out that in the past few years, Great Britain, Japan, Sweden, Portugal and Finland all have had dramatic swings in their governments. These shifts were not ideological, conservative governments lost to liberal ones, and vice versa. The only thing they all had in common was the voting public's demand for change, in whatever form it might take.
Why? Well as they say, it's the economy, (or at least the public's perception of it) stupid.
And how.
So what do the Democrats have to do to get back into the White House? That's another question I've been hearing ad nauseam since last Tuesday. Tremendous soul searching is the response I hear the most.
That's Democrats for you.
No, there's only one way for them go get back into the Executive Branch. Take a page from the Republican playbook and do everything in their power to make sure Donald Trump and the Republicans seriously fuck up in the next four years, and the American electorate will be looking for yet another change.
From what he suggests he's going to do once in office, they won't have to work too hard.
At least we've got that going for us.
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