Election 2024 reactions

Joy is everywhere, reports novelist L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright:

On Wednesday, my husband and I stopped at McDonalds so that he could pick up an iced coffee. The Hispanic woman at the window was smiling broadly. When my husband asked her if she was having a good day, she said she was in such a firm tone that she and I looked at each other and smiled. It was like a reverse moment to that Liberal commercial about the women meeting eyes at the voting booth....

Next, I went to drop off my car at the shop.

"So, how about that election?" asked my mechanic. He looked so happy and so relieved.

Karol Markowicz:

I've had a complicated journey with Donald Trump, rooting for him as results rolled in in 2016 and 2020 but either sitting out or voting Third Party in both of those elections. I did vote for him this time around, and I agree with him on most, but not all, of his policies....

I didn't just vote for Donald Trump this time around, I did so very enthusiastically, on day 1 of early voting, took my picture with the sticker and posted it to my socials.

I considered myself a "would crawl over broken glass to vote Trump" voter...this time. I voted to preserve civilization, as much as we possibly still can, whether than means allowing Israel to defend itself or securing our border. Against girls chopping off their breasts because they've been lied to that they could become boys. For the security of Jews in America. For the Second Amendment.

Josh Turley to the mainstream media:

The 24/7 news cycle, filled with half-truths, strong opinions, and sometimes blatant bias, lies hiding your corruption, accomplished something remarkable: it gave rise to a movement, built momentum, and ironically, solidified support for a candidate many considered unelectable. By portraying him as the perennial "outsider" or "threat," you inadvertently galvanized those of us who felt overlooked. Each insult, each exaggeration, each speculative piece of reporting only reinforced the idea that this candidate might be different--and in a time when many of us felt ignored, different was exactly what we were looking for.

Konstantin Kisin offers his European friends 10 Reasons Why You Didn't See This Coming. He begins:

1. Americans love their country and want it to be the best in the world. America is a nation of people who conquered a continent. They love strength. They love winning. Any leader who appeals to that has an automatic advantage.

2. Unlike Europeans, Americans have not accepted managed decline. They don't have Net Zero here, they believe in producing their own energy and making it as cheap as possible because they know that their prosperity depends on it.

Eugyppius has an explanation for European confusion in his report on the unbalanced diet offered by Germany's mainstream media:

This magnum opus was merely the last in a long line of articles from Koch that read like they were written by Harris's campaign. On 4 November Koch was writing about Trump's alleged "dementia," on 31 October he was lecturing the Americans about their political polarisation and on 21 October he was going after Elon Musk for his attacks on Harris. He loved few things as much as complaining about Trump's lies, and he praised Tim Walz for his catastrophic debate performance against J.D. Vance. Koch just served up article after article after article like this - an unending torrent of confused and ass-backwards reporting from a sad German man who cannot distinguish between campaign press releases and information. I highlight Koch's execrable work here not because the man is a major leader of opinion or even all that important, but because he is entirely typical. This was the tenor of mainstream, ordinary, middle-of the-road German coverage, and it was completely wrong, from top to bottom.

You could fill a book with this stuff. As late as Monday, the Berliner Morgenpost were telling oblivious Germans all about Harris's "deep roots in the black community." Back in July, the centrist and market-liberal Handelsblatt were writing that "Harris is officially 'brat,'" which (they explained) is what the kids call someone who is "cool" and "hip" and "also a bit messy." (This is a direct summary, I could not devise this kind of parody even if I wanted to.) They even brought in a "US expert" named Laura von Daniels from some German think-tank to tell us that "the 'Kamala is brat' trend has come at the right time" because "the meme culture was threatening to become the sole domain of Donald Trump." Other signs that things were looking up for Harris, according to our Handelsblatt America understanders, included the fact that she gained a lot of followers on X and Instagram upon announcing her candidacy and these new followers were posting a lot of coconut imagery.

German political leaders aren't any better:

The people who rule us play farsighted, smart and intelligent statesmen on television. In fact they are a lot of histrionic, uptight and anally retentive ninnies who have developed a bizarre moral panic about political populism and anything perceived to be "on the right." This started out as a cynical political strategy to delegitimise and perhaps even outlaw the populist opposition in the Federal Republic [of Germany], but in the course of just a few years it has become a fully developed and totally official system of political hysteria. There aren't any adults in the room anymore - just a lot of overgrown and emotionally incontinent children who feel that things should be a certain way, and for that reason alone are totally incapable of perceiving the way that things actually are. On Tuesday night reality kicked them all right in the teeth, and man does that feel good.

Writing before the election, Fred Bauer finds that alarmism about the election result is nothing new:

"It is not just a battle between two parties. It is a fight for the very soul of the American government," the president warned in Chicago. "Powerful reactionary forces . . . are silently undermining our democratic institutions." Republicans in Congress, he said, had "opened the gate to the forces that would destroy our democracy."

This wasn't Joe Biden in 2024, but Harry Truman in 1948. Apocalyptic invocations of disaster if the enemy wins are hardly new in American politics, and this year is no exception. Depending on who's speaking, the U.S. is purportedly headed toward either dictatorship or woke tyranny if the other side wins. Either the country will capsize into chaos, or the righteous will seize the tiller and steer the republic into a grand future. This kind of rhetoric exists on both sides of the political spectrum--but each cycle, one side must lose. An essential part of democracy is learning to live after the apocalypse.

Naomi Wolf offers some advice to the incoming Trump administration on framing their message with image and narrative.

While President Trump has been in media forever, he and his advisors have not mastered the art of telling a proactive symbolic and iconic political story. They tend to be highly reactive to adverse news coverage and to criticism, which is one of their most concerning vulnerabilities, as this continually misleads them into reactive media strategies.

President Trump's engagement with the media, and even with live crowds, has insulated him to an extent, and that is a risk at this critical moment in his pre-Presidency. President Trump is used to dealing with "fake media" that continually lie about him no matter what -- so in his calculus, he does not need to win them over at all. He is also used to speaking live to adoring crowds. So he is not used to speaking live to people who are unsure of him, or to people who actively hate and fear him.

But his task right now is to make it impossible for the "fake media" to disregard the positive points of his policy initiatives and the great news of his transition's personnel decisions.

President Trump also urgently needs to lay to rest the active, traumatized fears of the half of the country that did not vote for him and especially of the millions who have been so propagandized by legacy media that they are in active states of apprehension and of grief.

Aaron Renn writes that a brash character like Trump the adulterous casino owner could only become president in "Negative World," the cultural milieu that mocks Christian moral standards and WASP emotional continence as repressive and inauthentic, a world created by the very people most distraught at Tuesday's result:

And it's those who most enthusiastically tore down all the old Christian moral superstructure of America, the guardrails that would have barred the way to the Oval Office for someone like Trump, who are most horrified by his wins....

Trump had talked about running for President since at least 1988, but he never did it. (The fake 2012 Reform Party bid doesn't count). He knew that, whatever his fame, America would not elect someone like him. In a country where Sen. Gary Hart had to drop out of the presidential race because he allegedly had an affair, Trump's stormy personal life in that era would have disqualified him....

Trump also benefitted from the final decay of WASP norms in America. His gaudy consumption style, braggadocio, and love of celebrity are an affront to WASP values. But in a country that fetes Cardi B's "WAP" and other such music, in which drug use is now mostly legal and approved of, tattoos are very common, becoming a social media star is one of the top career ambitions of young people, and consumption of the expensive products and experiences is now a core element of the lifestyle of the American elite, how can Trump's behaviors be critiqued? It's hard to complain that he's crude when we live in a crude society and people like that way - except when it comes to him. In fact, compared to the rest of the country, Trump is a retro model of rectitude when it comes to not drinking or doing drugs, having a relentless work ethic, wearing suits, etc.

If we were still the America that elected George H.W. Bush, or even George W. Bush, Donald Trump would not have won his election. In fact, there's a good chance he wouldn't even have run in the first place.

Carrie Sheffield in the Daily Signal:

Washington Post columnist George Will--no fan of Trump--agreed, reminding readers: "This was concocted by an elected, flamboyantly anti-Trump Democratic prosecutor in Manhattan, who, in a marvel akin to the multiplication of the fishes and loaves, transformed a bookkeeping misdemeanor into 34 felonies in New York. Democrats, who call Trump an 'existential' threat to everything, endeavored to secure him another presidential nomination."

Indeed, Trump was slipping in the primary polls up until the August 2022 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago (pertaining to classified documents), followed by his indictment in the hush money case. These eventually clinched the nomination for Trump, driven by voters incensed by the improper use of the justice system.

From Trump opponents:

Dave Weigel

The apparent result means the defeat of a strategy that nearly all Democrats embraced after the 2016 election: Delivering populist labor, tax, and healthcare policies that they thought could win back Obama-Trump voters and stop any more losses with non-white voters.

That was not enough for swing voters, who never stopped crediting Trump with pre-COVID economic growth while absolving him for his handling of the pandemic. And that angst cut across racial lines -- along with anger at progressive crime and immigration policies that Vice President Kamala Harris abandoned before running....

Twelve years ago, the last time they didn't run Trump for president, Republicans watched Mitt Romney fail to break a 20-year Democratic grip on the Midwest. His weakness with Latino voters convinced many Republicans, briefly, that they needed to pass immigration reform. Trump ditched Romney's austerity policies, soft-pedaled his own very similar tax policies, and ran on closing the border to new arrivals to protect the country for the people already living here. And it broke the Democrats' coalition.

Daniel McCarthy in the New York Times:

To his supporters, however, a vote for Mr. Trump meant a vote to evict a failed leadership class from power and recreate the nation's institutions under a new set of standards that would better serve American citizens.

Mr. Trump's victory amounts to a public vote of no confidence in the leaders and institutions that have shaped American life since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago. The names themselves are symbolic: In 2016 Mr. Trump ran against a Bush in the Republican primaries and a Clinton in the general election. This time, in a looser sense, he beat a coalition that included Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney....

Mr. Trump is no one's idea of a policy wonk, but the role his voters want him to serve is arguably the opposite: that of an anti-wonk who demolishes Washington's present notions of expertise. Mr. Trump's victory is a punitive verdict on the authorities of all kinds who sought to stop him.

In economics, creative destruction occurs when a new competitor reveals just how ill-suited existing businesses are to satisfying consumer demand. Like market competition, democratic political competition leads to similar upheavals. If the disruption that Mr. Trump represents seems unusually drastic, that's a sign that American politics has been insufficiently competitive for too long. Before Mr. Trump came along, power was in the hands of a political cartel, which, like the market cartels that Adam Smith had warned about, involved institutions that should have been in robust competition but were instead cooperating to exclude rival "products" or ideas. The cartel's overpriced, shoddy goods failed to satisfy the public's demands.

Recently re-elected U. S. Senator Bernie Sanders:

The independent, who caucuses with Democrats, said it "should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."

David Brooks in the New York Times:

The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn't see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. I guess it's hard to focus on class inequality when you went to a college with a multibillion-dollar endowment and do environmental greenwashing and diversity seminars for a major corporation. Donald Trump is a monstrous narcissist, but there's something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself....

In 2024, [Trump] built the very thing the Democratic Party once tried to build -- a multiracial, working-class majority. His support surged among Black and Hispanic workers. He recorded astonishing gains in places like New Jersey, the Bronx, Chicago, Dallas and Houston. According to the NBC exit polls, he won a third of voters of color. He's the first Republican to win a majority of the votes in 20 years.

The Democrats obviously have to do some major rethinking. The Biden administration tried to woo the working class with subsidies and stimulus, but there is no economic solution to what is primarily a crisis of respect.

There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again.

Bret Stephens in the New York Times:

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.

In a video clip, James "Serpenthead" Carville says that Kamala Harris was doomed by her thoughtless response on The View to the question about what she would have done differently than Biden.

Another video clip, from Pod Save America, in which Jon Favreau states that the Biden campaign had internal Biden campaign polling showing Trump winning 400+ electoral votes while at the same time claiming that Biden was popular, the economy was the greatest ever, set to win, and Harris couldn't win.

Jeet Heer in The Nation:

The key to understanding the Trump era is that the real divide in America is not between left and right but between pro-system and anti-system politics. Pro-system politics is the bipartisan consensus of establishment Democrats and Republicans: It's the politics of NATO and other military alliances, of trade agreements, and of deference to economists (as when they say that price gouging isn't the cause of inflation). Trump stands for no fixed ideology but rather a general thumbing of the nose at this consensus.

The main fact of American politics in the post-Obama era is that an ever larger majority of Americans are angry at the status quo and open to anti-system politics. Trump won as the candidate of anti-system anger in 2016. In 2020, he suffered the liability of being the status quo even as Covid was ravaging the world. But by 2024 he was able to return again as the voice of change, bolstered by the fond memories many Americans have of the economy under his presidency--and of the temporary, but generous, expansion of the welfare state under Covid emergency measures....

Democrats will need to radically reform themselves if they want to ever defeat the radical right. They have to realize that non-college-educated voters, who make up two-thirds of the electorate, need to be won over. They need to realize that, for anti-system Americans, a promised return to bipartisan comity is just ancien régime restoration. They need to become the party that aspires to be more than caretakers of a broken system but rather is willing to embrace radical policies to change that status quo. This is the only path for the party to rebuild itself and for Trumpism--which without such effective opposition is likely to long outlive its standard-bearer--to actually be defeated.