It doesn't appear to have been close. Georgia flipped for Trump. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, too. The Blue Wall crumbled like Jericho's. Just about everywhere voted redder than in 2020. Young people went right. New York City went right. The polls said what they said, but then Americans went to the voting booth and said what they said, which is that they want four more years of Donald Trump. This feels worse than 2016. That was a squeaker, and you could convince yourself it was a fluke. The Comey letter. No Midwest Dem ground game. A uniquely unpopular candidate. Belief that maybe Trump wasn't being totally serious about the things he said, or might surround himself with smarter, better people. Maybe it was possible people were voting for Trump just to seize on an intrusive thought, a call of the void. You can't tell yourself these stories this time. Trump is a known quantity. We know what he would do as President, and we know all the things he'd promised to do as President a second time, and millions of Americans took all that into consideration and said, Yes, I want that.
What do you do in a place like this, with an electorate like that? You survive it, mostly, unless you don't. You will try to figure out how it got there, got so angry and stupid and cruel, so that you can nudge it somewhere else next time. You do this by seeing what went wrong this time. This seems like an impossible task this morning, because everything went wrong.
The temptation to recriminate is strong, and healthy when constructive, but feels more useless than usual right now, especially in these first few shell-shocked hours. Pick your own adventure, and go back as far as you like. Joe Biden could have dropped out earlier. Maybe Joe Biden shouldn't have run at all in 2020. They could have crammed in a sprint primary. Maybe Kamala Harris could have run as something other than an extension of an unpopular administration. Maybe she could have courted the right more. Maybe she could have courted the left at all. Maybe she could have been tougher on Israel, or maybe being even more deferential would have gained her some votes among the bloodthirsty. Maybe Liz Cheney was not the right person to make her most visible endorser. Maybe she should have chosen a more polished VP pick, or maybe she shouldn't have muzzled Tim Walz's seemingly popular early attacks. Maybe no plurality of Americans was ever going to elect a woman, or a black and Indian woman. Maybe the demographics are fundamentally Republican now: second-generation immigrants have gone rightward from four and eight years ago, as did younger voters. Maybe that side's threats of implicit or actual violence have given it an unsurmountable advantage at the ballot box. Maybe offering more policy specifics would have helped, or maybe they wouldn't have, given that so many voters cited a crime wave in a time of sharply decreasing crime and inflation at a point where inflation is nosediving. I have my opinions on all of these, as do you, but the point is that there is no "for want of a nail" in this election, no one thing that if addressed could have given Harris the edge. The margins were too wide, in too many places.
Anyway, just look at the other side. Ground game is supposed to be crucial, and the Trump campaign ground game was dogshit. He selected a deeply unpopular VP. He has personally offered zero in the way of policy specifics beyond raising the taxes of most of his base. He was visibly expiring at most of his rallies. He is a liar and a criminal and openly corrupt and none of it mattered. Everything we've always been told voters reject, they ignored, even embraced. Voters wanted Trump, in all his malice.
Even this morning's bleary eyes can't not see it clearly: This was a mandate for a nasty, venal person to keep being his nasty, venal self. You can't blame third-party voters, or hesitant lefties, or anyone but the many, many people who voted for him. He ran on a platform of punishing his enemies, and his voters' imagined enemies, and they turned out in droves to give him that power even at the expense of making their own lives worse. One cannot say broadly of Americans We're better than this, because we're not. A plurality of Americans hate women or people of color or immigrants or trans people enough for this to be the result. There's no Russian bogeyman this time, no Jill Stein stripping votes, to help concoct a different and more comforting narrative, one of a single fixable thing. There is no panacea for this. There is only President-Elect Donald Trump, and the scores of millions of people who wanted him in office again, but also the scores of millions for whom this is a nightmare brought back to life. If you are in the latter group, there will be future opportunities to organize, to vote in local elections, to mitigate some of the harm. But for the moment there's little to do, and no illusions left, just the struggle of figuring out how to live in this country, with these people.
