Fight/Flight
A couple of personal notes before I begin. Like a lot of Americans this week, I wake up in the middle of the night, and, for a moment, don’t remember Tuesday. But that crushing memory returns quickly. I used to read the news to go back to sleep. Now, that’s a path to another sleepless night. So I read old history articles instead, keeping a distance from the events of today.
When I do confront today’s news, I try to do it on my own terms. I feel that same distress I have before surgery. I know I have to have the procedure, but there always a strong “fight/flight” urge to jump off of the gurney, and flee down the hall in my open hospital gown. Now, like that pre-surgery stress, I have to face down the urge to run, and force myself to confront the reality of another “Trump America”. I know my reaction might get better in weeks or months, but for the moment, it’s almost overwhelming. And besides, there will be plenty of reality to confront in the next four years. We all need to take it a piece at a time, not all at once.
Horses with Teeth
I also joined my family in an “election avoidance activity”. Coincidentally, we planned on a trip to “The Wilds” in eastern Ohio yesterday. It’s a sanctuary where many endangered animals roam in protected pastures. So Thursday, instead of “deep diving” into the results, I was in the back of a beat-up pickup truck, getting “up-close and personal” with exotic species.
We literally fed a rhinoceros in a field, and scratched her back. We dodged ostrich nips, hand-fed lettuce to a giraffe with their amazingly long tongues, and learned from afar about a species of beautiful animals called Przewalski’s Horses. They cannot be tamed, and while they are gorgeous, almost cuddly, they have a secret weapon. Unlike other horses-species, these beautiful “ponies” have canine teeth, able to rip and shred. And they have no compunctions about using them.
The Numbers
So here’s the figures (of figures lie and liars figures). When the notoriously slow California vote is projected to completion, almost 160 million Americans voted. (Current prognosticators are ignoring at least seven million votes not yet counted). That’s about four million more than 2020. So let’s dispel the first fallacy: more Americans voted in 2024 than ever before. Donald Trump got about 4.5 million more votes than in 2020, and Kamala Harris about 1.7 million votes less than Joe Biden.
And that dispels the second fallacy: while this was a landslide in the electoral college, it was incredibly narrow when viewed through the prism of that old American principle; “one person, one vote”. The difference is less than a million, a little over one half of one percent.
To put a finer point on it, Trump really won the election by 247,583 votes. That the total of the difference in the “Blue Wall” states. And that’s a lot bigger difference than either Biden’s winning or Clinton’s losing result.
Of course, the voting margins don’t matter. This is a winner take-all deal, just like when the Bengals gambled on a two-point conversion to beat the Ravens last night with 34 seconds left in the game: score and win by one, fail and lose by one (they failed). The Electoral College is like that too, no matter how narrow the popular vote, the winner take-all Electoral votes are awarded regardless of the gap.
Babies and Bath Water
My rough estimate: Trump clearly motivated his voters to the polls. And there was a “swing” from 2020. While Biden reached more of the white, working class voters, some turned to Trump this go-round. And Harris performed well in the suburban vote, but didn’t deliver the urban vote the way Biden (or Obama) did.
We hear all sorts of “Wednesday Morning Quarterbacks” giving advice to the Democrats about what they did wrong. I have friends who are dead sure they have the answer, and angrily blame the intellectual or moral arrogance of the Democratic Party for the loss. Others look at misogyny; that like Hillary Clinton, the headwinds for choosing Kamala Harris as President were too strong. And still others want to blame Joe Biden, for not knowing he was getting too old to run for the job, soon enough.
All of those are true to some extent. And I do think, that my Democratic friends, need to do exactly what the Republican Party did after the Romney defeat in 2012. We need to do an “autopsy” of the 2024 election, and make determinations for changes Democrats need to make. But keep in mind, it really only comes down to a small sliver of voters in the large scope of things. It’s no good “throwing the baby out with the bath water”. We need numbers, we need time, we need, like the pathologist, to make dispassionate decisions about what happened. And unlike the Republicans in 2012, we need to heed the results.
“Dispassionate” is not the mood of the day. We are, right now, like the Przewalski’s Horses, ready to rip and shred, both Republicans, and our fellow Democrats. Instead, we need to face our reality: Donald Trump is President, and, if we weren’t lying before, our Democracy is in greater danger than any time in our history. Sure we need to fix what’s broke, but we better be ready to stand together for what we believe.
It might be our last stand.
