12:13pm Sunday The Dem has taken the lead in California’s 45th by just 0.01%. But with late counting favouring the Dem heavily, he should increase his lead. I think this will be my last post on this thread.
1:47pm Saturday Small vote numbers today further reduced the Rep’s lead in California’s 45th to just 0.02%, while the Rep’s lead slightly increased to 1.1% in the 13th, but Dem-favouring counties in that district are undercounted. Overall, Reps lead in called races by 218-212. In the remaining five, Dems should win Ohio’s ninth and California’s 45th, the Reps should win Iowa’s first and Alaska’s only, with California’s 13th still undecided.
2:04pm Friday November 15 Today’s counting in California’s 13th broke heavily to the Dem, with the Rep lead reduced from 2.4% to 1.0% with 84% in. In the 45th, few votes were counted today, with the Rep holding a 0.08% lead with 93% in. If Reps lose both these seats, their House margin would be 220-215.
4:53pm The Reps have hit the 218 called seats needed for a House majority. But Trump wants three House Reps to serve in his administration, and Rep Matt Gaetz has already resigned, so there’ll need to be three by-elections in Rep-held seats. In most states, by-elections require a primary at which major party candidates are selected before the by-election itself, so it takes months to elect a new member.
12:36pm Thursday Reps lead in called House seats by 217-208. But one Rep seat lead in California is close to flipping to a Dem lead, with the Rep lead falling from 4% to 0.12% and 7% still remaining to be counted. Reps are likely to win all other seats they lead in, for a 221-214 majority.
2:56pm Wednesday The Reps lead in called House races by 216-207, with 218 needed for a majority. In Californian counting today, the 41st moved to the Dems, with Reps now only ahead by 0.8% after they led by 4% after election night. But other seats have the Reps holding steady. The Reps are virtually certain to win a House majority.
4:06pm Tuesday CNN has called the Arizona Senate contest for the Dem, giving the Reps a 52-47 lead. The Reps are very likely to win the last undecided Senate seat in Pennsylvania, where they have a 0.5% lead with 98% in.
In the House, Reps have a 214-205 lead in called races and an overall 222-213 lead. However, two Californian seats with narrow Rep leads moved to Dems in counting today. If Dems win both these seats, Reps would win the House by just a 220-215 margin.
2:26pm Monday The Dem will win the Arizona Senate contest, where he leads by 50.0-47.8 with 91% in. There hasn’t been much counting for the House today as it’s Sunday US time. Reps lead in called seats by 214-203, and they maintain a 222-213 overall lead.
In my Conversation article today on Newspoll, I said that Kamala Harris should have emphasised health care more, particularly Trump’s nearly successful attempt to repeal Obamacare in his first term.
3:43pm Sunday CNN has called Arizona for Trump, so he officially wins the Electoral College by 312 to 226. In the Arizona Senate, the Dem has increased his lead to 49.7-48.2 with 86% in. In the House, Reps lead in called races by 213-202. Today, Dems gained a lead in a Calif seat that Reps had previously led in, so Reps now lead in 222 seats to 213 for Dems. There are three more seats in Calif with current Rep leads by about 3%, which could be won by Dems.
4:42pm Saturday: CNN has called the Nevada Senate contest for the Democrat. In Arizona, the Dem leads by 49.5-48.4 with 82% in. In the House, Reps lead in called seats by 212-200. While a Californian seat has flipped to a Dem lead since yesterday, an Arizonan seat has flipped to a Rep lead. Reps still lead the House by 223-212.
Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is a paid election analyst for The Conversation. His work for The Conversation can be found here, and his own website is here.
This post will be used to follow late counting in the US election. Donald Trump will win the last uncalled state in Arizona, and win 312 electoral votes to 226 for Kamala Harris. Trump leads the national popular vote by 50.7-47.7, with many more votes outstanding in Democratic strongholds like California. Before The New York Times Needle was turned off, its forecast was for Trump to win the popular vote by 1.5%.
You can read my latest on the big swings to Trump among Hispanics and young men at The Conversation. The Cook Political Report’s popular vote tracker shows the swings since 2020 by each state. Racially diverse states had the biggest swings to Trump.
In the Senate, Republicans have a 52-45 lead over Democrats (including allied independents) after gaining Ohio, Montana and West Virginia. Democrats have won or are leading in four of the five presidential swing states that held Senate elections (Pennsylvania the exception). If Republicans win the Senate by 53-47, Democrats could hope to recover it in 2026, when Republicans will be defending 21 of the 34 seats up.
Of the remaining contests, Republicans hold a 0.5% lead in Pennsylvania with 98% in, and Democrats hold a 1.3% lead in Nevada with 96% in. Arizona is the most interesting with Democrats holding a 1.7% lead with 74% in.
In the House of Representatives, Republicans lead Democrats in called races by 211 seats to 199. If Republicans win all the seats the currently lead in, they will win the House by 223-212. However, there are five seats Republicans lead by four points or less in California, where there is much late counting. So far California’s late counting has been good for Democrats.
If Democrats win the House or even get close, it would be despite a popular vote deficit in the Cook Political Report tracker of 51.6-46.9. While that gap will close on late counting, Republicans should still win by about 3%.
Irish election: November 29
Ireland uses the Hare-Clark proportional system that is used in Australia for Tasmanian and ACT elections. At this election there will be 174 members elected in 43 multi-member electorates. This election was called before it was due in March 2025.
Ireland has been governed for most of its history by one of two rival conservative parties: Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. After the 2020 election, these two parties formed a coalition government for the first time in Ireland’s history, with the Greens also included. The left-wing Sinn Féin had won the most votes in 2020 with 24.5%, the first time in almost a century that neither FG nor FF had won the most votes.
In Irish polls, SF support had surged to a peak of about 35% in May 2022, but since November 3023, SF support has slumped back to about 18%, behind both FF and FG. This election is likely to return the two conservative parties to a coalition government.
Left-wing parties to be routed at likely March German election
After the last federal German election in September 2021, a governing coalition was formed by the centre-left Social Democrats, the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats. However, this government has now collapsed, and it’s likely the next German election will be held in March 2025, rather than September.
German polls have been terrible for the governing parties for a long time, and the conservative Christian Democrats are virtually certain to win the most seats. But they are unlikely to be able to form a coalition easily, given their opposition to dealing with the far-right Alternative for Germany.
A textbook campaign that led to a landslide defeat?
God help us if she had faulted at any time
Yes, a textbook campaign and she did extremely well considering she had 106 days and she managed to turn things around and make substantial gains on where Biden would’ve led them. Had Harris not stepped up and campaigned the way she did the Republicans would very likely have had a super majority in the senate and we wouldn’t be still waiting on the House results.
Oakeshott Country, it wasn’t text book, it was flawed. She did a very very good job implementing a very very flawed campaign strategy. The strategy they took in was, a few weeks of joy and introduction, switched to womens rights above all other matters, switched to he’s a nazi and everyone who votes for him are racist/sexist.
That was a flawed strategy.
They started well, but just never pivoted properly to economy, economy, economy, and separation from Biden. I think mainly because they didnt know what the right economic strategy was.
Honestly, I don’t think the Democrats need to do anything different to come back. The post-COVID spring-back combined with the large stimulus, which was a global thing and also partly from Trump in the US, and the war in Ukraine is what caused the inflation spike. It is now under control but the public votes based on vibes not fact. Things are more expensive than they were under Trump, people rightly or wrongly blame Biden and the Democrats for that
And in the same vein, the global and US economy as its sitting now is probably going to gift Trump with a free run. It would’ve gifted whoever got power a free run. If he just sits on his hands and does nothing with the economy he’ll be able to take credit for it. Unfortunately his stated plan involves large tariffs on foreign goods, mass deportations that will supress the supply of labour and significant tax cuts for higher incomes. All of which will fuel inflation, none of which help the people who voted for him due to their legitimate angst about grocery prices
Maybe he doesn’t do what he said he’ll do. Maybe he doesn’t do it fast enough for people to notice. Maybe the economy is trending strongly enough in a positive direction to counter it. Who knows. But one thing I do know, politically Trump’s agenda does not belong on Regan’s side of the Iron Curtain
The Republicans will set about institutionalising poverty supported by the use of force and the repression of opposition. They are going to be ruled by an absolute moron and his cretinous flunkies. The less we have to do with them the better.
Both the UK and the US have fallen for reactionary projects. This will end badly. Very badly.
Things are more expensive than they were under Trump, people rightly or wrongly blame Biden and the Democrats for that
I get this, but don’t people also realise that prices always go up? Also, there are exogenous causes for price rises, like Bird Flu which the chickens laying the eggs have succumbed to, and the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, that contribute to this as you say.
I never hear people complaining when the value of their house goes up though. Funny that.
US politics has routine fundamental party system shifts and we are probably in the middle of one, which some are calling the Seventh Party System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh_Party_System
Having finally lost the south in the sixth system, the Democrats are now in the process of losing the working class and minorities. They are being imagined as an elitist party representing the West Coast and North East.
‘Vice President Kamala Harris grabbed headlines for her campaign’s fluent use of TikTok to reach millions of potential voters on social media. But it didn’t translate to victory at the polls.
Harris inherited the Democratic nomination just 107 days before the general election, but her campaign seemingly struck gold early on with a few weeks of viral fame on TikTok, the short-form video app that could be banned in the United States as soon as January. Videos referencing Harris’s now-famous coconut speech and supercuts of the vice president set to Charli XCX songs flooded the zone, as an online army of professional and amateur creators made content promoting her.
But Harris’s early hype and continued success on TikTok didn’t tip the scales on Election Day, and strategists on both sides of the aisle want to know why.
While Harris enjoyed a media cycle about her savvy TikTok presence, in reality the Trump campaign wasn’t far behind. Harris racked up more than 3.4 billion views on TikTok across the Harris, Walz and campaign accounts since the vice president launched her personal account in February, according to a Washington Post analysis of TikTok view count data. The Trump campaign cracked 3.2 billion views since the president-elect started his personal account in June.
What feels big on the internet is often smaller in reality, said Eli Pariser, author of “The Filter Bubble,” which coined the term in 2011 to describe the way personalized algorithms warp our perceptions. Our media ecosystem is now so fragmented, it’s difficult to place where we are inside of it, he said.’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/11/08/harris-tiktok-election-loss-trump/
I wrote a piece over a decade ago that stated that the Democrats needed to adopt the Wellstone strategy and in a kind of a way in this campaign they did with the selection of Wellstone Foundation alumni Governor Tim Walz. That he consistently polled more favourably than Kamala Harris tells me that people bought what HE was selling more than what SHE was. Also, Minnesota is still Blue when all the other Mid Western States aren’t. I think that is more down to the policies than the politician from there.
Democratic voters were not willing to support a black woman and preferred to stay home than to vote. Trump made gains among Latinos – especially men – and maybe lost some traditional Republican voters. But these voters were not prepared to vote for Harris.
Reactionaries have won. Racism. Sexism. Christianity. Economic and environmental voodoo.
What a fuck up. The social estate in the US will be incinerated. Desperation for millions more ordinary people awaits.
The convention was a bit of a turning point for the campaign, which represented their pivot to the ‘centre’ and dissipated the excitement that came from Harris being ‘Not Biden’. Harris’s instincts up to then had been very good. Hopefully now the strategy of courting Republicans while alienating core parts of the base can be thrown in the bin.
The Great Depression of the 1930s was precipitated by a tariff war. Retaliatory trade policies caused prices to rise and production to fall. Declining production caused employment and investment to crash. Because monetary systems relied on gold fixing, there was no monetary or fiscal flexibility and economic contraction became entrenched, resulting in protracted deflation and severe, intractable unemployment.
It’s possible that something similar could occur again. The last serious economic crisis in capitalism arose within the banking system following massive speculation in land. It was a financial crisis. It was relatively short and easily fixed.
If an economic contraction arises within the productive sectors rather than the banking system then it will likely be a lot more difficult. Tariffs are taxes on products. They repress demand. If all economies start to repress demand for each others products at the same time there will be contractions in production and increases in unemployment. It will not be easy to reverse that.
The US benefits from imports. Tariffs will negate those benefits. Economies that export to the US will be hurt but the biggest loser will be the US itself. Real wages will fall. Demand will then also fall unless wage repression can be arrested by, say, increased public spending. But Trump and the Republicans will gut public spending. Reactionary ideologues will be in charge. Anything could happen. Really, everything that could go wrong probably will go wrong. There are very good reasons why modern economies include a tax system that directly focuses on incomes. Trump wants to change that. There will be chaos if he succeeds.
I agree the Democrats need to focus on working class people, but Harris made the right decision in campaigning from the centre.
There was no discernable dissipation of support for her after the DNC, quite the opposite actually.
Reactionary politics is well organised here too, just as was the case a century ago. Frightening really.
Two universal truths of politics. Firstly the biggest motivator for voters is the state of their transaction account when they cast their ballot. Secondly economies are slow moving, complicated machines so voters are unlikely to feel the economic impacts of one term of government. The Democrats just happened to be in power this time during one of those swings. Like Carter and Bush Sr in decades prior
If we want to draw comparisons, I think these last three elections in the US were basically this generation’s equivalent of Nixon -> Carter -> Reagan. Except that Trump was figured out earlier, was less accepting of defeat and somehow ended up back on the Republican ticket
C@tmomma says:
Saturday, November 9, 2024 at 9:43 am
…..don’t people also realise that prices always go up?
Well…unless there is a pronounced economic contraction, when unemployment soars and prices decline. Deflation encourages hoarding…and prices fall further. Deflation can be very persistent. Trump’s plan is deflationary.
“I wrote a piece over a decade ago that stated that the Democrats needed to adopt the Wellstone strategy and in a kind of a way in this campaign they did with the selection of Wellstone Foundation alumni Governor Tim Walz. ”
@C@tmomma
I read Kamala Harris advisers wanted her to select Joshua Shapiro. Probably largely due Pennsylvania being a swing state. Harris in the interviews felt more of a bond and connection with Tim Walz and decided to stick with her gut instinct selecting Walz.
It’s probably good thing she chose him. Both John Kerry and John McCain regretted selecting running mates on the advice of there advisers then sticking to their gut instincts. I doubt it would have changed the result for both those elections though.
It’s taken a couple of days for me to get over hangover from the U.S. election result. I saw Kamala Harris concession speech live on TV. And it really sunk in, seeing the distraught look on the faces of some of her supporters was hard to watch.
Democrats to win the working class back have to do more then a centrist Democrat canidate promising affordable private healthcare and a tax break for small business. Kamala Harris campaign spent a billion on the campaign- alot of that money would have come from corporate donors. Which is part of the problem for the Democrats it limits what they can do when up to neck with corporate donations.
Labor strategy suggesting Peter Dutton is a threat concerns me. Because that was the Democrats strategy against Trump which failed to pay off. The only difference Trump has a record in office. Which was a factor in the campaign was voters remembered when the economy was travelling good under Trump before covid.
OC
I don’t see how Harris could balance differentiating herself from and administration she was part of. Rock and hard place.
The fault is that there wasn’t good enough defence of the administration and highlighting the headwinds and the successes. Biden wasn’t up to it. From there they needed a competitive primary. That didn’t happen. The rest followed.
I do harp on, but again, culturally, Trump and his like appeals to so many Americans. The reasons for this go back far beyond Biden’s term.
PN
One of Biden’s good decisions was appointing Lina Khan, and unsurprisingly some big Dem donors wanted her gone, illustrating the predicament you alluded to
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/two-billionaire-harris-donors-hope-she-will-fire-ftc-chair-lina-khan-2024-07-26/
“Or, my thoughts at the time, that Harris should have used the excuse that she needed to focus on her job as VP and not accept the late nomination – letting someone run who was not associated with Biden’s term. Also not ideal.”
@Team Katich
To do that you would have to convinced Kamala Harris not to run. There definitely would have been accusations of racism and sexism. Harris selected as running mate and then elected as vice president only then told she can’t step up and do what she was elected to do.
There wasn’t enough time for a democratic primary. There’s a view Harris didn’t get enough time as it,
let alone running a fast track primary and selecting a candidate. And Harris stepping in as the canidate still looked more smooth and credible as renewal. Then chopping and changing of Prime Ministers in Australia and the UK.
MI, I think it would have been possible due the exceptional circumstances. They would have needed to avoid the perception of sexism – but I agree it had those risks. Which is why I say a contested primary (during the primaries – with or without Biden) was the better option. Harris might have stayed out willingly. Or lost. Or had the opportunity to create a proper platform.
TK
Differentiating from the previous administration requires either a different candidate or a fine balancing act but saying “there is nothing I would change” about an unpopular administration is not the way to do it.
This may explain why there have only been two elected transitions from president to vice president since the 18th C and both followed very popular presidents: Martin Van Buren after Andrew Jackson and George H W Bush after Reagan. Maybe she was a doomed candidate due to Joe losing the skill of introspection and no one having the guts to tap his shoulder.
Oh, I’d change a lot of things. Only One being; A recognition that in todays US (as in decades past) a Dem Potus and a Dem Potus candidate need to be capable of selling a message. Clinton and Obama were both excellent communicators and charismatic and it got them elected and out of jams and re-elected. Biden only barely defeated a terribly unpopular incumbent Trump. He got lucky.
Actual policy changes? Hmmmm. Maybe.
They certainly need to be more relatable. They chose Walz for that reason. But did he cut through? There are plenty of capable.and relatable Dems out there. A couple just got voted out of the senate.
Differentiating from the previous administration requires either a different candidate or a fine balancing act but saying “there is nothing I would change” about an unpopular administration is not the way to do it.
@Oakeshott Country
I’m not comparing Biden’s unpopularity with George W Bush. But John McCain struggled with this big time when following from Bush. Factors with voters getting impatient with a growing unpopular Iraq war and the Global Financial Crisis. McCain and Sarah Palin kept referring to him as a ‘maverick’, but the Obama campaign kept linking McCain to Bush with effective ads like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdXaE-mMXTg
If people are wanting to dissect why the Dems have done so badly, there’s lots of wise commentary on this podcast.
https://www.hacksontap.com/episodes/election-post-mortem
The broad conclusion? Wokeness/DEI is the Dems’ biggest problem. The majority of the electorate that went for Trump either can’t stand this stuff or are at least a little put off by it. The issue of Harris having agreed to gender reassignment surgery for a grand total of two inmates became emblematic of the problem, and was brilliantly targeted by Trump’s campaign, running masses of ads about it during football games.
Obviously we’d need to see survey data to get a full picture of the electorate’s view on that particular issue, but I would suspect that significantly less than 10 per cent of the electorate would agree that this was essential, life-saving surgery for the prisoners, and the rest would see it as an expensive luxury or, if they were socially conservative, a terrible outrage. And all of them would also have seen it as an exemplar of what the Californian lefty democrats truly care the most about. And they saw Harris – married to a tech millionaire and living in Bel Air and being as woke as woke until she became the V-P candidate and realised that it wouldn’t do – as an exemplar of Californian lefty democrats.
Trump’s claim that the US economy was in a terrible state was of course total BS. But the underlying message of Trump’s campaign was “Trump cares about the state of your wallet/bank account, as you can remember from how good things were when he was President last time. But Harris, who came into presidential politics as a woke/DEI candidate and, no matter how much she protests that she isn’t one now, still is one at heart, cares most about transgender and affirmative action and defund the police and all of that terrible nonsense.”
So we are talking here about a branding problem for the Democrats, and the need to find candidates who break the mould. Walz was an attempt to do this, but he wasn’t that effective (and, looking at his record, he’s more down the DEI/woke end of the party’s spectrum than not). They need to look beyond the coastal strips and the mid-west. A southerner would be good. Better still if they were a genuinely devout Christian. Even better if they were a Latino. Someone who is completely unassociated in the public’s mind with the woke style of liberalism. Even an old-fashioned socialist like Bernie Sanders (but hopefully a younger version) would be better than more wokeness: but of course I would prefer a moderate.
It will be difficult for the Dems to go this way. Nancy Pelosi is having herself on completely if she believes that the Dems might have run with another candidate if Biden had decided to pull out earlier or if he had not endorsed Harris. Even if Biden had pulled out in October 2023 and there had been a full primary process, a lot of pressure would have been put on other potential candidates to clear the field for Harris. There would have been powerful speeches by (mainly) white people arguing that denying the candidacy to an Indo-Jamaican woman who grew up in Canada and now lives in Bel Air would smash the dreams of little African-American girls growing up in the ghetto that one day they too might become President.
The Dems need to find a way of getting rid of some of this sort of baggage. Their best hope is to start finding some candidates who epitomise something other than DEI/wokeness. I reckon they can at least manage to do that for 2026 and 2028. If so, the unpleasant task of trying to deal with it at the root and branch level can wait a while.
Credit to Cenk/Marianne/Dean for trying to force a primary a year prior
Performative ‘wokeness’ deployed in lieu of meaningful policy has hurt the Dems – remember senior Dems kneeling in Kente cloth after George Floyd then doing nothing about police reform, or referring to Bernie supporters as sexist. And those rotating villains in the senate who derailed the most popular elements of Biden’s platform should have been whipped rather than praised (or did Biden secretly never want those things)
meher baba,
So Tech Billionaires such as MElon Musk and Peter Thiel, who are joined at the hip to Donald Trump, just not married to him, are fine with you? That doesn’t make him an East Coast Elitist? Or is it okay because he’s shed that skin like a snake? Or because Donald Trump can do what others can’t?
And, like, it’s fine for Donald Trump to paint himself as a man of the People, but live in a gilded penthouse in New York and a faux castle in Florida?
God, the excuses made for that man, that he can get away with rank hypocrisy but don’t dare have a Democratic candidate for President reside in Bel Air!
I didn’t know that the Trump Kool Aid was so strong that he would have willing apologists in Australia as well as America.
I do agree that the Democrats need another Bill Clinton, but one who can keep it in his pants this time. Or a charismatic former soldier who can appeal to Black and Hispanic Men such as Governor Wes Moore of Maryland.
Moo deng rules…
A hippo in Thailand successfully predicted Donald Trump’s US presidential election victory.
The baby pygmy hippo Moo Deng from the country’s Khao Kheow Open Zoo selected a melon with the president-elect’s name over one with Kamala Harris’ name on with the light-hearted take on the poll going viral across the globe.
The animal has now ‘congratulated’ Trump on his election success as he made a ‘speech’ at the zoo.
A post on the zoo’s social media pages read: “I’ve waited for the final say of the American people and now am quite certain of the result. I, hereby, give up my chance that the people gave me and congratulate Mr. Donald Trump for his presidency, with love, Moo Deng.”Perth Now today.
meher baba says:
Saturday, November 9, 2024 at 12:41 pm
If people are wanting to dissect why the Dems have done so badly, there’s lots of wise commentary on this podcast.
We live in times when reactionaries are well-organised, well-financed and well-supported. This is very dangerous for economic welfare, peace, social harmony, personal freedom and democratic government. None of these can be taken for granted and all are menaced by the Reactionaries. Reactionary projects in Europe and the Americas have been notably successful.
I think the post-war enthusiasm for social democratic values and programs is in deep decline. The phase from the achievements of FDR in the 1930s concluding with the election of Thatcher and Reagan looks increasingly to be an historical aberration.
The Reactionaries are back in the drivers’ seat. The last time they were so ascendant was in the latter years of the 19th century and early 20th centuries. Reactionary programs and politics led to massive economic catastrophe, monumental revolutions and global wars. We are re-visiting such times. The politics of revenge, violence, hatred, me-first and nationalist/nativist triumph is winning.
Misery and exploitation are back in fashion.
China is not exempt from this. Repression at home and conquest abroad are the twin pillars of power for Xi. This example is not lost on Putin or Trump.
Fatalism is one kind of refuge, I suppose. Think of Brecht, Kafka, Sartre and Camus. Think of Steinbeck. Think of Guernica. We are descending into a new reactionary chaos. The long peace in Europe has already been broken. Pity Ukraine, the Baltics and possibly also Poland.
Of course, the need for international co-operation on the environment has never been more pressing. And the chances for it never less promising. The Reactionaries will fuck us all….every last one of us.
c@t: “meher baba,
So Tech Billionaires such as MElon Musk and Peter Thiel, who are joined at the hip to Donald Trump, just not married to him, are fine with you? That doesn’t make him an East Coast Elitist? Or is it okay because he’s shed that skin like a snake? Or because Donald Trump can do what others can’t?”
——————————————————————————-
Of course Trump – as well as Musk, Thiel (who is married to another man, but that’s by the by), etc. – are part of a rich elite. But Trump gets a free pass from the sorts of voters who elected him to office because they find him relatable in a way that they don’t find the lefties from the Democrat Party. As I have posted before, Trump behaves the way that blue collar blokes believe they would behave if they were rich: playing golf all day, dating models and porn stars, getting revenge on their enemies, etc.
Trump is sui generis: whatever else he might be, he’s a brilliant salesman. I don’t think there’ll be another such at the top level of US politics for a while. But Trump has exploited weaknesses in the Dem Party that have been emerging for many years now. And those weaknesses were in fact the main reason for Harris’s loss. I am pretty sure that De Santis, Haley and a range of other potential Republican candidates (but perhaps not Ramaswamy) would have done just as well if not better than Trump, albeit with perhaps a slightly different coalition of voters (eg, Haley would have attracted more women voters and more city voters, but fewer of the “bros”).
If you look at where the big swings happened this election, they were particularly in blue collar areas which used to be heavily Democrat. These are the people that the Dems need to win back. And they don’t seem to like people like Harris. I thought that they would perhaps reluctantly pick her over Trump because he is such a lunatic. It looks to me as if the Dems have a significant cultural problem that they need to address.
I’m optimistic, I think they can do it. The first thing they have to do is to start running genuinely open primaries and then pick the winners, and stop trying to clear the field for the DEI candidates. Or even for the moderates (risky, but that strategy hasn’t worked all that well either).
The Democratic Party – like the SPD in Germany, UK Labour, Labor here – and centre left parties everywhere have been trying to defend and hopefully extend the gains made by social democracy from the 1930s and 40s onwards. This has given these parties a ‘defensive/conservative’ cast. They have been trying to defend the status quo, at least up to a point. Their failure has been to find ways to re-invent social democracy in the context of two fundamental changes in the landscape.
First, the global distribution of capital has been completely reinvented. The main locus of industrial production within capitalism (and everything that goes with it – jobs, technological innovation, skills, good wages) has been extensively re-arranged. Second, the digital communications/IT revolution has enabled the creation of very lucrative new meta-monopolies and the complete re-organisation of the dissemination of news/propaganda.
It’s very difficult to see how/where parties of the centre-left go from here. The Reactionaries own all the key resources. They own or have on permanent hire the most important political operations. They control the information diets. They are in the process of organising the State to protect their assets and their power.
I think we the people are in grave trouble.
The US federal department of education was created in 1867. The Reactionaries have promised to abolish it. Now that is a very pronounced reactionary project. Pre-civil war. FMD.
https://www.ed.gov/about/ed-overview/federal-role-in-education
Education has a distinctly egalitarian quality to it. Absolutely no wonder at all that the fascists want to annul it.
Obviously Harris didn’t have a flawless campaign. Trump certainly didn’t. Were Harris’ flaws the difference? No.
Wokeness? Sheesh. It isn’t wokeness. Woke is essentially just liberalism and pluralism poorly sold. Everyone has minority preferences of some sort or another. Being woke to those is basically just a freedom of expression issue.
Wgaf if two men get married. Or if pot use is legalised.
Only when there is positive discrimination or government funding exclusive to a group to help them overcome prejudice does it need justification. Of which there is often plenty justification and should be a relative easy sell. Female representation in courts, politics, policing, boardrooms for example. But it needs to be sold. Back to my earlier argument
I will say Kamala Harris campaign specifically targeting women didn’t work. There were more white women that voted for Trump then Harris. Woman candidates probably can attract more women, but I wouldn’t target campaigns attracting voters on women issues as your main selling point (abortion). I know Julia Gillard in the dying days of her Prime Minstership delivered a speech about abortion and men with ‘blue ties’.
It won’t work, it doesn’t work, and it never will work. It’s far better for future women candidates to focus on bread butter issues just like the men. Any women who wants to see a woman in the oval office will come with their candidacy. I also think the view US voters don’t want a woman in the oval office may forgetting two things. 1) Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million in 2016. 2) Trump election in 2016 was largely a fluke by narrowly winning a lot of battleground states. Dropping one of those states would have handed the presidency to Clinton. If the state department didn’t find Clinton emails which turned out to be nothing on Anthony Weiner laptop late in the campaign. Trump wouldn’t have become president. Even then Clinton’s campaign was largely a dud the campaign slogan “Stronger together” was barely featured in her campaign. Yet she still won the popular vote by 3 million.
How long before Trump stuffs Musk and RFK Jr in the wood chipper? (Wood chipper analogy courtesy of The Mooch).
I hate to say it but…..liberal state woman of colour seeking the Presidency?…….in America?……..I don’t think so. In combination with a sitting President who hinted at being transitional and then let his ego get the better of him. Throw in an opponent that will say absolutely anything to win and an ill-informed electorate and bingo!
How Middle America turned the tide
Trump won a thumping victory by stealing America’s working class from under the noses of the Democrats, the supposed party of the worker. The Democrats are now the party of educated urban elites with the luxury of prioritising identity politics.
The oz now.
Says it all really!
I agree. She did extremely well considering what she was facing. And with regards to ‘does better on the economy’, Biden was trailing Trump by something like 18 points. Harris closed that gap to 3 or 4 points in the most recent polling I saw.
Still, people wanted to send a message to Joe Biden and his administration, which by extension includes Harris, and they voted for Trump. I certainly hope that Democrats’ takeaway message from this election is to never run a woman at the top of the ticket, because that would be a mistake in my opinion.
IMO RFKJ will get shafted before Elon does.
Team Katich: “Wgaf if two men get married. Or if pot use is legalised.”
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Well Trump clearly doesn’t, because he didn’t run on those issues. (Some right-wing Republicans care about SSM, and might well try to take the issue on through Congress and the Senate. I would expect Trump to resist this, because I don’t think the majority of Americans would support a ban.)
The woke issues that really hurt the Democrats were:
1. Soft on the border (eg, sanctuary cities, etc.)
2. Soft on crime (including the lingering shadow of “defund the police”).
3. Soft on street sleepers (aka the homeless), with right-wing blogs, webcasts and podcasts going on and on about homeless people shitting in the streets of San Francisco.
4. Taking transgender rights much further than people are comfortable with (eg, biological men in female sport, “women” with penises using female toilets and changerooms, gender reassignment surgery for prisoners, etc.)
5. DEI stuff around jobs, education and political candidacy (note that Harris made comparatively little of her racial background during the campaign.)
The Israel-Palestine stuff didn’t help the Dems too much either, allowing the Republicans to implement a pincer movement in which Biden and Harris found themselves hated by both the left and the right, and by both Jews and Muslims.
The root cause of the current situation is that, while most ordinary American voters will tolerate the right-wing of the Republican Party, they won’t tolerate the woke left wing of the Democrats. They might tolerate a more old-fashioned leftist like Sanders, but the party machine makes sure that this sort of person would never get to be a Presidential candidate. That’s probably wise in the sense that a Sanders type could probably never win a Presidential election (George McGovern, the most left-wing Democrat candidate in the party’s history, won just Massachusetts out of the fifty states in 1972).
But, if they aren’t going to go with a socialist, then they need to find someone more moderate but with a similar appeal to working class voters.
Question to PB Bloggers.
Do you really think Trump is going away after current term is over?
Bellwether @ #88 Saturday, November 9th, 2024 – 2:38 pm
Yup. Sad, but you don’t need to look any deeper than this to explain everything.
The US voting system has delivered 74 million or so voters the game, set and match to Trump and the Republicans.
It is a pity the rest of the world (as some European politician noted) has to have its future partly determined by someone in Wisconsin representing somewhere near just a third of all those entitled to vote. However them’s the US rules and so be it.
It will be with morbid fascination watching happens now but frankly I am all US’d out. Or put bluntly, I hope the US gets what is voted for.
The absence of a reliable social/economic safety net in the US really does condemn millions to lives of very great hardship. This is all about to become a lot worse for these people and for many others as well. The Reactionaries will further weaken whatever remains of the social estate in the US. This will advantage them in future elections.
Politically, the destruction of the social estate has perverse effects. Real wages and year-round income security determine just how families can live from day to day. Real wages have taken a prolonged covid-related hit, driven by supply-side production changes and price rises. This has been a problem in the US. It’s a problem here too. The political reaction among working people has been to support candidates that promise to create jobs – any jobs – since the availability of work provides at least some chance to generate family income. Trump has promised to bring back the jobs lost over the last 40-odd years. This cannot be done, but in the absence of a safety net or other jobs-positive policies what else is there? Workers voted for jobs and therefore to improve real wages. Makes sense. As well, industrial incomes at the lowest levels actually did gain during Trump’s first term…though not by as much as during Biden’s term.
The social-democratic response to high inflation would be to find ways to prop up real wages during the transition from rapid price rises to price stability and to create room for wages to rise while also supporting jobs-positive policies. To echo Neville Wran: elections are about three things – Jobs, jobs and jobs.
There are many things governments can do with respect to real wages. Tax abatement is one. Tax relief on workers’ incomes would work. Direct transfer payments are another. Renewed investment in education/re-training and fee-cutting would also be relevant. Broad-based wage increases would be directly helpful.
Labor have done some of these things, but they have been piecemeal. In the US very little has been done or was proposed by Harris. I reckon it’s too late for Labor to do much now. They will be vulnerable to attacks that highlight the harm done to real wages in the last three years.
Labor better get their thinking caps on.
mb
Some of your points point to the potency of Republican messaging rather than Dem weakness;
1. Soft on the border (eg, sanctuary cities, etc.)
– they essentially had a right wing border bill
2. Soft on crime (including the lingering shadow of “defund the police”).
– defunding never actually happened, in fact the opposite might have happened. Plus as I understand violent crime has been on the decline
Coming back to my point that nothing matters, you can just say anything now, and this will become easier if the electorate becomes increasingly uneducated
Real wages. That’s the issue at all times.
“Question to PB Bloggers.
Do you really think Trump is going away after current term is over?”
@Think about it
There is no realistic option for him to repeal the 22nd amendment that limits a president to two terms. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he seeked to repeal this when his second terms comes closer to a end. Just like Ronald Reagan did because Trump is crazy enough to do it. He views the presidency as his plaything and his sense of entitlement.
https://www.vox.com/politics/383616/trump-third-term-constitution-22nd-amendment
Trump told Americans ‘get out and vote this one time, you’ll never have to do it anymore’. Should people take him at his word?