Interesting Times: America Re-Elects Trump

The election of 2024 has come and gone. Polls were tight right up to election day, nearly all of them within the margin of error. Still, it came as a surprise when Kamala Harris won 7 million votes less than Joe Biden in 2020. Donald Trump, meanwhile, picked up 2.2 million more votes than he had in 2020. Unlike 2016 when Trump won the Electoral College but not the popular vote, Trump did win the popular vote in 2024, by 2.6 million, though it was still a hair below 50%. The Republican Party flipped the US Senate and maintained its majority in the House of Representatives, though barely.

As expected for the losing party, the Democrats have a lot of soul searching to do. The different factions of the coalition that together comprise the Democratic Party are, understandably, blaming each other. There is much written on the matter, and many more post-election analyses are still to come, but so far I think Fareed Zakaria does a nice job of identifying three main mistakes by the Democrats, each of which he had warned about before the election: 1) immigration, 2) identity politics, and 3) the prosecutions against Trump.

Immigration has been the bane of Democrats for a long time now. It is a philosophical or ideological stance that, unfortunately, now puts Democrats in the minority. America has a strong history of immigration and in assimilating immigrants, but every wave of mass immigration in the past was soon followed by a backlash. It's clear that we are in that phase now, and the Democratic Party should recognize that and perhaps consider de-prioritizing opposition to immigration reform – at least for a time.  That's not to say that they shouldn't be ready to oppose unreasonable and wide-ranging mass deportations should that become the policy of the Trump Administration. 

Identity politics has evolved to become one of the party's major focuses. The Democratic Party has championed civil rights for decades, and it seeks to extend civil rights to other marginalized groups like transgenders, a very laudable goal. Unfortunately, however, identity politics has morphed into something illiberal, according to Zakaria. Women and girls sports have been negatively impacted by the participation of transgendered females as seen recently in Olympic boxing. Opposition to the participation of transgenders in women sports is labeled as transphobic. Opposition to immigration is labeled as racist. While the Harris Campaign eschewed these issues, they have been a part of the culture of Democrats for more than a decade. Smug condescension of those who disagree with these stances, including or maybe especially among Democrats, and the imposition of campus speech codes (for example, the use of unorthodox pronouns), push voters away.

I would add that following the horrific October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel in 2023, a sizeable and vocal faction of Democrats automatically took up the 'Free Palestine' cause and accused Israel of being a settler-colonial state bent on genocide. This is a blinding ideological narrative divorced from reality. The Biden Administration's craven backpedaling so as not to alienate this blind ideological faction before the election after strongly and rightfully backing Israel on October 8, I believe, pushed away even more voters.

Zakaria's last point on the prosecutions against Trump is well taken but with a caveat. Zakaria – and I – believe that New York's prosecution of Trump for paying hush money to a porn star was the wrong case to go forward. Voters had already shown little interest in sex scandals dating back to Clinton. It was Georgia's case for trying to overturn that state's 2020 election, and/or the federal government's case for leading an insurrection on January 6, 2021, and trying to overturn the federal election, that should have gone forward, not New York's hush money trial. After NY's prosecution, Democrats called Trump a "convicted felon" at every opportunity. It's technically correct, of course, but its small potatoes compared to the Georgia and federal government cases. It gave credence to the view that the NY prosecution was a partisan political persecution.

My caveat is this: what has taken Georgia and the federal government so long? It's been almost four years. More than 1,200 defendants were arrested since January 6. But not Trump, the instigator ("It'll be wild!")-in-chief. Why not? The answer is obvious to me: the wheels of justice turn slower than slow for billionaires. That fact was surprisingly lost on the Democrats. I never saw it mentioned or written about. What happened to the party of the working class? There didn't seem to be much concern about the snail's pace of justice outside of the hush money case. There was a lot of talk about the threat to democracy that Trump embodied, but action is greater than words.

Trump won close to 50% of the vote, to Harris' 48.3%. That's still pretty tight – the tightest race, in fact, since the 2000 Bush v Gore election that was settled only after the Supreme Court weighed in – and the country remains divided. Not only is it divided between parties, it is now divided within the two parties: Trump cult-of-personality Republicans vs Traditional Republicans (themselves sometimes split between social and fiscal conservatives), and Economic-centric vs Social Engineering Democrats.

Interesting times.