Scott Gurvey's Public Offerings

It was about 3:00am the day after the election in 2016 when I came to the conclusion that Donald Trump would win, beating Hillary Clinton. This time, I knew it at midnight.

Steve Kornacki of NBC, my favorite election night data analyst, was going through the state of Pennsylvania county by county. Pennsylvania was the biggest of the “swing” states which had been a toss-up in the polls before election day. In each county, the story was the same. Trump was performing as well or better than he had in 2020, while Vice President Kamala Harris was running behind Trump and significantly short of her performance in 2020 as the second part of the Biden-Harris ticket. She could not win.

I’ve waited almost two weeks to write this. There are a few reasons. I first wanted more of the voting data to be reported. Some of the states, most notably California, take several days to report results. While I was sure of Trump’s victory in the Electoral College, the popular vote results were not settled. Nor was the final party balance in the House of Representatives.

But there was something else. I never hid my choice between the two options I faced. And I was profoundly disappointed that my fellow Americans failed to agree with me.

A lying, serial cheating, misogynistic, failed businessman, convicted on thirty-four felony counts, with a vicious streak a mile wide, a man fixated on the past and looking for “retribution” for perceived grievances was preferred over an educated, intelligent, loyal, experienced, professional woman, who was forward looking and promised to be a leader for all Americans. To me, it still doesn’t make sense. It took a while before I was ready to write again.

Supporters of Harris and Democratic pundits have spent the last two weeks pointing fingers and complaining about the outcome. The words I hear most often are, “This is not us” and “This is not normal”.

Sorry.

This is us. This is the new normal.

Trump’s victory was narrow but definitive. Trump won all seven of my “too close to call swing states”. And unlike 2016, Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. The Trump-Republican party also retained control of the House of Representatives and took control of the Senate. With the overwhelming conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Trump will be firmly in control of the government when he takes the oath of office on January 20th.

The latest totals can be found here, reported by the Associated Press. As I write, Harris has 73.7 million votes, compared to Biden-Harris’s 81.3 million in 2020. Trump has 76.6 million votes, compared to 74.2 million in 2020. Harris has 226 votes in the Electoral College compared to 306 for Biden-Harris in 2020. Trump has 312 Electoral College votes compared to 232 in 2020. The difference is less than three million votes, about two percent.

The exit polls tell the story. They make interesting reading. Harris lost ground in major voter segments compared to the Biden-Harris ticket four years ago. While she won more than 50% of the vote among latinos, young voters, and women, her share in each category was down. Trump gained ground among conservative voters, white evangelicas, and whites without a college degree. Whites without a college degree voted for Trump 2 to 1.

Voters did not like either candiate. Fifty-two percent of voters said they have an unfavorable opinion of Harris. Fifty-three percent of voters said they have an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Yet voters who didn’t like Trump still voted for him. Their dislike for the candidate was outweighed by their desire for change.

Most of our elections are calls for change. Three-quarters of the voters said they were dissatisfied or angry about the way things are going in the country today. Two thirds of them voted for Trump. Harris tried in the final weeks to put some distance between herself and President Joe Biden, saying her administration would not be a second Biden administration. But as Biden’s vice president, she was inextricably tied to the administration’s policy. The voters could not see much of a difference.

As expected, sixty-nine percent of voters rated the economy as bad. Seventy-five percent said inflation was a severe or moderate hardship. Voters saying the economy was the most important issue (32%) they considered when making their selection chose Trump 80% of the time. Ironically it might have been the Biden administration’s legislation designed to cushion the impact of the Covid-induced recession that caused the inflation which soured voters. What voters wanted most is lower food prices. Good luck with that.

Those voters citing immigration as the most important issue (11%) picked Trump 90% of the time. Harris was the choice for voters saying abortion was the most important issue item (14%) receiving 74% and also when the top issue was the state of democracy (34%) with 80% of the vote.

There was also a considerable amount of ticket splitting. Democrats won House and Senate seats in states where Trump won the presidential vote. Ballot issues providing guarantees for woman’s reproductive rights succeeded in eight of eleven cases (two in Nebraska). Six of the states voted for Trump. Democrats expected the abortion issue to have a much greater effect on the vote for president than it did.

My takeaways…. Although the Republicans are proclaiming a “landslide” and a “mandate”, this election was neither. A margin of two percent of the popular vote means we remain a very divided country. Trump is already prattling away about a victory the likes of which we haven’t seen in hundreds of years. The last mandate I saw was Ronald Reagan’s second term victory over Walter Mondale in 1984. Mondale won only his home state of Minnesota and Washington D.C. Reagan won 525 Electoral College votes. That’s a mandate.

The Democrats were thought to be dead for a generation in 1984. Then came Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, defeating Repubican incumbant George W. Bush in 1992. Don’t count the Democrats out. But they will have to change their game plan. This election showed they could not attract the working class. Democrats will have to rethink their message and their goals.

In the near term Democrats have two months to lock in as many programs as possible and ratify as many federal judges as possible. I don’t know if Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has it in him. There are some calls for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down. That is a terrible idea. The people pushing it are thinking of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died at the age of eighty-seven. Ginsburg was frail and suffering from cancer. Republican Mitch McConnell was majority leader, and he blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee. Sotomayor is only 70 years old and in decent health. I have no confidence in Schumer’s ability for work a new Supreme Court nominee through in a few weeks. Schumer isn’t half the tactician McConnell was. Leave Sotomayer alone to write the great dissents calling out the Court’s pro-Trump majority for what they are.

As for Trump, his second coming promises to be everything he promised and more. I warned you back in October. I fear for the result. Trump promised change. In the two weeks since the election he has made it clear he will take a meat clever to the government and the social institutions which have served this nation for nearly two hundred fifty years.

Fasten your seat belt. It is going to be a bumpy flight.

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