Historians will be scratching their heads over the 2024 presidential election for decades to come. How a clownish buffoon who uses too much bronzer and too few brains could have won any election at all with 34 felony convictions goes beyond the pale.
I have my own idea why this happened, but first I did “my own research” as independent voters are wont to proclaim. What do “the experts” say?
Former Obama advisor David Axelrod lays the blame at the feet of priggish over-educated Democrats: “[Democrats have] become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party. You can’t approach working people like missionaries and say, ‘We’re here to help you become more like us.’ There’s a kind of unspoken disdain, unintended disdain in that.”
NY Times journalist Frank Bruni says people weren’t really paying attention to Bronzer Boy’s “florid ugliness,” especially toward the end. We who paid attention were outraged, “but we’re arrogant: We assume our experience is everyone’s and our knowledge ambient.”
I was guilty of this more often than not. As a matter of fact, I was known to say anyone could beat Trump. My refrigerator could beat Trump.
The New York Times (which replaced WaPo on my digital subscription list) lists the thoughts of several pundits, two of which struck me as being non-repetitive.
Politico’s Ankush Khardori says “a critical mass of voters were willing to set aside their concerns about Trump’s alleged misconduct because of their dissatisfaction with the Biden-Harris administration. Fair or not, this was absolutely their right as voters.”
Maybe.
John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times thinks that it’s the economy, stupid: “Ultimately voters don’t distinguish between unpleasant things that their leaders and governments have direct control over, and those that are international phenomena resulting from supply-side disruptions caused by a global pandemic or the warmongering of an ageing autocrat halfway across the world. Voters don’t like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit.”
And at the Brookings Institute, we have William Galston, who put it all on getting out the vote: “Convinced that Trump’s intense personal bond with his supporters would do most of the mobilizing work, the campaign decided not to invest heavily in traditional get-out-the-vote organizing and instead outsourced it to supporting organizations. Although the Harris campaign touted its advantage in the “ground game,” there is little evidence that it made much of a difference.”
But it’s like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Each used their sense of touch to discover what an elephant looked like and came away with conclusions based on their own narrow experiences.
I prefer to believe that the reason he won goes much deeper. I recall a consideration early on that Joe Biden was going to bridge to the new generation of 60 year-olds and serve but one term. It was not my imagination. I thought it was a good plan. He is, after all, no spring chicken. But they flipped that script, didn’t they? And when they saw their mistake – too late – the hair-pulling began. America, too used to 2-year presidential campaigns, had to adjust to a new paradigm of what became our version of a “snap election.”
Don’t get me wrong, it was a great campaign – all 107 days of it – and I enjoyed watching. It just wasn’t long enough to let the less engaged voters catch up. Had Biden committed to a 1-term administration, Harris would have been a huge consideration to succeed him along with others. But by waiting until very late before stepping aside, only Harris could have accessed the campaign war chest that Biden’s people had already amassed.
It was Harris or bust.
If you’re paying attention, like Salon customers are, it would have only been a slight change in plans. But with so many voters not tuned in – people were Googling the terms “did Biden drop out” on Election Day – the outcome seems inevitable in retrospect.
