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Writer's pictureHowie Klein

Call Me Crazy, But Maybe Democrats Should Put More Focus On Economic Populism Going Forward

Would Bernie Have Won? We'll Never Know



My mind was blank last night when I went to bed, seeing Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin blinking red. I had no thoughts other than getting a good night's sleep. I woke at 2 AM with a mind bursting with thoughts… and forced myself to go back to sleep. I didn’t want no deal with even going downstairs and seeing which states he won, which Senate seats turned red, which House seats were swept up in America’s embrace of MAGA-ism. But here I am— incredulous. I’m old; I feel bad for the kids who are going to grow up into this MAGA reality.


Trump won— and by a lot… across the board. Americans want him. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be close— albeit in the other direction— and it wasn’t. Young men fell for his shtik; Latino men did too. Roland asked me if that means they’ll be compliant when he has them rounded up and put on buses; that's mean-spirited. “Trump won 18- to 29-year-old men by 11 percentage points, securing 54% of that group compared with 43% for Kamala Harris. In 2020… Biden won those voters by 15 percentage points, 56% to 41%… [And Trump] grew in popularity in rural and suburban counties but Harris failed to counter that by growing her urban advantage… The GOP also made big gains with nonwhite voters. Among Black voters, Trump saw his share of the vote grow to 15%, compared with 8% in 2020, according to AP VoteCast. There was a similar jump with Hispanics. On Tuesday, Trump won 41% of the Hispanic vote, 6 points higher than in 2020.”


Let me share some comments worth reading— in no particular order, but starting with David Ignatius, Matt Bai and Ruth Marcus from this morning’s Washington Post. Ignatius, “mystified… The presidential election is a character test for the candidates, but also for the country, and this election makes me realize how little I understand the American character in 2024. Trump somehow managed a kind of alchemy. The billionaire ex-president managed to appear as the victim, the outsider and even the change candidate… I worry that that was a significant factor in what seems to have been sympathy and support for Trump... I’m not sure whether people will blame the progressive wing of the party, or progressives will claim they were right and Harris made a mistake in moving to the center.”


Bai: “Democrats dug themselves into a hole on cultural issues and identity politics. Trump’s vicious transgender ad in the closing weeks (‘She’s for they/them, he’s for you’) was probably the most effective of the cycle. I think that probably landed with a lot of traditionally Democratic voters who feel like the party is consumed with cultural issues while the economic issues don’t really change.”


Marcus: “I suspect this was more about voters’ anger and unhappiness about their own situations, and about their own perceptions of themselves as victims, including of an elite that disdains them, than it is about Trump himself. We are an angry and divided country. A country where too many people are willing to blame immigrants for all sorts of woes. A country that is furious about prices that are not still rising at unacceptable rates but that are too high. A country where too many people somehow find this strongman with his authoritarian impulses attractive as a leader. A country where— and I think we have to consider this as well— too many people are not able to countenance the notion of a Black woman as president.”


Susan Glasser: “Electing Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake— a consequential one, to be sure, yet still fundamentally an error. But America has now twice elected him as its President. It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be. His victory was a worst-case scenario— that a convicted felon, a chronic liar who mismanaged a deadly once-in-a-century pandemic, who tried to overturn the last election and unleashed a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, who calls America “a garbage can for the world,” and who threatens retribution against his political enemies could win— and yet, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, it happened.



Charlie Sykes: “This is who we are… the fights ahead will be even tougher and more dangerous than the ones we’ve been through. There will be the inevitable and immediate attempts to downplay the threat of a second Trump presidency, but this time we need to take Trump both seriously and literally… We can expect President Donald Trump to begin a massive purge of the federal workforce; and the process of mass deportations. The reign of Stephen Miller, Elon Musk and RFK, Jr. will begin… Trump will pardon the January 6 rioters; and summarily fire the prosecutors who tried to hold him accountable. Having been immunized by the Supreme Court, he will instruct the DOJ to go after his political opponents. He will abandon Ukraine and begin the process of weakening our alliances. A newly empowered Trump will gut or kill Obamacare outright, while imposing massive new tariffs on the economy… [T]he American people have returned this blatantly, dangerously unfit man to power. In the end, nothing mattered. Not the sexual assaults, the frauds, the lies, or the felonies. Not the raw bigotry of his campaign; not the insults, nor the threats… This is the hardest part about today: realizing that our fellow Americans saw all of that; watched all of that; listened to all of that, and still said, ‘Yes, that’s what we want.’ That’s who we are. The whole world is watching. And that’s what they are seeing. We can change that, of course, because this isn’t the final chapter. But the fight will be long and even harder now that we have been stripped of so many of our illusions.”


Marie Newman: “We have an American problem: We have stopped talking to each other and we are not listening to each other, quite literally, at all. We all sit in a bubble… We cannot solve our problems with just politics and legislation. It won’t work. It has to be about relationship building. Michelle Obama famously said, ‘It’s hard to hate people up close.’ So, move in closer, see people in person (not on social media) and have a starter conversation, folks.”


Brian Beutler: “The United States and the world will soon be in the hands of mercurial, vindictive, greedy men with scores to settle and few checks on their power. Perhaps there’s some solace in that word “mercurial.” Who knows what Donald Trump, the 78 year old former president and current president-elect, will choose to do with his time and authority? Maybe some semblance of stability can be salvaged through the fact that he mostly just wants to be the center of attention. But I don’t take much solace at all. First, the people who’ve attached themselves to Trump know this about him, and they are ambitious. They have already reasoned that they’ll be empowered to fill all the gaps in his attention, and their ranks include corrupt oligarchs, conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, religious extremists, and fascists. Think Trump might ultimately not care that much about abortion? Well, the people serving under him do, and he won’t be checking their work. And then there are the things we know Trump does care about.”


If Trump threatens to send National Guard or military troops into, say, California— to round up immigrants in sanctuary cities, or to establish a mass-expulsion camp— will Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) stare him down? Or will he fold?
Trump doesn’t just want his legal blemishes to vanish for reasons of personal liberty. He means to erase them from history. Will he retaliate against teachers, professors, textbook publishers, school districts, or any other educational leaders who are faithful to the truth about his first term? Who’s going to protect them? The Supreme Court’s Republican justices recently legalized these kinds of measures, and even if it falls to them to keep him within the bounds of whatever law remains, why would they? They are the authors of his revival.
It goes on like this. It’s what those of us paying attention meant about him lacking the character to be president. Even if he were inclined to golf all day, the presidency has its own internal momentum. It will confront him with these opportunities to be corrupt, and he will seize them.

Speaking of which... I hear Kamala is already talking about running for governor of California— like Nixon did, unsuccessfully, in 1962. I don't mean to direct this towards Kamala at all but, let's face it, political careerism really and truly is like a cockroach.



7 Comments


Guest
an hour ago

I see DWT has seen fit to censor already. So at the risk of giving their eraser more to do...


I see that the responses below continue to vindicate all I've been trying to 'splain to you all for years.


1) ALL of your speculations about what the democraps might try going forward will be relevant if/when the nazis decide to end elections and make the party illegal. It's among the first things hitler did, so it's absolutely not out of the question.

2) You all still think the democraps can be viable... if only they lied better. Because, under their current ownership, they'll never DO any progressive reforms about which to actually brag.

3) you STILL refuse to condemn…


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Guest
4 hours ago

This was an unwinnable election for the Democrats and that’s why they chose Kamala to take the fall rather than ruin the career of one of their younger prospects. Kamala’s political career would be over regardless. While we were all focused on Gaza it was the inflation and price gouging that ironically put the billionaire back in the White House.

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Guest
6 hours ago

i posted a few weeks ago on this blog that i am a pessimist and predicted Kamala would get rolled.


it wasn't just my pessimism though, its 35 + years of democrats not even understanding the working class. Which i was part of from 1992 to 2022. For 30 years i saw one mfg company after another outsource jobs to mexico and then china. Just myself alone ive seen the lives of 100's of americans ruined by these egregious policies.


The Democrats have a HUGE class issue and it's time for them to pick a side. You are either with workers or Wall Street. You cannot have both b/c it fucks up your message, assuming you even have one.

Edited
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Guest
an hour ago
Replying to

you correctly recognize only one symptom of the cancer. The cause of the cancer, however, is not god sending you a passle of useless corrupt pussies. The cause is YOU who never fixed or replaced a useless corrupt pussy party all the while. What you noticed in '92 was happening since 1980. And the beginning of their apathy toward the working class began in 1968, a year when they openly ratfucked the young who were being sent to slaughter in viet nam.

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ptoomey
8 hours ago

It is an objective fact that a majority of Americans who sufficiently roused themselves to vote for president this year voted for Trump. It's equally objective that for the 3d straight presidential election year, there was an extraordinarily strong correlation between how people voted for president and how they voted for US Senate. Beyond that, it's largely matters of opinion.


It's my opinion that people tended to vote against the opposing nominee at least as much as they voted for a particular nominee this year. It's also my opinion that GOP essentially twinned Harris with Biden, whose approval ratings have been in the toilet for most of his presidency. It's my further opinion that Harris did nothing substantive to distingui…


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Guest
an hour ago
Replying to

elections have been people voting AGAINST since '68. It's always a matter of whether the thing you have to vote FOR in order to vote against the other is actually seen as worth the trouble.


As I kept pointing out, 2016 = 2024 for your side. Your pos was seen as not really worth bothering with, even considering the opponent (trump both times).


Another factor you won't want to even waste time on... BOTH times trump won was against a woman. Granted, these particular women weren't much... but biden is less even than those 2 and HE failed to lose. Perhaps your voters have a problem with female presidential candidates?

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