Fault Lines
If you’re looking for links to articles with post-election finger-pointing, you’ll have to look elsewhere (they won’t be hard to find, just open your browser to any news site). This election didn’t come down to some single strategy error or messaging mistake related to whichever issue a columnist cares about the most. Policy positions? Hah. Come on. If we want to look at the broad-strokes, it probably makes sense to point to inflation since that’s an issue that has been hammering incumbents nearly everywhere. Derek Thompson in The Atlantic (Gift Article): How Donald Trump Won Everywhere. “Inflation proved as contagious as a coronavirus. Many voters didn’t directly blame their leaders for a biological nemesis that seemed like an act of god, but they did blame their leaders for an economic nemesis that seemed all too human in its origin. And the global rise in prices has created a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world.”
+ Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American. “Pundits today have spent time dissecting the election results, many trying to find the one tweak that would have changed the outcome, and suggesting sweeping solutions to the Democrats’ obvious inability to attract voters. There is no doubt that a key factor in voters’ swing to Trump is that they associated the inflation of the post-pandemic months with Biden and turned the incumbents out, a phenomenon seen all over the world. There is also no doubt that both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat.” (So Kamala only had to deal with global economic trends, race, gender, and an incredibly short campaign…)
+ “What did this mean? Why did this happen? The most fundamental reason is that we’re coming out of a vast, global, public crisis that began just short of five years ago. The economy was good through most of Donald Trump’s first term. The pandemic was an epochal disaster, the full impact of which I believe most of us still haven’t gotten our heads around.” Josh Marshall: Thoughts on the Day After. So if high prices were the big issue, will those who voted for Trump find relief in his policies. I don’t think so. But I do hope so. The reality will probably look more like the one Tom Nichols describes in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Trump Voters Got What They Wanted.
