As one would expect, the postmortems on last week’s election are well underway.
Here in North Carolina, where voters did pretty much what they’ve done for years, the results don’t seem that hard to understand.
Republicans continued to dominate the presidential contest, and Democrats returned the favor in the governor’s race.
Meanwhile, most of the other races for statewide offices were pretty much evenly divided and all decided by small margins. And thanks to egregious gerrymandering, Republicans won most of the congressional and legislative races even though the vote was, as usual, about evenly split.
But, of course, all of this normalcy is overshadowed by Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House.
And this dramatic (and to many, inexplicable) development has caused millions of people and countless politicians and pundits to ask several basic questions.
How did this happen? How could so many Americans vote for a presidential candidate who is a convicted criminal, an inveterate liar, and a champion of so many policy positions that large majorities oppose? Who’s at fault for allowing it to happen? And what kind of fundamental sea change does this signal in the American experiment?
As is often the case, comedian Jon Stewart probably had one of the best overarching responses to our national head scratch.
In a fine segment in which he featured video clips of national pundits offering supremely confident (and, as it turned out, utterly inaccurate) declarations about the meaning of past presidential elections, Stewart put it this way:
“Here’s what we know, is that we don’t really know anything…and that we’re going to come out of this election and we’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is and what this world is. And the truth is, we’re not really going to know s***.”
Stewart is right that most grand pronouncements about the reasons for, and meaning of, Trump’s return are folly.
Most Americans have not embraced fascism or Christian nationalism. Right-wing values have not emerged as permanently ascendant. Neither progressivism nor the Democratic Party are dead.
Indeed, if Joe Biden were ten years younger, or if he had stepped aside in time for Vice President Harris to have prevailed in a normal party nominating process, last Tuesday’s result might well have been very different. Who knows?
All that said, there are at least a few post-election truths that seem hard to deny. Here are five:
1. Many Americans do not pay close attention to the details of politics or policy debates. While many people care deeply about climate change, reproductive freedom, immigration law, racial equality, human rights, and foreign policy, a large proportion of voters simply look at their own personal situation – particularly their economic situation — and assess whether they are happy with it or not. If they’re dissatisfied, incumbents tend to lose. This played a big role in 2020 and clearly played a role last week.
2. Many more have grown rather cynical. To those who are sickened by Trump’s serial dishonesty and grifting, it seems unimaginable, but for many low information voters who only tune into politics occasionally, Trump’s lies, and megalomania tend to produce a “meh.” Tragically, millions have come to assume that all politicians lie, and that Trump is simply a loud but typical example.
3. Politicians love being with the winner almost more than anything. This is why so many once seemingly responsible leaders of the Republican Party – the longtime symbol of sober and stolid middle American values – could embrace and kowtow so shamelessly to a shallow and narcissistic snake oil salesman like Trump.
4. Anyone who thinks that Vice President Harris’ race and gender weren’t factors in her defeat is kidding themselves. The U.S. has made a lot of progress in overcoming the prejudice that has helped assure a tiny slice of its population – older white men – have occupied the presidency for 228 of the 236 years it has existed, but we still have miles to travel.
5. Lies, distractions and disinformation sometimes work. If you watched sports television during the past month, you were bombarded with a Trump ad featuring a Black man behind a microphone ranting that Harris was a supposed champion of “taxpayer funded sex change operations for prisoners.” It seems almost certain that irrelevant nonsense like this helped depress the vote for Harris and, quite likely, voter turnout more generally.
Of course, had Harris prevailed, all of these truths, though still accurate, would have been consigned to the backburner and our days would now be filled with mad Trump claims of voter fraud and a stolen election.
And this fact helps to illustrate one final, perhaps overriding, truth. A wobble in the electorate does not a definitive trend or mandate make. Trump and his allies will likely enact all sorts of destructive changes in the months ahead, but those changes won’t be reflective of any sort of genuine national consensus. Rather, they will reflect the actions of a group that’s managed to temporarily win power in a divided nation. An electoral wobble back in the opposite direction in 2026 seems highly likely.
This column was originally published in NC Newsline.
