One Football Stadium: The Size of Harris’ Loss

This was not a “sweep” by Trump – this was a “sleep” by Democrats.

Less than 125,000 votes separates us from having the first Black woman president of the United States instead of what we have now: the first felon president.

Harris would have won the Electoral College had there been a vote shift of less than one per cent in three battleground states.

Trump took Georgia by 116,819 votes; he took Pennsylvania by 147,606 votes, and Wisconsin by 29,687.

That totals 294,112. 

The way a voting split could work, is that 123,750 people in the right proportions in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan would have given those states to her.

It’s about the same number that allowed Trump -  providentially -  to take the Electoral College in 2016.

It works out to 0.1% of the overall American vote of 144,713,886.

Trump did not gain more votes than he got four years ago; he has no reason to look so smug.  He got the presidency with less than a 2% edge; only Richard Nixon got so slim a margin (back in 1968). Neither Trump nor Harris gained the 15 million Biden voters who did not show up this time.  Republicans did not gain voters…Democrats lost voters.  

And Kamala has an excuse: she was only on the trail for three months!

 In fact, 100 million Americans did not care enough to vote…more than voted for either candidate.

This is a huge message to both parties: you are not concerning yourself with issues that affect citizens!

This was not a sweep by Trump – this was a sleep by Democrats.

The gods of luck have been extraordinarily kind to Trump. 

Hillary Clinton got as many votes in 2016 (and lost) as Barrack Obama got in the previous election in 2012 (which he won).  But Trump won the 2016 Electoral College because of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which went to him by 79,316 votes.  Clinton had an overall popular vote advantage of more than 2.5-million.

Both Clinton and Harris lost by one football stadium.

Here’s what the difference in her loss looks like in one of the states (Wisconsin):

If it wasn’t identified by an arrow, you would have a hard time staring at those maps to see the difference between Biden’s win and Harris’s loss. 

Sauk County.  The only one that flipped. 

I have words for them.

A loss is a loss, and I understand that we have to deal with it.  But we do that because we have a sense of ethics and morality.  When Trump lost in 2020 he tried to burn the country down.

It’s a good comparison of the character of the two sides, in fact.  The difference is that the Republican side said the election was ‘stolen’ and raged against the light.  The Democratic side conceded peacefully – with great pain, but no riots – and started looking for reasons why they lost.

That’s because they are rational human beings with brains.

A bit more thought and they would concede that their candidate had only three months to drive home a message of hope, against the two decades of despair and hate that her opponent espoused.

They could also reflect that every incumbent party facing re-election in a developed-world country this year lost vote share for the first time since data started being recorded (1905).

Trump is still far from popular - many of his voters still disapprove of him.  Some 54% of Americans had an unfavorable view of him going into the election.  His rating is minus 9.  It is even worse than it was the previous time he took office,  

Both he AND Harris had some of the worst favourability ratings for presidential nominees since 1956. 

Since 2004, only former President Obama ranked higher than 60 percent in both his campaigns.

Trump’s plans are likely to nose-dive his ratings even more. 

If he goes ahead and imposes heavy taxes on imported products and deports undocumented immigrants—who make up a significant portion of the labor force—there will be a huge price inflation and shortages. 

Most of Trump’s voters do not know that.  Fox News did not let them in on the secret. 

Those voters are beginning to get a sense of what is to come.  They seem shocked and surprised.  They did not connect the party they voted for with the economic result.

While Biden’s efforts have improved the economy over the past few years, media gurus point out that most Americans without college degrees — that’s the majority — have not felt it.  Those without college degrees have not felt much economic improvement for 40 years.  Their jobs have become less secure. Though the economy is more than twice as large as it was then, the median wage has not changed.

Doubtless Biden’s continued work would have gradually moved those numbers up.  He was transferring wealth from the top to the lower wage earners.

The fact is that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s  -  if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.    In fact, 23 Nobel-winning economists endorsed Harris's economic plan and said it would grow the economy; and they said that Trump's plan would start a whole new round of inflation. Even the Wall Street Journal, which heavily favors Republicans, said they endorsed Harris's plan over Trump's.

It was a matter of a lack of campaign time for explanation, rather than a preference for Trump, that left Harris short.

If the election had gone on for another few months, the odds are the results would have been very different.

Harris would have filled up those that stadium.

Now, the economic good that Biden has done will be reversed under Trump.  The wealthy will get an even greater share of the economy;  Elon Musk’s wealth grew instantly by $13-billion the day after the election.

At this point Democrats must take a very different route back to power, in my view.

They can no longer do the bidding of big corporations and the wealthy. They can’t listen to the poised professionals that drove Hillary off the cliff.  We must instead focus on winning back the working class. They should demand paid family leave, Medicare for all, free public higher education, stronger unions, higher taxes on great wealth, and housing credits that will generate the biggest boom in residential home construction since World War II.

When the polling was done before the 2016 election, only Bernie Sanders – not Hillary Clinton –  was selected by the electorate as the one who could beat Trump.  Sanders was beaten into the ground by the Democrat’s electoral professionals.

Democracy goes hand-in-hand with a fair economy. Only by reducing the power of big money in our politics can America grow the middle class, reward hard work, and reaffirm the basic bargain at the heart of our system.

Abortion, BTW, did remain central to the vote in 2024.  You may hear some gurus saying “inflation” was a key factor.  It’s the kind of word people deflect to when they can’t think of anything else to say.  In fact, inflation decline over the past year and is near historic lows.  But Republican voters did not know that.  They were hammered with the message that there was inflation and it was bad and it was Biden’s fault! 

Misinformed, low-information voters.  That is the real problem.  As one online pop (pissed off person) Trump's team is great at lying and bullshitting in a propaganda environment that their party has been building since the Nixon administration and bolstered by the influence of multiple Billionaires who own tech and media infrastructure.

Trump lied throughout the campaign. He told lies throughout both presidential debates. He lied about Hatian immigrants eating dogs. He lied about Biden's economy being a disaster. He lied about Harris's race, saying she wasn't black until recently. He is the most untrustworthy person in America, which should bother everyone--unless you're a low information voter and don't bother to check to see how much he lies his ass off.

Because of course someone who has bankrupted six companies is much better qualified to run the economy.

But pro-abortion referenda won in Missouri, Arizona, Montana, Nevada, Colorado, Maryland, and New York. It lost in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota because of the language of the amendments and by the support required for passage. In Florida, for example, there was 57 percent support, three short of what was needed to pass the amendment. And this in the face of Ron DeSantis multi-billion dollar campaign against it.  In South Dakota, pro-abortion groups refused to support the proposal because it contained some limits on late-term abortions.

You can identify specific states where abortion had a measurable impact, yet one is at a loss to find a similar example(s) regarding ‘inflation’. 

Everything Trump does in the coming four years can be reversed in a one year of a socially-responsible party gaining power…An anti-establishment party ready to shake up the system on behalf of the vast majority of Americans.

The voters have to be motivated to move.  Biden’s economic work was good, but it wasn’t radical enough.  It did not reach into the homes of the 90% of people whose economic unhappiness has not changed one iota in the past 35 years:

The American economy is now owned by the wealthy, and all the gains are going to those who need it least.

This isn’t even “trickle down” economics – this is “grab and hold” economics.

It’s Bernie Sanders Time.

Four years from today.

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