Sample reader election post-mortem reactions from a stellar list @ TPM. Josh Marshall, head honcho, does these reader response lists now and then when big issues come up, and regularly acknowledges their importance to his ongoing journalism work. But I can't remember a set of them so strong and original, coming at the shocking outcome of the election from so many angles.
They seemed to have struck a nerve, as I gather TPM has received a boost in subs since the election. Reading through them was so hard-hitting for me I couldn't get through them in one go but it might be useful to think of them as reactions to Josh's following post-mortem summary take:
"I continue to be of the opinion that the big story of this election is that people experienced a lot of hardship coming out of the pandemic and they have basically blamed it on and punished the incumbent party in power."
Like other countries all around the world, where over the last few years voters have been kicking out incumbents over grocery prices and the perceived threat of immigrants in a difficult post-pandemic economy. Kitchen table, bread & butter, fundamental cost of living economic issues, driving electorates and elections.
Okay. But why in France when the extreme right pounced on these circumstances did a liberal left coalition rally in only a couple weeks to thwart it? Or, more critically, how in the world after just suffering four years of Trump's malevolent incompetence and non-stop corrupt self-dealing could Americans, men or women, city or rural, white or black, possibly think Trump would help reduce the cost of living for them even if he knew how?!
Harris's platform, constantly criticized for being vague, in fact included several specific plans to assist workers, plans to reduce price gouging, reduce health care expenses, add childcare tax credits, boost home acquisition, and increase taxes on the rich to fund crumbling public infrastructure. By contrast, Trump's economic plans were shock doctrine junk economics so extreme economists, even former Nobel prize winners, denounced it as incredibly inflationary (what was already supposed to be driving the electorate away from incumbents in Josh's fundamentals theory) and potentially catastrophic.
There's an old line from Ben Franklin about how democracies require an informed electorate. I get people's kitchen table budgetary stresses and reaction; I know many of the same stresses. Reaction against inflation is natural but imagining Trump as representing a viable economic solution is a dis-informed electorate of staggering proportions.
My own crude first take would be that this is less about the economics and still a culture war response to everything, as if mass deportations and crackdowns on "the enemy within," immigrants, Trans people, liberals, anybody who didn't vote for Trump or gets in the way of their agenda, and his thin 51% majority believe this scapegoating will take care of all their problems.
They won't but the winning electorate won't get this until the violent catastrophe they are provoking engulfs them. This is part of the violent fascist allure, reducing our collective complex problems to a few easy to identify scapegoats. So looks like, unfortunately, we're all going to go through some things. Rest up and get ready. And my apologies to all the innocent people who will become targets of this fascist violence.
Some highlights of what other readers were calling out:
Reader Reaction #1
The emphasis here is on the terrible neglect of Trump's Covid public health record absent in the Harris campaign and how the emphasis in the campaign was too exclusively on Trump as a "bad man" as opposed to the ample record of Trump as a "bad president." "Because Trump is both a bad man and a bad president, I think the next several years will be rocky."
Reader Reaction #2
"Trump can do whatever he wants, but the rest of us are just chumps." Yeah, WTF is up w/ that?!
Reader Reaction #3
The task now is building a middle up and sideways out class resistance to the coming tyranny. I gather this means building out from the cities and states in strongest legal constitutional positions to resist his plans to violently scapegoat "the enemy within," which will focus on undocumented immigrants and civil servants to start but really means all of us, the 49% who didn't vote for him.
Reader Reaction #6
It's mostly fundamentals, the "felt economy"--people didn't like big jump in groceries prices and out of reach housing costs and impossible interest rates for buying a car, that covers 67% of consumers in the economy. Okay but, again, seems like only a massive disinformation campaign and a very stupid electorate could imagine Trump could or even would if he could remedy expensive groceries and interest rates.
I sincerely hope Grump/Vance, and especially Musk, who I can especially imagine being triggered this way, take it all as their "fix it" challenge to reduce the cost of living for working people, they are wildly successful business people, they know how to produce share value, etc, but I'm fairly certain they won't be able to reduce the cost of living for the working classes by deporting millions of workers or imposing unprecedentedly high tariffs on imports or purging civil servants or cutting Obamacare or attacking Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid. No way.
Reader Reaction #8
"Sometimes people need to actually get what they want before they realize what that means," wins my quarter for incisive insightful line of this mix of reactions. "And I think we’re there, and to a certain extent, progressives need to be more selective about where we step in for the next decade or so." I hear you.
Reader Reaction #9
"He is basically the personification of the American id – the guy who says and does whatever he wants and gets away with it. Obviously, for us who believe in integrity, accountability, and decency, in playing by the rules, this is a huge turnoff. Sadly, we seem to be slipping into the minority. And that, more than anything else, terrifies me." Me too.
My first reflex, frankly, is flight, how do we get out of the way of this terrible scourge and evade its worst predations? And I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
You could say they're counting on this withdrawal and intimidation to reinforce their rules like bullies on the playground and we need to fight back, fight fire with fire, etc. I do think in our own blue jurisdictions their worst humanitarian abuses should be resisted, and we should expect and call for and continue to vote for a strong effort to resist the worst of this by our leaders. But for now a lot of this feels like it is about getting out of the way of their blundering violent idiocy and letting them hang themselves with their own rope.
If Josh is right that this devastating loss is conventional, simply reflecting bread & butter fundamentals, people voting against grocery prices and high housing and car loans costs, it is very unlikely Trump improves any of these cost of living issues and if he really goes through with his tariff and mass deportation plans it will be nigh impossible. So the same reaction against the rising costs of living and the incumbency should operate against Trump and the Republicans in 2026 and 2028.
But this also gives them four more years in power to rig the media and courts, meaning any democratic swing away from them will have to be significant and beyond their manipulations.
And if the bigger story is the galvanizing alliance between the Billionaires and bigots, our corporate rulers trying to hold onto an increasingly unsustainable neoliberal order and the culture war bigots wanting sadistic retribution against other groups, immigrants, people of color, gay and trans people, and liberals, who they think threaten their fortunes, then shaking this fascist fever, I'm afraid, will take something bigger than more or less status quo downturn economic conditions.
It'll take a bigger catastrophe, a bigger war, another colossal natural disaster, or economic collapse, like the pandemic, like 2008, something that brings the corporate order to its knees. That Trump and his admin will botch the response to any crisis horrifically, sadly, is likely and almost inevitable sooner or later. Unfortunately, again, such crises in the past just as often provoked more anti-democratic strongman reactions as they do liberal democratic reforms that protect workers and the environment from corporate rules worst predations. But I'm afraid this is where we are.
That abortion protections won in several states, even ones where Trump won, is a good sign for the potential of resistance against the worst of what Trump and the Trumpsters try to do. But clearly women's rights, and female rule, and what these things mean, has become The Rubicon upon which the country is not ready to cross. Still in 2024!
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