My father was a careful man. An architect. A woodworker. A builder. And a fount of axioms. Given his passions, one favorite was “Measure twice, cut once”. Another was its sibling: “Haste makes waste.”
I think I pretty much wasted my last post. It was certainly hasty—written just hours after the election. And as such, it was not measured at all. I had read and hastily circulated a convincing piece from a New York Times opinion writer who insisted that Trump’s victory proved that we as a people have become just like him, rather than a more admirable people. It fit my despair of the moment.
In the ensuing week, the press has been fixated on the “landslide” victory of the Republicans and the flaws of the Democrats that, they claim, are proof positive that America has swung wholesale to Trump. To go by the preponderance of expert opinion and exit interviews, one might think that’s the whole story. Certainly that is what this map of voting proportions might suggest:
But I decided to measure twice. I measured what they were saying, about proportions, and then I measured the actual size of the actual vote. And I came to a realization that most of the major media have yet to notice in their obsession with "breaking news!" about Trump's reprehensible appointments--namely, the less earthshaking story told by those actual numbers (as of 11/11; may be slightly different now):
1. There was almost zero net increase in support for Trump over 2020--he just about broke even. A paltry 462,578 more citizens voted for him in 2024 than in 2020—that’s less than one percent of the 74 million votes cast for him.
2. There was a whopping decrease of 10,318,809 in the number of votes for Harris in 2024 relative to the votes for Biden in 2020—that’s a monumental 12.6% of votes that would have sent Trump packing.
That decrease in Democrat votes is what primarily accounts for those arrows showing proportional changes in preference., not a sudden surge of Trump-love.
Those 10,000,000 stayed-at-home Democrats are the ones who actually elected Trump. Contrary to media impressions, a big electoral vote margin for Trump isn't some irreversible landslide. The Democrats’ mudslide is the real story of the election of 2024.
To be sure, there are lessons galore for Democrats to learn in rebalancing their priorities and messaging, to be ignored only at grave peril. And also lessons galore to be learned from how skillfully and relentlessly the Republicans have captured offices and mindsets at every level throughout the country over past decades. Left uncontested, only at grave peril.
But the most critical understanding Democrats must learn is why ten million of their voters who eagerly drove Trump from office just four years ago decided that this year—widely regarded as “the most consequential election in our lifetimes”—they would just slump down on the couch and allow him to resume his no-holds-barred onslaught to reshape America to his liking, Constitution-be-damned.
Just think: America would be planning the inauguration of President Kamala Harris today if only someone had gotten a handle on the indifference of those ten million, had gotten even a handful of them to the polls. Digging into this is Job #1.
While we’re waiting for some analysis and insight and corrective strategies to forestall such a monumental blunder in the future, let us not grind ourselves into despair about “what America has become”. We Americans as a people have not become Trumpians. We are still capable of being “a city on a hill”, even if passing clouds sometimes dim our shining light.
I’ll bet you think I’m quoting Ronald Reagan, don’t you. Nope. I’m quoting John Winthrop from a lay sermon he delivered in 1630, describing his vision of this barely-newborn country. He, in turn, has been quoted by nearly every President to hold office, Republicans and Democrats alike, including John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
Republicans, Democrats, Independents—the vast majority of us yearn for America to be a shining city on a hill. That is the enduring aspiration of America, and it has not been lost forever just because some couch-potatoes didn’t do their part in 2024.