By Lance Simmens
As time will heal all wounds, the recent presidential election will take an extraordinary longer time to digest and accept than could be imagined for those of us who spent at least a portion of the time trying to rally Democratic troops around efforts to support candidate Kamala Harris. I have dedicated considerable time in campaigns promoting Democratic candidates since 1976 to coincide with a 40-year career in politics and public policy. There have been victories and defeats but this most recent election ranks up there with one of the most surprising and indeed the most deflating loss in any one yet.
Truly I was prepared for an astounding recovery from the decision to replace President Biden late in the election season with Vice President Kamala Harris and the joyous acceptance that followed her at the convention in Chicago and head-first into challenging Donald Trump. I boarded a bus full of Kamala supporters in Los Angeles that last weekend of the campaign headed for Phoenix to scour neighborhoods in Glendale with visits to ensure the occupants would vote the following Tuesday in what is affectionately known in the biz as canvassing. Without a doubt it was the most efficient and effective ground operation I have ever participated in. As Election Day arrived, I felt 100 percent certain that we were on the brink of securing a four-year victory.
I was certainly secure in my long career that victory was at our doorsteps. I could see it in the eyes of those I encountered door to door over that last weekend. It became a certainty as the evening proceeded that my hopes and dreams would essentially evaporate. The results were a disaster for Democrats and joyous for the Trump team. As the evening went from bad to worse it did not take long to accept the inevitable. Donald Trump would prevail and along with it he would be supported by a majority in both the House of Representatives and the United States Senate. A clean sweep and now he was in control of a trifecta that would bolster both the policy agenda, the administrative apparatus, and the definitive retribution he promised on the campaign trail.
How could such a thing happen? How could we have been so far off the mark? Personally I had surmised that the white women’s vote, particularly in the suburban enclaves that surround major cities in the so-called Blue Wall states, would salvage the day; that did not happen. Surely I was heartened to see the long lines on my alma mater campus in Philadelphia of young women and men waiting two or three hours to vote for the first time; they had to be our savior. They were not!
Gen Z women only went 36 percent for Trump, women aged 30-44 went 41 percent for Trump, women aged 45 to 64 went 48 percent for Trump, and women over 65 backed the former president 45 percent.
In a trend that could alter the political map, Trump won Latino men by 12 points, a 35-point swing from 2020. Trump’simprovement was fueled by Black men. According to CNN, “Exit polls showed just a 2-point shift among Black men toward Trump nationally. But the shift was much bigger in some key states, like Pennsylvania, where Biden’s 89 percent to 10 percent edge turned into a 72 percent to 26 percent win for Harris, and North Carolina, where Biden’s 91 percent to 8 percent advantage was just 78 percent to 21 percent for Harris.”
Jack Rasmas, author of “The Scourge of Neoliberalism: U.S. Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump” writes in the LA Progressive, “Perhaps the most glaring indicator of what went wrong for Harris, however, is the big shift in the popular vote away from Democrats in 2024, so far only 69.1 million. That’s 12 million fewer votes for Democrats! … Did all the 12 million cross over to Trump? Apparently not. Trump’s 2024 popular vote was not that much difference from 2020. He received 74 million in 2020 and in 2024 so far about 73.4 million.”
Rasmas asserts “In 2024, the COVID-induced mass layoffs in 2020 no longer prevailed but were replaced by another COVID-induced economic consequence: inflation, which erupted in fall of 2021. Prices for goods started abating by 2023 but inflation in the much more ubiquitous services sector of the U.S. economy remained chronically high throughout 2023 and into early 2024. Official government statistics estimate the price level rose 24 percent over the four Biden years, but real inflation-adjusted take-home pay for tens of millions of households was impacted more severely than the statistics or politicians and media suggested during the recent election … Actual inflation impact on family budgets was more like 30 percent to 35 percent.”
James Carville is famous for advising “It’s the economy, stupid” and this could very well have summed up the 2024 election. In any instance, Trump has prevailed fair and square. It reminds me of the famous line in the 1972 movie “The Candidate.” Upon being victorious, Robert Redford asked, “what do we do now?”