What the Hell Just Happened? Trying To Make Sense Of It

I'm Gutted

What the hell just happened? America has again elected a man who clearly lacks the knowledge and character to be an effective President. His former team told us that. He is someone who clearly does not care about anyone but himself. He told us that. He is someone who has exactly none of the values that we admire in other people or in leaders. He’s a racist, misogynist, rapist, low IQ, toxic mess. But, hey, he’s entertaining. He’s funny. He says what he really thinks (as if lacking a filter is a virtue). He seems hypermasculine and tough. Even though the economy is doing well, he told people that it wasn’t, and they bought it. Even though his first term was a disaster, people somehow have halcyon memories of it.

Kamala, for her part, crashed into the highest glass ceiling in America. Many people are still not ready for a woman President much less a multi-racial one. Full stop. But I also think, after knocking on doors in Pennsylvania and talking to voters, many people felt like they didn’t know her well enough.

On Tiktok, this notion was endlessly parodied with jokes like this—someone is told their choices for dinner are salmon, which is not their favorite, or poison. Their response is ‘But how is the salmon prepared?’ That joke contained part of the truth—many voters said but who is she? What are her policies? Where is she from? Perhaps this is an extension of what Van Jones said—she has to be flawless while he’s allowed to be lawless. The two candidates were clearly held to different standards. At the same time, many voters clearly refused to see Trump as the equivalent of poison. For some reason people think he’s a reasonable choice. I will never understand that. But Kamala saw slippage in so many groups—she underperformed Biden over and over. By 9:15pm I was sick of Kornacki telling me that yet again Kamala was getting a little less out of each county than Biden had gotten. That happened over and over and over.

Let’s look at several CNN exit polls. It’s like looking at the wreckage from a crash.

Good news—Kamala did much better than Biden with white women who are college-educated and Trump slipped a bit with white women who are not college-educated. So the problem wasn’t white women.

Overall Trump slipped a bit with white men and slipped a lot—six points—with white women.

The biggest problem—Latino voters came out huge for Trump. This was a crushing blow. With Latino men he did 33 points better than he did in 2020. He went from getting crushed by that group to winning them by a double digit margin. That is an extraordinary takeaway. He also did 15 points better with Latinas. I think many people outside of the Latino community are misunderstanding them and expecting them to vote like people of color—and to be offended when Trump says racist things about brown immigrants. But as Paola Ramos said on The Daily Show, many of these voters are native-born and Americanized and thus do not identify with the people Trump wants to deport. When he’s mean or racist toward Hispanic immigrants, it does not hurt him with Hispanic-American voters. It might be helping him with them.

I had expected to see a massive gender gap but it did not emerge. Kamala won women in general but she did not do as well with them as Clinton or Biden. But Trump did a little better with men.

When we slice the electorate by ideology, we see Kamala did better than Clinton and Biden with liberals, but she lost ground with moderates while Trump gained with conservatives.

Thankfully, after a campaign where Black men were a much-discussed group, it turns out that they showed up for her.

But Trump made big gains with rural voters and slight gains with suburban voters while Kamala did not improve with urban voters.

I am despondent. I feel like I just watched America get fleeced by a con man for a second time. The candidate of competence, of joy, of the future lost to the candidate who told us the country is going down the tubes when it is not. Trump ran a terrible race filled with gaffes. He got destroyed in the debate and chickened out of a second. But many Americans—many of them rural or non-college educated or Latino—still like him. And many said they just don’t know or trust her. I will always wonder what might have happened if Biden had stepped aside earlier and given Dems a chance to have a real primary and thus giving a Dem a much longer runway before the election. The refusal to acknowledge or recognize Biden’s demise left Kamala with the shortest campaign window in history and in a campaign where many felt like they didn’t know her, and weren’t afraid of trying Trump again, we ended up with this mess. I wonder if America can survive.