Being a longtime member of this site, I had a peaceful feeling going into Election Day this week. I was confident in our ground game. I was aware of the GOPasaurus and its impending extinction. I was inundated with polling data that’s been accurate since 2008 when I was helping to usher in President Obama and his family. All of these things contributed to the lowest fall I could have never expected when Trump claimed the Presidency and the Republican Party rose out of the ashes of their civil war on a wave of pessimism, cynicism, misogyny, bigotry, and hate.
I’ll need to process what has happened to our country over the next days and weeks and so forth, but one thing has become painfully clear to me: the country I thought we had is not really the country we actually have. The electorate Democrats rode to elect President Obama twice is not the electorate that showed up on Tuesday. The electorate that the likely voter models were screening wasn’t the one that showed up to vote. And after being so confident that when more people vote Democrats typically win, I was given a frigid shower to the contrary.
I’ll say it again… the country I thought we had is not really the country we actually have. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. This is what we’ve been hearing from Republicans for the past eight years. And it’s something we need to deal with. There is a tension in that statement and there’s a strange duality to it, reflecting what conservatives and liberals / progressives think about our country. On the one hand, conservatives believe that “their” country has been taken away from them. They are trying to get it back, although they can never cite exactly to which version of our country they are trying to return. Needless to say, what they see right now is not the vision of the United States that they desire. On the other hand, liberals and progressives now have an electoral result that should force us to come to the same realization, albeit from the other side. The United States is not as enlightened or educated or self-preserving as I thought it was. A whole slew of Trump voters came out of the woodwork to vote on Election Day. Yes, there was voter suppression. Yes, there was voter intimidation. Yes, our early voting hours were trimmed. Yes, gerrymandering has un-leveled the playing field. But we lost Florida even with all those new voters. And we lost Pennsylvania even given the strength of our electorate in the big cities. And we lost much of the midwest for all sorts of other reasons. Had President Obama not been from Illinois, who knows how things would have gone there as Illinois is not a blue island in a rising sea of red states. And even with a popular President backing us up, we couldn’t field enough voters in the states that ended up being pivotal to our success. Lots of echoes of Gore 2000 in this election. It’s a funny thing to be a liberal. Conservatives only have to spew propaganda to influence their voters. We need to educate our voters, which takes a much longer period of time. It doesn’t take long to shout “death panel” while it takes a helluva long time to convince someone that such things do not exist.
I voted for Hillary in the primary. If I had to do it over again, I would vote for her again. I don’t blame the DNC for doing anything wrong during the primary but it’s okay if you do. I can’t really be bothered to play out some fantasy hypothetical scenario, now that we’ve lost, where Bernie wins on Tuesday night. I’ve already seen the “I told you so” diaries on here… appearing while many of us are still nursing our wounds from Election Night. I guess everyone has a different time span for mourning. Maybe if Elizabeth Warren were the nominee… maybe if she were the veep… maybe if Bernie were the veep… maybe if Cruz had been the nominee. So many permutations.
Maybe this final point will end up being what happened in this campaign. There’s no way for me to know for sure. I think there was a fundamental choice we all could have made when Trump became the nominee. At that point, we could have run a campaign based purely on policy versus one based on personality. It’s a strange thing to reflect on now. But it appears more and more that this year’s electorate really had no taste for personalities at all. We were content to ignore the shortcomings in Hillary’s personality (perceived or otherwise) while conservatives were more than happy to ignore Trump’s racism, sexism, and outright idiocy. Such a strange situation to be in… with all the polling saying that Trump is one of the most unfavorable candidates ever to run for office and yet people didn’t mind voting for him. The voters tuned all that stuff out about taxes and sexual assault and shoddy business practices to focus solely on his unwavering vision of an America where whites ruled again and where you could say whatever the hell you wanted and where you could insult whomever you pleased. On the other side, just with fewer numbers, we tuned out all the stuff about email servers and foundation intrigue (not that there was anything relevant in there at all) because we felt Hillary’s vision for America was the right one for us.
It will be a long two years in the weeds until we have a chance to win some campaigns and elections again. It will be a long four years in the tall grass before we have a crack at the White House again. During that time, we’ll backtrack on the Supreme Court and we’ll backtrack on the federal courts; we’ll probably lose Obamacare, although that will open the way to a single-payer plan; we’ll have more obvious abortion curtailment and fewer gun control measures; we’ll have more restrictive voting regulations because hell it worked this year so why not keep things going with friendly federal courts (stacked with Republican judges) in the near future; etc. There’s no sugarcoating this and there’s no silver lining. Silver linings appear once a storm has passed. This storm has only begun, with a lot more self-reflection for our party to come. Anyways, just one more diary I felt I had to write before I take a break… not from this site, which I’ve loved since the time I started on here; but from politics in general. We all need a bit of time to decompress. I hope the Democratic Party exhales a bit now and then comes roaring back better than ever.