Commentary: A profound sadness
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
This a painful commentary as this is not the news any of reading this wanted to read. The polls were close, but I thought Vice President Kamala Harris had a solid lead and if she lost it would be a razor thin loss, but in the end that is not the choice the American people made. Words alone can’t express the sadness I feel over the choice the American people made.
There are a lot of postmortems being written about the campaign that Vice President Kamala Harris ran. I think she ran a great campaign, and I say that as someone who has been a volunteer or staff on many campaigns over the last three decades. Could she have done thing different or better or different, yes. Was she also done in by sexism, misogyny, an unserious political media, and a host of other factors outside her control, yes. Beyond anything Vice President Kamala Harris did or didn’t do, I think Democrats missed two issues driving American anger, one a federal issue and one a local issue.
I think not having actions on grocery prices included in the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) was a major issue, that’s not discussed enough on liberal media. The majority of Latino that I know (anecdotal) that which votes mentioned this. It was a major miss on our side. Having temporary expiring measures, maybe a mix of increased food aid and producer’s subsidies should have been there. The other issues, which are a longer-term issues for Democrats, is rent and housing prices.
Blue state housing policy has been bad for a long time. There is just too much resistance at the local level to building in blue areas. It’s driving young people out of blue states or to the right at a level not discussed enough. When I was younger it was quite common for “average” young people to roommate together, but housing prices is forcing far too many families to roommate together. I think the YIMBY (yes in my back yard) need to win more battles against the NIMBY (not in my back yard) to restore balance. This is a fight much more slain at the local level, and something I think we need to guide “younger leftist protesters” to focus their action on.
But I want to remind everyone it’s OK to grieve, it’s OK to feel depressed. But we have to fight for this country we love. There will be a lot of fights ahead. We will have to regroup and make sure that it’s all hands-on deck for 2026. We have lots to wok on. I’ve said for years our social media messaging (especially on WhatsApp) to the Latinos suck, we need to figure out how to stop “fake progressive” saboteurs from getting platforms large enough to hurt America, and we need a better policy than relying on legacy media. We also need a new generation of political consultants. Consultants who advised deemphasizing the “weird” comments, not running ads how casing Trump’s obvious mental and physical deterioration and asking “how will he be in 4 years” is unforgivable. We need to clean house again.
Make no mistake these next two years are going to be rough, sometimes it will be hell, it’s a shame we are here again. But I for one am not ready to give up on the great land and people we all love.
Forward together.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Did white women, Hispanic men or the Democrats' messaging failures doom the Harris-Walz campaign? Or were we just crazy to believe this country was ready to elect a Black woman as president? The Grio: Why Kamala Harris lost, explained
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While we eventually grew accustomed to my mom’s bespoke child-rearing technique, it could be exhausting. Sometimes my sisters and I didn’t feel like searching our souls to unravel the existential meaning of why I didn’t make the basketball team or how earning an 83 on a pre-algebra exam was a slap in the face to my six generations of my ancestors (It probably didn’t help when my I laughed when my sister whispered: “If the ancestors could do algebra, why didn’t they give you the answers?”) Fortunately, my sisters and I eventually found a way to instantly opt-out of the Dorothy Harriot Socratic Method by uttering a simple two-word phrase:
“Oh, OK.”
To my mom, “Oh, OK” alternately means “I have seen the light and understand exactly what you’re trying to teach me” or “I think I figured it out.” But in the vernacular of the Harriot siblings, it translates to “please stop talking.” The two-word phrase can also be used as an implied punctuation mark that simply means: “I would like to end this conversation.” Despite my mother’s belief in the power of self-examination and logic, some problems have no answers. No one wins every battle. Anyone who is brave enough to fight a particularly daunting opponent must also understand that it is very possible they will lose. And sometimes, there is no one to blame.
This is a story about Kamala Harris.
As a graduate of the Dorothy Harriot Academy for Answering Questions, I understand why people are searching for answers to why Vice President Harris lost her bid to become the next president of the United States. It is perfectly reasonable to lament the fact that Americans would rather have a lying, cheating, morally and financially bankrupt white supremacist convicted criminal as the next president than a more experienced, more educated, more accomplished Black woman whose major fault is that she laughs kinda weird.
Like my mother, we all want to live in a world run by logic and reason. More importantly, we want to believe that our failures are fixable and not an inevitability. And, as long as those answers make us feel like we are not powerless, they don’t necessarily have to be true. But, because we need someone or something to blame, every pundit’s and pollster’s post-mortem is an attempt to solve the same unanswerable riddle. Fortunately, I have a definitive solution:
Interrogate America.
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Despite narratives that doubted Black voters would show up for Harris, they did. There were pockets of America where Trump’s pull was strong, with certain states like North Carolina pulling in a greater share of Black men’s votes. The Grio: Exit polls show majority of Black men and women voted for Kamala Harris
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Despite much hand-wringing about whether Black men would jump ship from the Democratic Party and vote in droves for Donald Trump, election exit polls tell a different story.
Early exit polls from The Washington Post show that 78% of Black men voted for Kamala Harris. The vice president’s numbers were just one point under those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
“We said early on, based on our data, that the mainstream media was going to continue to prepare to blame Black men for whatever the results of this election were going to be,” said Dr. David Johns, Executive Director and CEO of the National Black Justice Coalition in an interview with theGrio. “What our data showed, in fact, that the biggest divide was not gender. It was generational concerns for older voters and adults are different than younger generation millennials, Gen Z and the like.”
Johns says that many Black men carried empathy for the plight of women in the post-Roe era and had the women they loved in mind when they went to the polls.
“I just apologized to my 21-year-old Black niece who lives in Texas where both of our parents were born,” Johns told theGrio. “She didn’t ask to be born. She is just now able to engage in a political process that has continued to state and constrain her life options and opportunities, often without her being able to consent.”
Nevertheless, Trump still made notable gains with Black men, earning an estimated 20 percent of Black male voters per Politico. In specific states like North Carolina, Black male voters did break for Trump, with 1 in 5 Black men voting for him, which was twice his support in 2020, according to CBS exit polls.
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