The Trump win was big. Very big. I still think people don’t appreciate just how big. Trump won Florida by 13 points. This until recently was the state you spend all of election night worrying about. It used to be a purple state that could go either way. Trump won it by 3 points last time, and Trump took it by 13 this time. That’s a huge swing. The final electoral college vote was 312:226, total votes for Trump, with many millions left to be counted, were 74,834,220, sealing the popular vote. The Republicans took the Senate 53 to 46 and just last night secured the House.
The win was so total, so complete that I noticed one big and important change from the first time around. Most of the left accept the result and the democratic mandate Trump now has to implement his agenda. Well most on the left apart from the journalists stuck on their island marked The Irish Times, who are conducting themselves like Japanese soldiers still fighting on some remote pacific hellscape 40 years after the war ended. Justine McCarty had her breakdown on Friday and Una Mullally didn’t do much better yesterday.
But everywhere else, especially in the UK the acceptance of the result is clear. This time, we are not going to get endless think pieces on how the electoral college isn’t binding (Trump winning the popular vote rules that out), or how it was based on slavery, or Trump won because of bad actors on social media. We will be spared the Russia collusion narrative. All this nonsense was used to delegitimize the results of the 2016 election. You might not remember it dear reader, but I as a political nerd I do, and it was divisive and poisonous. The left were disputing the result of the 2016 election a long time before January 6th. I kept the receipts on that one.
There is none of this now. None. In the UK media, especially in the New Statesman you got actual news analysis. Left wing journalists asked why the Democratic base collapsed so spectacularly. Matthew Syed in the Sunday Times, easily their best writer, hammered the Europeans and their free loading off the US taxpayer for decades.
Camilla Long asked the question no one seems to be asking in the Irish media, why did the Democrats think they could win on reproductive rights? Or let me phrase it differently. Why did they think women wouldn’t care about immigration and the economy?
Well known lefty Hadley Freeman also accepted the crushing defeat, admitting that “basking in moral rectitude rather than finding solutions to problems has only one outcome.”
But despite all this, I still don’t think these people have truly come to terms with it. It wasn’t just a rejection of tactics or messaging. It was a full-bore rejection of their instincts, and of their normalcy.
It comes down to this: The Democrats have been so infected with celebrity and wokish elitism that they don’t really care about winning elections – they care about looking woke, which they think means being nice. The problem is that their definition of “nice” strikes the average normal person as deeply weird, to the extent that Donald Trump is objectively more normal than the average coastal libeal. Like normal people out there, he at least seems to understand instinctively that chopping up children before they have reached puberty is barbaric – and indeed made this the focus of his advertising. Under Joe Biden, at least 14,000 children have had their ovaries or penises removed, breasts removed, or been surgically or chemically castrated in America in the past five years. Some are now unable to have orgasms. These monstrous acts have been supported by the left, without even a hint of popular support. In Ireland the same people who rail against the Catholic Church and their views on sex and ‘controlling’ women’s bodies are happy to nod on while young children have their sex lives destroyed before it even begins. Give me a break. While this remains normal on the left, voters will keep fleeing to the right.
And when you look at the numbers the collapse of the Democrat base was almost total. They still take much of the black vote, especially the female black vote and white boomer women who are beyond hope. But the rest of, nearly all of it, voted for Trump.
Let’s take the humble Latino man. Latino men veered hard to the right. “On Tuesday, Trump won this group handily, by 10 points, according to exit polling performed for the Washington Post and other outlets. Meanwhile, Harris won Latina women by 24 points, a victory that pales in comparison to Clinton’s 44-point lead in 2016.”
The Latino men who broke hard to the right are the normal people in the US right now. All they want to do is get up in the morning, put their children in a normal school that doesn’t tell them they were born in the wrong body, go to work on a living wage not undercut by cheap illegal labour, and come home and not get shot by the drug cartel peeps they or their parents fled in their homeland, and have dinner with the family. That’s all they want – and for their children to have a chance to break into the middle class eventually.
If the Democrat can’t get back this voter, they are doomed. We know white working-class men are Trump’s base. White women still vote Republican, as is the usual way despite the fact that conservative white women hardly get a look in in the media. The Democrats have only peeled away this group from the GOP twice, in 1964 for Johnson and 1996 for Bill Clinton. (Bill has always had a way with the ladies.) In fact Trump did better with both young men and young women this time around.
But you cannot build a winning coalition around black women and their deranged boomer white sisters. That’s not a winning formula.
Trump in the end kept it simple; the working class is hurting and he promised to make the pain go away. And it was the working class, across ethnicities that voted for him. Even Una Mullally gets this just about, “the problem for this nation is that so many of America’s tired and poor are voting for Trump.” It is obviously not a problem for the poor to vote in their economic and cultural best interests. It’s a problem for the Irish Times, but not anyone else.
The irony is that this working-class coalition has been the absolute back bone of the Democratic party since they lost the southern states back in the 1960s. Kennedy took them, Johnson took them and Robert F Kennedy was putting a similar coalition together before he was taken by an assassin’s bullet in 1968.
From memory it was Pat Buchanan who said the Republicans needed to understand the working-class voter. He had enough of the business interests and lobbyists and their control over the Republican party. Buchanan saw that it was time to listen to the ordinary American. He understood the importance of the working-class vote but he was before his time.
It’s a long, long way back for the blue-collar Democrats. They must now wrestle their party back from the white coastal elites, media celebrities, race hustlers, and demented woke – sters, to have any chance in 2028. The problem is, they don’t want to. It may take several more defeats on this scale to restore sanity to the left.