The Mathematics Were Clear and Obvious
The night started with bad electoral news for Kamala Harris and got worse, state by state, until Pennsylvania slipped away, making it all but assured that Donald Trump had won in a walk.
Despite his criminal record, impeachments, and a campaign built on deriding migrants and offering wholesale insults and threats to “the enemy within,” Donald Trump will be the American president for the next four years.
The pattern grew from the start. Trump rolled up the vote in rural counties, and Harris’ total fell behind most levels that Joe Biden had achieved in 2020. The mathematics were clear and obvious. With electoral votes from Georgia, North Carolina, and then Pennsylvania falling his way, and Wisconsin and Michigan looming — and Arizona and Nevada still out — it became impossible for Harris to pull out the win that her supporters thought might emerge in battleground states.
Any one remaining state would put Trump over the top. Harris waited to concede until all the votes were counted.
It was an election with long voter lines from swollen turnout, relatively close results but hardly something that might come down to a hanging chad or a coin flip, indeed, Trump was on track to win the popular vote as well as electoral votes, with substantial percentage gains in states like New York, Maryland and New Hampshire.
What made the election results more difficult to swallow was apparent election of a Republican Senate majority, with victories in West Virginia, where Joe Manchin left vacant, in Ohio, where MAGA car salesman Bernie Moreno topped Sherrod Brown, and in Montana, where Democrat Jon Tester was on a losing path to Tim Sheehy.
A Republican-led Senate will translate into more Supreme Court judges in the mold of the three appointees who overthrew abortion rights, as well as support for any Trump proposals for tax cuts or border changes and wide scale deportations.
The makeup of the House majority was more difficult to gauge without complete results but looked to be headed for more gridlock with small seat differentials between the parties.
What About the Big Issues?
So much for the need to “preserve democracy” by rejecting a candidate who had tried to overthrow the very government he is now poised to lead again. So much for practical policies that will address high prices at supermarkets and fuel pumps. So much for international support for Ukrainian allies at war with Russia. So much for worry about a national abortion ban. So much for Donald Trump being called to account in anything resembling equal treatment under the law to criminal indictments.
So much for claims of “unfitness” for office.
The ultimate joke of democracy is a majority popular vote for someone who professes autocracy.
Trump’s return will usher in a remake of government built on personal loyalty to Trump and on punishment and “retribution” to political opponents and a constant state of attack on individual rights, on environmental and safety regulation, and on our health systems. It will be culture wars raised to the highest levels every day.
The appeal to U.S. voters was raw and promotion of a personalized, religious “savior” who alone will repair whatever it is that ails us nationally. It was filled with fact-free mental spinning and the absence of empathy and humanitarian concern.
There was no rational explanation for why insulting Puerto Ricans resulted in Trump improvement in votes among Latinos other than a rejection of a Black-Asian woman alternative who is seen as defending an economy that many find too troubling, despite its relative success on the globe. In the end, what proved most important was anger over the perception that the economy should be better for me personally.
There is a challenge that would come to either candidate upon winning — dealing with the fat that half the voting country favored the opponent. In Harris, we already were seeing someone moving towards compromise with Republicans. In Trump, we instead can prepare for a MAGA steamroller along the lines of what the Heritage Foundation laid out in its Project 2025 document.
The Election Day disappointment is that a majority of voters simply closed their ears to promote their anger. That’s not a value that we teach our children.
