Mea Culpa 2: Return of the Cruel

 Once again, I got the election wrong, spectacularly so.  Was confirmation bias the key?  Partly but mostly too much and too little comparative analysis.

Too much: yes, people were pissed at inflation, but it is down now and this government did better than any other at getting their country to a soft landing quickly.  Also, best wage growth for middle and lower class folks in decades.  But, nope, Americans don't think comparatively.  They were pissed about inflation and not elated about the low unemployment.  That Biden avoided a recession got no rewards.

Too little: turns out every democracy in 2024 had the incumbents losing and by big numbers.  Harris's loss was smaller than all, which might give her some due and undue credit.  US institutions and polarization limit how much she could possibly lose. 

Which gets us to the real puzzle of the election: why didn't Democrats turn out? Harris got something like 14 million votes less than Biden.  Trump got fewer votes than 2020.  All Harris really needed was to get something like 5-6 million less than Biden.  Perhaps I was deceived by the reports of my friends doing get out the vote stuff and by the fact that the Harris campaign did a lot of GOTV stuff and Trump's was run by Musk (who sucks at everything besides getting attention).  So, why did Harris not get as many votes as one might have expected:

• Incumbency.  The thing I got most wrong in my prediction post is that I thought she successfully flipped the script and positioned herself as the change candidate and Trump as the incumbent. Nope, nope, nope.
• Abortion/Dobbs didn't have the same magic on turnout this time as 2022.  Why?  I am guessing that it was partly due to the referenda that were supposed to generate turnout.  Instead, people didn't understand that these referenda would not actually protect their states from an anti-abortion government--they thought they got their umbrellas via these referenda so they could go out in the rain.  
• Racism and sexism.  Men of all kinds voted against Harris.  That a second woman lost to a clearly disqualified/unqualified man requires some consideration.  Trump won his gamble that his racism would not be problematic to men who didn't want a woman in the White House.
• No one cares about VPs.  Walz was fun, but only helped in Minnesota, JD Vance was awful but no one cared even though he has the best chance of any recent VP of becoming President.  
• Our pop culture heroes don't matter.  Beyonce, Taylor, Lebron don't move the needle.  
• The aforementioned split tickets--NC should have dragged down the GOP, but perhaps what happened was that queasy Dems knew that the Dem gov candidate would win and then didn't show up to vote for Harris.

The flip side is how could people vote for a convicted felon who also happened to be an insurrectionist.  Turns out Jan 6th didn't move the needle. Last year's inflation (and yes, prices haven't dropped, but they don't without some suffering) matters more than the threat to democracy.  What matters more to Trump voters are change, rejecting the status quo, resentment, fear, and ignorance.  Seeing a young woman say that Trump wouldn't ban abortion was just appalling.  That people don't understand what mass deportation really means is partly on the Dems but mostly on the media but also on the voters themselves.  They don't care about that or the cruelty directed at transpeople.  Yes, we only have two real choices, but showing displeasure at the status quo meant voting for the cruel and the corrupt.  That should have made a difference, but it didn't so that says much about a good hunk of the American electorate.

Which leads to this: that so many future targets of mass deportation voted for the party of mass deportation is just horrifying and appalling.  That Latino men might think they are immune because they are citizens, because they were here before the Anglos, because their families immigrated legally, whatever is even worse wishful thinking than I induldged in before Tuesday.  Empowering racist cops and sheriffs (and maybe militias?) to enforce mass deportation means lots of false positives--that people who are not undocumented migrants--will get swept up and sent to places that don't have due process and assume that those incarcerated don't have full citizenship rights.  Sure, people will learn to carry birth certificates and passports just to leave the house (papers, please!), but asshole cops and sheriffs can just take the docs and toss them aside and deny they have done so.  The people who will be enforcing the mass deportation sweeps are going to be the worst people, and they will have immunity (see Project 2025).  The camps don't have to be set up by super competent people.  They will have crappy sanitation and they will overcrowded and they won't be safe in summer (no AC) or in winter (no heating, little shelter).  And people will die due to reckless disregard (this is how concentration camps work) while the US govt spends a tremendous amount of its political capital and leverage forcing countries to accept the 10 million.  

People didn't take Trump seriously last time, but he did do a heap of bad that has been memory holed. His big campaign promises of banning Muslims and building a wall happened even if it was a shitty wall. I fully expect a weaponized Department of Justice and mass deportation to happen.  And both will be so very destructive including to those that voted for Trump.

Yes, I am angry.  Not just at myself for my wishful thinking and confirmation bias, but at the Democrats who didn't show up and let this happen and to the Trump voters who cared more about imaginary fears of an immigration crisis, who didn't care about a competent government doing much to improve things despite a Congress blocking its way, and who didn't mind either the cruelty aimed at trans people or the corruption and bullying of Trump and his people.

So, no, I am not sleeping well.  I am not sure how long this nightmare will last.  Our best hope is that we have a real election in 2 years which changes Congress so that it stop some of the worst excesses and that the GOP gets tossed in 4 since the pattern of the last three elections is tossing out whichever incumbent.  But that aforementioned weaponization of DoJ might mean that political opponents get arrested so that elections become farces.  That is how competitive autocracy works.