NYT Op-Ed Writer: Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Donald Trump Again? Matt Vespa Matt Vespa
Democrats may be glad that Joe Biden appears to be on the cusp of officially clinching the presidency, but there’s a bit of confusion as well. Folks, the Trump campaign and its allies have yet to secure a decisive court win to continue their fight in exposing the mountain of voter fraud allegations. It’s a high bar concerning proving such fraud was so rampant and systemic that ballots should be tossed. It’s not in the cards right now. So, as Joe Biden picks his nominees for cabinet positions, hordes of liberals are celebrating, but there are some who know this really wasn’t the win they were looking for; they wanted a blue wave to crush Trumpism. Instead, Trumpism is here to stay. Donald Trump secured the most votes for re-election for an incumbent president in American history. Democrats weren’t able to retake key state legislatures which means the GOP still controls the lion’s share of mapping those congressional districts. Democrats lost seats in the House; it will be their smallest majority since the New Deal. And if things go well in the Georgia runoffs and the GOP retains the Senate, not much is going to happen for the Biden presidency.
I didn’t want this. I wanted Trump to crush Biden and perhaps if he just let the former VP hang himself with his own words in the first debate, things could have been different. Yet, a New York Times op-ed wonders why so many people voted for Trump. Here were the reasons he offered, while also giving a slight warning to the progressive left towards the end (via NYT):
Democrats, struggling to make sense of it all, are locked in yet another round of mutual recrimination: They were either too progressive for swing voters — too socialist or aggressive with ambitious policies like the Green New Deal — or not progressive enough to inspire potential Democratic voters to show up or cross over.
But they should understand that there was really no way to avoid disappointment. Three factors — the logic of partisan polarization, which inaccurate polling obscured; the strength of the juiced pre-Covid-19 economy; and the success of Mr. Trump’s denialist, open-everything-up nonresponse to the pandemic — mostly explain why Democrats didn’t fare better.
[…]
The president’s mendacious push to hastily reopen everything was less compelling to college-educated suburbanites, who tend to trust experts and can work from home, watch their kids and spare a laptop for online kindergarten. Mr. Trump lost the election mainly because he lost enough of these voters, including some moderate Republicans who otherwise voted straight Republican tickets.
Democrats need to rethink the idea that these voters would have put Democratic House and Senate candidates over the top if only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were less radiantly socialist. They need to accept that they took hits on the economy by failing to escape the trap Republicans set by doggedly refusing to do anything about the uncontained contagion destroying it.
And they need to understand how Mr. Trump saved his party by weaponizing polarization. Conservatives needed a way not to get spun by the president’s destabilizing act of disloyalty, so they steadied themselves by reaffirming their loyalty down the remainder of the ballot. They were voting against a personal crisis of identity, not the Green New Deal.
Democrats might have done better had sunny polls and their own biased partisan perceptions not misled them into believing that backlash to indisputably damning Republican failure would deliver an easy Senate majority — but not much better. Until the mind-bending spell of polarization breaks, everything that matters will be fiercely disputed and even the most egregious failures will continue to go unpunished.
Yeah, it’s the Times, so of course, Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats aren’t slammed for their politically motivated actions regarding derailing any form of COVID relief bill which proved to help the Trump White House and Republicans. They admitted this recently. It was also clear as day. No such bill was ever going to get Pelosi’s blessing so close to the election. Also, Chuck Schumer probably guessed correctly that a major piece of legislation like that would help Republicans keep the Senate. But hey, ‘orange man…bad,’ right? I also think that Trump suffering marginal losses with white working-class voters in the Rust Belt was probably more impactful regarding the Electoral College math, which is all that matters.
Politics is the organization of our animosities, so this decrying of hyper-partisanship is trash. What do we have in common with liberals? Nothing. Yet, the call for AOC to be less socialist is just hilarious. She, of all people, is not going to back down. And his wing of the Democratic Party is on the uptick. It’s the moderate and more establishment wings who are in danger of being obliterated by Ocasio-Cortez and her squad. Democrats may have won 2020, but it could cost them everything. And this war between the far left and the establishment left-of-center could be a long, bloody slog. The more traditional sectors may be filled with older folks, but they have money and connections to counter the energy the far left brings. They duke it out, and the GOP can be there to pick up the scraps and offer the winning message of liberty, jobs, economic growth, and most of all law and order.
Defund the police is coming back. Green New Deal is going to be pitched again. And Everest-sized tax increases are coming too, among other things. The circus is coming to town—and Joe Biden isn’t going to be able to hold it together. The man already fell over and broke his foot.
Tread water until Trump 2024 arrives.
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