The Blame Game

Well as you might guess, the Democrats in the US are blaming everyone for the historic beating they took in the US Presidential election ....

Democrats Are Finger Pointing ....

..... a defeat that could turn into a disaster from their point of view, if they lose both chambers of congress (as seems very possible) when the counts are completed.

Trump won power by gaining incrementally in many small areas of the swing states across the land, all adding up to a big win in the US system by taking them all, even though the vast majority of the shifts in voting were under 5%.

In Wisconsin for example, Trump won by less than one percentage point - just over 28,000 votes at latest count. The urban areas remained Democrat, and the rural counties remained Republican, but just one rural county, Sauk, actually switched from Democrat to Republican out of the 72, and that tipped the state to a Republican gain. This was typical across the US as this map shows, and so won Trump his landslide.

US Voting Swing Patterns

Demographics, which Democrat analysts once thought back in 2008, would eventually allow Democrats to permanently own the Whitehouse ("Demography is Destiny") by 2044, hasn't panned out that way. The non college educated turned from Democrat to Republican (56%) under all three of Trumps presidential runs (with a partial reset when Joe Biden ran against Trump). While in the age ranges: Under 30's only 43% voted Trump, while in the 45-64 age band 54% voted Trump .... the other age bands were 30-44 (48%) and 65+ (49%) Trump.

Ethnically, the voting was generally as you might expect, nationally the majority of Whites (57%) voted Trump, The Blacks (85%) voted Harris, while the Latino's shifted to more voting for Trump (46%), and the same with the Asians (39%). In Nevada for example, surveys suggest that Nevada’s Asian voters, shifted towards Trump from 35% in 2020 to 50% in 2024. and although they were only 4% of the survey, it was this kind of general shift nationally, that Trump benefitted from.

So now the Democrats are finger pointing. Of course the one thing that they can't do is address the elephant in the room, which is that Kamala Harris was chosen as a Vice President to attract women and Black voters to Biden, but not because she was expected to become President. Her sex and race were a combination that it appears that many in the US couldn't vote for. Polls suggest many men in traditional Democrat areas voted against her.

So ignoring any misogynistic and racial bias of the lost voters is a little stupid, but its what the Democrats will do as they cast around for the author of their defeat. So Former US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who won her seat for the 20th time, has blamed Biden on two counts. saying that if President Joe Biden had exited the race sooner, the party might have done better as there would have been time for  "an open primary." 

She then argued that Harris would have done well in such a primary process and it would have made her "stronger going forward" (or possibly she would have been beaten by a far better candidate, not chosen solely for her sex and colour, but she couldn't actually bring herself to say that). "But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen, because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different. We live with what happened."

Meanwhile, unnamed Harris aides also laid the blame at Biden’s feet, and said he should have bowed out sooner, with one unnamed aide saying that “We ran the best campaign we could, considering Joe Biden was president. Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost tonight.”

But Biden supporters pushed back, when another unnamed but former Biden aide, said this week that former President Barack Obama’s advisers were to blame because they “publicly encouraged Democratic infighting to push Joe Biden out, and they didn’t even want Kamala Harris as the nominee.”

Another unnamed former Biden aide told another political news outlet, that Harris was making excuses. "How did you spend $1 billion and not f*cking win?.” Democrat Senator John Fetterman, Pennsylvania, blamed the election loss on those who plotted to oust Biden. “For those that decided and moved to break Biden, and then you got the election that you wanted, it’s appropriate to own the outcome and fallout.”

Then there were those who blamed Political Correctness and the far left .... New York Democratic congressman, Tom Suozzi, said the election loss was partly due to the party's focus on "being politically correct." The party had was not able to counteract Republican attacks on "anarchy on college campuses, de-fund the police, biological boys playing in girls' sports, and a general attack on traditional values."

Congressman Seth Moulton said that "Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

While another New York Democratic congressman, Ritchie Torres, blamed "the far left” as radicals within the party had “managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ or ‘From the River to the Sea’ or ‘LatinX’.” Explanation: Latin-X is a gender-neutral term used to describe people of Latin American descent or cultural identity in the United States. It is an alternative to the masculine "Latino" and feminine "Latina" and isn't a term that is popular or used amongst the community themselves.

Whether the next electoral cycle will prove the rule and reestablish 'demography is destiny' we will have to wait and see, but with Latino heritage Republicans such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis likely to try again for the Presidency (he was wiped out by Trump in an ill advised tilt to be nominated this time), demographics may not reset as the Democrat analysts hope.

Meanwhile Trump has gained numerical control of both chambers of Congress (The house of Representatives, and the Senate) in whats known as a governing trifecta, so on paper at least, for the next two years (until the mid-terms possibly change the balance), Trump will hold all the cards for nearly absolute power in the US, and will be largely unrestrained in what he attempts to do in that period.

However both Trump and Biden held governing trifecta's in the first years of their presidencies, and still had to negotiate with Congress, as in the Senate, all bills require a three-fifths majority (60 votes), and Trump doesn't have that .... so not totally unfettered power, but close enough to make possible many of his more controversial campaign pledges to be achievable .... something for us all to think about.