FUCK! I DID NAZI THAT COMING!
Original title: WE FUCKING WON!!!
It’s been two-and-a-half months and it is now irrefutably real. He Who Shall Not Be Named was sworn in focusing on one of our most pressing issues – Manifest Destiny and the ownership of the Panama Canal. (Trust me - I did not watch one minute of it. I gleaned this from the coverage I could not avoid.) 1,600 marauding January 6 criminals - including Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio previously sentenced to 22 years - in prison are back on the street. And the fact that we are actually having hearings about Trumps horrendous picks (with a few exceptions) have convinced me that this is not just a nightmare I will wake up from.
Time for a painful postmortem. A little 5 stages of grief, a little what happened and a little what the hell are we going to do now. Despite these major setbacks, these few months have convinced me that we still can do good to improve the country.
Here’s where we are:
Trump’s Marginal Win: Trump won the popular vote by 2.5 million, 1.5% of the vote. I can’t believe he won the popular vote. But while he definitely beat us, it is NOT a mandate in the way Trump thinks it is.
The House: The House is 2020 to 2015, an extremely tight margin for Republicans. It is likely that the House will flip in 2026 because that always happens in the midterms.
The Senate: The Senate is 53 to 47. Because the VP JD Vance will be the tie-breaking vote, we would need to pick up 4 seats in 2026, which would be a heavy lift if not impossible. Possible pickups in 2026 are Maine, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. We would have to get all of them.
Here are a few of the more amusing headlines/posts right after the election. Humor is good, even in (especially in) dark times.
5 Stages of Grief:
Denial: I woke up on the Wednesday morning after the election feeling weirdly fine. That, my friends, is what Denial looks like. I am out of Denial now but I want to highly recommend Escapism. I started watching Madame Secretary, which I have never watched before. With 120 40-minute episodes, it should last me for a while. Since we will not be seeing any cool high-profile women in power in the executive branch for the next 4 years (no, Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi do not count), it is delightful to watch a fictional Secretary of State killing it. Speaking of which, I now have a Madame Secretary in my own family! My sister, Tana Senn, just became the Secretary of Children Youth & Family in Washington State!
Anger: Next stop was fuck all the people who voted for him (I was VERY angry). They will get what they deserve and it won’t be pretty. I am still in that phase to a certain extent but I am trying to be a better person. I deal with that side of myself by saying out loud “this is what the people wanted” every time I hear about something ridiculous coming down the pike.
Bargaining: I am not sure how to bargain in this situation. I did that pre-election:
If I and everyone I know do everything we can to work to help Kamala win, then we will not elect a fascist – tried that.
If independent journalists identify that actual women are dying from abortion bans, then women will be so furious that they will stop Trump in their tracks. Women definitely let us down. 45% of women overall voted for Trump. There were a few bright spots. 92% of Black women, the backbone of our base. https://cawp.rutgers.edu/blog/gender-differences-2024-presidential-vote. Plus, 88% of Jewish women, voted for Kamala. (Yeah, Jewesses – my peeps!) https://jewishdems.org/the-jewish-vote-came-through-for-democrats/
What I did NOT do and the Democratic party did not do enough, is focus on the economy and economic messaging relating to kitchen table issues. (More on that below.)
Depression: At some level depression will, sadly, be my default for the foreseeable future. But hopefully not all the time and not intensely.
Acceptance: I have already accepted the outcome. There were some left-wingers who were claiming that there was some sort of fraud. But that has thankfully died down. And with more than 90% of counties shifting in Trump’s direction compared to 2016, there is no fraud that could have been that effective.
But what I do not accept is that we have lost forever. We are down but we are not out.
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
To me, all the op eds and commentaries come down to three theories.
It’s the economy, stupid –I think that explains most of it.
Messaging. The right-wing media environment distorts everything and prevents us from getting our message across. I think that is also part of it.
Everyone is just a racist or sexist. I can’t count that out but it is too depressing to focus on.
1. IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID!
Household income during Trump I vs. the Biden Administration
Notice the large increase in real median household income in Trump’s first term between the beginning of 2017 and 2019 below. This is what people are talking about when they get misty-eyed about Trump’s economy. Most people do not blame him for the pandemic economy (which I think is fair although he did kill a lot of people because of his terrible COVID leadership so that was pretty bad). Household income started going down before the pandemic and was going down during the first year of Biden’s term. It then started going back up about a year in.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
The interesting thing is that although the above looks like it is not that bad, when you look at wage and salary workers (i.e., not including the stock market) it looks worse. Real income went up under Trump until the pandemic. It then went down by 5% in real dollars between the start of the pandemic and July 2024.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q#. The lower your income, the less likely you are to own stocks so this would have struck particularly hard for lower income Americans. https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-owns-stock.aspx
Finally, and relatedly, as the stock market went up, the really rich got richer but as seen above, as usual, that did not trickle down to the working person.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLTP1246
So what we see economically is that low-income people have been hit pretty badly on the economic front. And although the really rich are doing well, they know that Trump will cut their taxes because he already has and told them he would again.
And 78% of young people who cited the economy as their #1 issue voted for Trump. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/yes-trump-improved-young-men-drew-young-women-rcna179019
Another interesting thing is that some really blue states were being killed by inflation – that could explain some of the losses we took in typically blue areas.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/07/prices-are-up-in-all-us-metro-areas-but-some-much-more-than-others/sr_24-09-20_metroareainflation_2/
And we were not the only ones - Inflation Trends Predicted Election Outcomes Globally:
Developed countries throughout the world have undergone the same pattern. Their economies collapsed during COVID. To save the economic situation, they infused their economies with stimulus. As a result, they all experienced inflation. Although the US had the lowest inflation in the G7, Biden got almost no credit, probably because most people in the US pay absolutely no attention to the international economy.
Because of this, every governing party in a developed party in 2024, whether in the left, right or center, lost vote share in elections. This is the first time that this has happened in 120 years.
https://www.ft.com/content/e8ac09ea-c300-4249-af7d-109003afb893
My super smart college friend, Prof. Pat Egan, was in the Kornacki war room on election night helping to crunch the election returns. In addition to that being super cool, he wrote this article about exit poll results. This was the summary: “Voters were disappointed about the economy and their finances, all of which fueled a desire for change. And Trump cleaned up with ‘change’ voters.”
“Nearly half — 45% — of all voters said they were worse off financially than they were four years ago.”
“Though the economy is growing, with a low jobless rate and a booming stock market, 2 in 3 voters rated the U.S. economy poorly, a level higher than in 2020.”
“About three-quarters of voters nationwide said they felt negatively about the way things are going in the country, including 29% who said they were downright angry.”
So economic reality significantly drove the result. I am guessing that most of the people receiving this email are deeply invested in the stock market. Per the first chart above, our household incomes are doing well. So for the most part, we do not see the economy as being bad.
THE MANOSPHERE LED TO THE BROTOCRACY
This election was the “podcast election.”
More and more people are getting their news from social media. And those people are going for Trump. We need to take back the on-line space. One of the issues is that Democrats require 100% fealty to a range of issues. You fail on one, you get castigated – on-line and everywhere else. The Republicans on the other hand have one requirement – fealty to Trump. That is really easy to comply with (if humiliating in some cases). And it gives more breadth of what it is OK to address on-line.
This is not to say that we should ignore in-person contact. Trump had almost no ground game – no one was out knocking on doors. And our efforts made a difference in swing states where our ground game was strongest. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/27/trump-harris-ground-game-election/. But we were not able to overcome the on-line strength of the Republican influence.
In part as a result of Republicans’ on-line advantage, Trump’s support with young people significantly jumped in the 2024 election, especially among young men. Young men backed him at a rate of 41% in 2020 and 55% in 2024. Young men are going to college at lower rates than young women, they feel like the Democrats blame straight white men for various societal ills and buying a house is now out of reach for many young people. https://www.glamour.com/story/why-did-young-men-vote-for-donald-trump; https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/30/opinion/dating-bro-culture-manosphere-trump-cinderella.html. The Manosphere – the right-wing part of social media with commentators like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, etc. – has a big role in influencing young men ad low-information voters, groups where Trump has a lot of support. Trump appeared on these podcasts to set forth his policy vision to positive effect. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/yes-trump-improved-young-men-drew-young-women-rcna179019
In addition, as per usual, Democrats suck at communication. Biden was a great president in many ways, but communication was not his strength. I thought that Kamala did a great job but she only had 107 days to get her message out.
I will leave to those smarter than me as to what Democrat’s exact message should be but it should focus on bread-and-butter issues. We need to reclaim our identity as the working person’s party, rather than the party of college-educated elites. I know people mocked voting for a fascist racist rapist because of the price of eggs. But if your real income has gone down 5% and you were already on the edge financially, you probably are not going to vote for a party that you feel did not help you out for the last 4 years. (I know that Biden had a lot of signature legislation, but infrastructure and climate help take a long time to be felt by real people.) Bottom line is that Dems need to get an overarching economic message and actually start to deliver it well.
PEOPLE ARE RACISTS AND SEXIST
There is no question that Trump is racist and sexist and he has surrounded himself with some pretty racist and sexist people, including but not limited to childless cat lady obsessed J.D. Vance; Stephen Miller – the architect of the family separation policy and supporter of remigration “the forced repatriation or mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship”; and Pete Hegseth, whose own mother said “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say…get some help and take an honest look at yourself…I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years).” There has also been research showing that racism and sexism has driven support for Trump. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7812802/. I am sure that some people in the country did not want to vote for a black woman either for one attribute or the other. But I don’t know how many. If they were just core Trump voters then I am not as worried. There have always been racists and misogynists. It will be more alarming if that was what animated moderate voters and made a difference. Full results on a precinct-by-precinct basis will come out in the next months, with follow-on research. So I will wait for the updated research to see what happened in this election on that front
WHAT WE CAN DO NOW
For the next four years, the Trump administrations is going to do a lot of things that we are going to hate. There are two big ways we can make a difference:
Work on local, state and federal races: Continue to work on exciting political races and consider running yourself if you are passionate about an issue that you want to change to improve your community. A few exciting races coming up are the governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, in which two great national security women are running. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/22/sherrill-spanberger-virginia-newjersey-trump-2024/ Another one is a governor’s race in Colorado, where one of my college friends is running. I will separately send out an invitation to an event I am sponsoring. Here are the links to their campaigns:
Abigail Spanberger for Virginia Governor: https://abigailspanberger.com/
Mickie Sherill for New Jersey Governor: https://www.mikiesherrill.com/
Phil Weiser for Colorado Governor: https://philforcolorado.com/
Build Community: One of the things that is slipping away is a feeling of community. So many people work from home and spend a lot of time on-line for work and in their free time. Now is the time to build it back.
Volunteer for organizations serving people less fortunate than you are.
Get more involved in organizations that you are already part of but never make time for – such as religious institutions, team sports, etc.
Spend more time with your friends and family. They will make you feel better in dark times.
Try not to worry about things that have not happened yet. Do not be distracted by all the crazy things that Trump and his goons say. Remember that the vast majority of them will never happen, or will happen 5% so that Trump can declare victory and move on. It is a waste of time to anticipatorily stress.
Fight Against Trump’s Excesses: There area going to be a lot of organizations springing up to fight against Trump. I will cover them in this newsletter. If you are interested in doing that full time, join one of these organizations or start your own. Another great option is joining a state AG’s office in a Democratic state. They will be leading the effort in many areas. If you are at a firm, encourage your firm to do pro bono work in this area and devote your time to that.
Hang in there! There will be bad days but work your hardest to do fulfilling things that help people and keep you happy. Happy new year and here’s to making 2025 as good as we possibly can.
Best,
Mara