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Last Thursday, two days after Donald Trump and the Republicans’ win, I spoke with an American woman around my age (35) who was seriously struggling with the results.
“America elected a sex offender and convicted felon,” she said. “Now I am scared for my rights as a woman in this country” — a reference to the contentious abortion issue that was among the hot topics in this U.S. election cycle.
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose every one of her points is accurate: Donald Trump is a convicted felon, a sex offender, and a threat to women’s rights. This brings us to a puzzling question: Why, then, did he and the Republicans win by such a substantial margin?1
The answer may have less to do with Trump himself and more with the Democratic Party and its candidate, Kamala Harris. In a two-party system, voters do not simply support the candidate they prefer; some vote with the party (and/or candidate) they do not prefer in mind. Many Trump voters may not be die-hard fans of his, but in a choice between him and the Democrats’ increasingly dissonant agenda, they chose what they saw as, to put it colloquially, more “American.”
Instead of fixating on the modern-day Republican Party or Trump’s base, perhaps it is time to reflect on why Harris and her party failed to resonate.
Let’s consider this: Democrats’ support among women actually declined. While Harris won 53 percent of the female vote, Biden had won 55 percent in 2020, showing that even women did not feel as strongly aligned with the Democratic Party as before. Trump, meanwhile, won 46 percent of women this year, up 3 percent from the last time he ran for president.
Naturally, many self-styled “Democrats” are spinning this humiliating loss as an issue of gender or race. But Trump’s victory was not a decisive blow, akin to a boxer dominating his opponent. Sometimes, a team wins simply because the opponent sh*ts their pants, so to speak. In the long run-up to this election, the Democratic Party sh*t their pants on a myriad of occasions.
Shortly after October 7th, in virtually every conversation about Jews in America, the Biden-Harris administration began grouping antisemitism (which is almost always unjustified) with “Islamophobia” (which is almost always justified).
I recall last November that Harris found the gall to spiritlessly unveil an “anti-Islamophobia” strategy — just one day after the FBI director told senators that antisemitism is reaching “historic levels” in the United States.
Only America’s academic and media elites, over-privileged millennials, self-declared “oppressed” people, and ignorant college students bought this “Islamophobia” nonsense. The rest of America was shocked by October 7th and the pro-Hamas faction of the Democratic Party because, among other things, they remember 9/11 quite vividly and know jihad when they see it.
In July, Kamala Harris the Vice President deliberately skipped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. By choosing to sit out, Harris sidestepped a deeply loyal U.S. ally facing a seven-front existential war, while subtly signaling a disturbing shift in diplomatic norms.
Harris’ absence is no less troubling for the precedent it sets. If America’s leaders, especially at the highest levels, can selectively dodge engagements with leaders of allied nations based on domestic discomfort or political calculations, the notion of “steadfast” alliances quickly becomes conditional.
As such, Harris and the Democrats trivialized the American-Israeli relationship, making it look less like a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and more like an inconvenient partnership, convenient only when it suits current political tides.
It also shows just how out of touch Harris and the Democratic Party are with “Main Street USA”; a recent poll of Americans about the 20 “most favored institutions” in the U.S. has Israel at number six, whereas campus protestors, the Palestinian Authority, Antifa, and Hamas (obviously) occupy four of the five least-favorable institutions (China being the other one).
Finally, as an American Jew, I was particularly put off by Harris’ pick for vice president. Well, more specifically, I was particularly put off by who Harris did not pick for vice president.
Josh Shapiro is Jewish and the present-day (Democratic) governor of Pennsylvania — a state where he is decisively popular. As such, Shapiro was widely viewed as a top vice presidential candidate for the Harris campaign because he could have helped Harris carry Pennsylvania, a must-win state for both her and Trump’s campaigns.
However, some in the Democratic Party’s base balked at Shapiro for his stance on the ongoing Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran war, as well as his historical support for the Jewish state. A number of voices on the far-Left also attacked Shapiro, labeling him “Genocide Josh” for Israel’s (perfectly justified) response to October 7th that has involved absolutely no inkling of genocide.
Ultimately, Harris opted for Tim Walz, the uncomfortably mega-“progressive” governor of Minnesota. I do not believe that Shapiro’s Jewishness was the primary reason that she chose Walz instead. I think that Team Harris said to themselves something like this:
“We already have a Jew on our side in Doug Emhoff (Harris’ husband), so we don’t really need another Jew. Let’s choose a ‘real’ progressive so that Harris (who has always been a ‘progressive’) can start taking moderate stances to appeal to more Americans, while our vice presidential candidate does the work of appealing to our ‘progressive’ (extreme Left) base.”
And that is the real issue here: So many people in the U.S. are tired of this identity-politics, pseudo-progressive hogwash.
Most Americans acknowledge our racial issues and our country’s imperfect history. We believe that those who are disadvantaged by the circumstances of their birth should be given the opportunity to succeed.
What we reject, however, is the idea that — in order to address the issues of the past — new issues must be created. The “progressive” doctrine of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is absurdly racist. We know it and we despise it precisely because you cannot halt racism with more racism.
What’s more, most Americans do not believe in extreme socialism, let alone communism (both of which are pillars of the “progressive” movement). We believe in meritocracy. We do not care about the rich being rich because we know that we live in a country where being rich is available to most anyone with the talent and drive to make it. We do not resent success; we celebrate it.
Most Americans are also relatively optimistic. This means that the “progressive” view of American history as a laundry list of purely evil transgressions for which we must eternally apologize is utterly beyond the pale. We believe in moving forward and correcting along the way, not endlessly obsessing about the past.
Donald Trump won because he is not a “progressive” and his opponent was, even as Harris tried to rebrand herself in the final three months of this election, similar to how Barack Obama forged his life story to be more appealing to “mainstream America.” The American people did not want a female version of Obama: pseudo-progressive, unqualified, and obsessed with identity politics.
On the campaign trail, Tim Walz accused Trump of being “unhinged.” Interesting how America chose “unhinged” Trump over the guy who advocated for tampons in boys’ bathrooms at schools. (And Democrats wonder why they did not win.)
Not only are Americans not that stupid, but we are tired of being told that illiberalism to save liberalism makes perfect sense.
We are tired of much of the mainstream media pretending to care about “American democracy” when these outlets really just care about manipulating yellow journalism to produce sky-high profits.
We are tired of being gaslit by so-called “Democrats” who brush off the unmistakable rise in crime as overhyped or not that big of a deal.
We are tired of “progressives” hijacking pop culture — from education and Big Tech, to arts and entertainment, and even corporate America.
We are tired of those who call themselves “Democrats” obnoxiously trying to convince us that democracy is only democracy when you vote for the Democrats, and that a Democratic Party loss is unconscionably undemocratic, never mind if that loss was a product of actual democracy.
And we are tired of all this redefining of gender and sexuality and identity and pronouns and the curriculum of “feelings matter more than facts.” As one social media account put it, showing two “progressives” sitting together, one wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh: “I can’t believe that a year of us screaming at Zionists, taking over buildings, destroying college property and burning American flags didn’t defeat Trump.”2
And yet many Democrats are not looking introspectively at what they could do better to course-correct their party. They are blaming Trump and the Republicans and parts of American society for all sorts of things — some of which might be accurate, but that is not the point. Long ago I learned that it is more effective to make sure my side of the street is clean before I go on harping about how much my neighbor’s side is not. And right now, the Democratic Party’s side of the street is an absolute dumpster fire.
As someone aptly wrote in the last few days, foolishness says the Democrats lost because everyone who did not vote for them is stupid, racist, or misogynistic. Wisdom says the Democrats lost because something about their party needs serious change.3
Heck, some 64 percent of Native Americans voted for Trump and the Republicans. I am old enough to remember when the Democratic Party’s narrative was that only “White people” like Trump; now their narrative is that everyone who voted for him must be uneducated. If you want to win a future election, you might want to refrain from implying that all the folks who did not vote for you — including the people who you claim to champion like Latinos, Black Americans, Native Americans, and women — are stupid.
It is tragic how many Democrats are unable or unwilling to engage in introspection and self-awareness. If they did, they would see quite clearly that they shot themselves in the foot. When you shoot yourself in the foot, do you blame the gun (i.e. Trump and the Republicans and their voters) or do you blame the person who pulled the trigger?
As the impeccable philosopher Thomas Sowell once said:
“One of the most pathetic — and dangerous — signs of our times is the growing number of individuals and groups who believe that no one can possibly disagree with them for any honest reason.”
There was a glaring preview last Tuesday night, shortly before the major U.S. news networks reluctantly announced that Trump and the Republicans were on their way to victory, when the journalists working on the TV channel, MSNBC, started to appear increasingly agitated. The reality was hard to ignore: Harris and the Democrats were not only losing in pivotal swing states, but also in areas that her comrade, Joe Biden, had won by big differences just four years earlier.
The camera panned from one commentator to the next, seemingly desperate for some explanation, and then the audience suddenly received this glaring preview of the impending blame game.
“I think it’s important to say, anyone who has experienced this country’s history, and knows it, cannot have believed that it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color,” offered one of these journalists. “I mean, this was really a historic, flawlessly run campaign.”
Historic? Flawlessly run? Is this not the same type of reality distortion that Democrats have long accused one of (in their eyes) the world’s greatest evils, Fox News, of perpetuating?
Or is there something deeper here?
Maybe it is not just about hypocrisy, like all the Democrats who wailed about the modern-day “Hitler” being elected president a week ago, yet who suddenly became very quiet about what happened in Amsterdam last Thursday.
Maybe much of the Democratic Party’s policies have become entrenched in gaslighting, lies, indoctrination, deception, false pretenses, and artificial excuses. As one billionaire mega-donor to the Democratic Party said last week, following the election, “I think the policies of the Democratic Party are fundamentally broken. They have become the exact opposite of where they were even 20 years ago.”4
I don’t need you to tell me that “the Republicans do the same thing.” I know they do the same thing. But they do not brand themselves as those who are more sophisticated and courteous and caring and “liberal,” and those who honorably take the high road. Today’s Democratic Party leaders tried to manipulate Americans into thinking that they were the “good guys” — until the mask came off for us to plainly see.
Some say that this is the end of liberalism. I vehemently disagree. Truth be told, liberalism was hijacked by the extreme Left and the goalposts were moved without asking for most people’s consent. Therefore, liberalism has not changed; the Democratic Party did.
I am referring to the electoral college, not the popular vote, since the former is how the U.S. presidency is determined. Trump’s Republicans notched 312 electoral votes, compared to Harris and the Democrats’ 226.
Elder of Zion on X
JoDavi on Substack
“Trump wins! How it happened and what’s next.” All-In Podcast.
I will tell you why Harris lost, because the economy for the average person stinks. But all the Biden White House talked about was paying off student loans for those with 6 figure incomes and telling the average person they were too stupid to know how good the economy was. It wasn't for any other reason. When people cant put food on the table and have problem keeping a roof over their head, they will not vote for the party in power. Simple.
One of the funnier bits of the rhetoric was The Guardian wailing that Trump's election opens the door to Israel removing its remaining restraints in Gaza & Lebanon. That was the whole benefit! They can finally finish the job they've never been allowed to finish.
(Apologies but I just can't stop reading The G out of habit)