Election Week:
What and Who Lost the Election?
(And what do we do now?)

Dick Tuck was a political prankster before Watergate, way back when pranksterism was funny and kind of cool.

Watergate changed all that as so‑called pranksters went to political dirty tricks, sabotage, vote stealing, illegality, and frequent prison terms.

Back in more innocent days, Tuck was late to a 1966 strategy meeting and discovered he had been made a candidate for California State Senator. He lost in the Democratic primary. Badly. On election day voters might as well have thrown rocks at him. He got less than 10% of the vote.

As he watched the tsunami level election totals roll in,
he announced to his election night gathering,
The people have spoken…

Then he added:
…the bastards.

So what happened this week? What lesson is to be learned?

From The Magnificent Seven:
A funeral director explains how community ethnic hatred complicates a burial.

He doesn’t share the prevailing attitude. He wants everyone treated equally.

Well in that case, get that hearse rolling.
I can’t, my driver’s quit!
He’s prejudiced too, huh?
Well, when it comes to a chance of getting his head blown off,
he’s downright bigoted.

When voters feel threatened by inflation, crime, or cultural change, fairness and equality take a hit.

Let’s see what say our founts of wisdom:

• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson has a new approach to the election results:

  I keep hitting "refresh" on my browser but the election results won't change. Going to try unplugging and plugging back in.

  — James Wigderson (@jwigderson) November 8, 2024

• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz asks what many are wondering:
  What The Hell Just Happened, America?

  Key caution (Why the timing of his post may have been a bad idea):
  Writing while grieving deeply is like drunk‑tweeting: it’s likely not going to come out well or effectively convey anything helpful. I don’t feel like I have real encouragement to offer you and I don’t want to bullshit you or myself by trying to pretend that I do.

  Key Other hand:
  But maybe reaching out to you right now, in the middle of the disorienting hurricane inside my head and with this massive stone sitting upon my chest is the best time: because some days the beautiful mess is a whole lot more mess than it is beautiful, and this is one of those days.

• Nan’s Notebook has nothing more to say than 😢.

• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil declares a worldwide end of the American era or at least the end of America being better than this.

• Disaffected and it Feels So Good is despondent and a little ticked off, but does not see the election as an aberration.

• Legal expert Imani Gandy seems somewhat down:

  I keep randomly screeching “DONALD TRUMP’S AMERICA” to see if i can make it fun but it’s not fun

  — Imani Gandy (@angryblacklady.bsky.social) November 7, 2024 at 9:58 PM

• PZ Myers decides that his decades of experience have taught him never again to say it can’t get any worse.

• Master of Rant, Max’s Dad, describing election night as a gut punch, starts with a piece of cautionary advice for America: Well, you spoke. And now you will have to deal with your choice.

• Noted author John Scalzi has the exact two word reaction shared by many of us, only one of which is an expletive (Yeah, I counted carefully).

• SilverAppleQueen rants about the election.

• Hackwhackers brings us an election analysis directly from Ulysses S. Grant, then steps back to regroup.

• @whiskeywhistle98 watches, listens, and congratulates America (Sort of):
   
  

• Dave Dubya illustrates, in a single meme, how crime pays.

• driftglass sees the result of two elections as a parallel to deliberate national tragedy from 23 years ago.

• As might be expected, I have a thought or two of my own.

• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors advises that our disappointment not push us into despair.

  Key counsel:
  It was a wave, but it was not a mandate, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger does point to a mandate. He thinks President elect Trump did get one, but not the mandate he thinks.

• Infidel753 suggests possible reasons for the loss, immigration overpowering the abortion issue. But he expresses his greatest impatience with our refusal to even attempt to understand opposing views.

  Key political flaw:
  Being unable to understand something is not a virtue. Nobody ever won an argument by standing around slack‑jawed with shock that anybody could be so depraved as to have opinions and priorities different from their own. You’re not going to win elections that way either.

  Infidel goes into some detail. The unexpectedly decisive loss may contain a few glimmers of hope. One is that the annoying, and sometimes damaging, excesses of the self‑described Progressive left will be left in the dust, while unpopular Republican extremism will remain uncorrected.

  I can relate peripherally. Last week, I posted a link to a satiric Onion video about JD Vance and childless children.

  I received, and posted, this indignant comment:

  Sir. I don’t have kids and my preferred pronoun is “child‑free.” Please do not use the slur, “childless.” Please be an ally and share this. Thank you.

  I remain unable to tell whether it was a form of parody of the fashionably complex linguistic codes leftward folk occasionally insist on.
  (Who next will be sentenced to worktime sensitivity sessions for having a brainfart on LGBTQRSTUVW)
  [Update: It was a parody. (Damn, I’m old!)]

  Infidel relates far more serious incidents in which reasonable, or sometimes semi‑reasonable, objections to prevailing ideology result in unreasonable professional cost.

  To be sure, there will be Trump instigated damage to great numbers of vulnerable people. Infidel suggests ways state and local government, as well as ordinary citizens, can act to mitigate the harm.

• In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson acknowledges that both racism and sexism played an important role, but says that a flood of disinformation, especially from Russia, amplified both.
   
  The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.

• From The Borowitz Report, in reaction to cowardice of Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, Americans are switching from the Post to gummies.

• At The Moderate Voice, retired U.S. Air Force Major Dorian de Wind goes to The New York Times to find reactions of readers, mostly profoundly sad, many fearing for the future.

  Key comment from Oakwood Ohio:
  Well, America, you have shown us who we are. And it’s not a pretty sight.

• Dave Columbo is reminded of lessons learned in 2016, that much as the right is manipulated by media to be angry, many on the left are soothed to complacency by the certainty that decency will win in the end:
   
  

• Clickbait satirist Reductress has news that Trump is planning a unique, first time ever, commemoration of his election victory.

• Scotties Playtime gathers a few somewhat bitter internet autopsies ascribing the loss variously to economic and cultural despair, middle‑of‑the‑roadism, sexism, racism, and Muskism.

• News Corpse asks what the election tells us about the nature of our nation.

  Key question:
  And Trump has now won reelection over his opponent, Kamala Harris, who was deemed unacceptable due to her being an extraordinarily well qualified Black woman with a sterling reputation and resume.

  So What Is America? Who votes for this?

• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit puts much of the blame for the loss on President Biden. He waited to step back until all the primaries had passed and Kamala Harris became the inevitable candidate.

  Key handicap:
  That’s not a slam of Vice President Harris, but asking a country where Trumpist‑style racism is engrained to choose a Black Asian woman as president was a bridge too far. So was asking her to mount a hundred‑day general campaign for the job.

• Julian Sanchez, on Threads, has advice for Democrats: Don’t blame the Harris campaign strategy:

  View on Threads

• CalicoJack in The Psy of Life sees Tuesday as a win for toxic masculinity.

• Tamra Brown previews the reasoning ability of men:
   
  

• Tommy Christopher hears Jim Acosta’s question to a panel of three women, Are there women who don’t want a woman president?

• At The Onion, tireless civil rights crusaders are not so smug now:

  Key gloat:
  Right about now they must feel pretty stupid for strutting around like a better future was possible, huh?

• Kevin Drum sees an overriding issue that may have obscured all others: economics, especially inflation.

  Or maybe it was not just inflation after all.

• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged is resigned to voters acting on disinterest and non-information.

  Key insight:
  Not everyone is me.

  Key empathy:
  Regular folks are sick, they are exhausted, they don’t know all this is lies and some of it feels true, and even if they were predisposed to vote at all for Harris- it turns them off of politics altogether.

• At Juanita Jean’s Dangerous Beauty Salon, Nick Carraway reacts to the election, going to early Christian history to advise us:

  Let’s all begin with a deep breath.

• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, atheist Bruce deconstructs a common religious belief that, although you can’t see them, angels and demons are real.

• Out of the hospital, Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes has a great fall, which accelerates to a medical emergency, so back to the ER where he encounters varying medical competence.

• The Journal of Improbable Research goes to Oreo cookies as a cholesterol treatment to illustrate how to explain a strange idea by talking really fast.