We all forget, or maybe aren't aware of two realities, that should ALSO be considered in terms of retrospective spasms when it comes to the 2024 election.
1) In 2024 (as in 2020 and before that in 2016), Tr*mp did not secure even 50% of the popular vote. More people voted for candidates NOT Tr*mp than for him. Which means despite NEVER once winning an actual majority of the popular vote in three elections, our flawed system has still allowed him to be put into the office of the Presidency...twice(!).
Further, when you consider the voting eligible population, and that over 30% did NOT vote in any three of those elections, you see that his share of the electorate has not only missed the 50% mark, but even the 33% threshold! What we do know, is that in three elections 12 million more Americans chose to vote for someone NOT Tr*mp. That's the clear (super) majority speaking.
2) But, if that margin doesn't seem high enough given the naked racism, nativism, sexism and LGBTQ-hatred that are hallmarks of Tr*mp/MAGA's kleptocracy (a corrupt government of wannabe mob bosses extorting everyone from universities and law firms, to wholesale industries and countries), keep in mind that between 2020 and 2022, 19 million Americans were systematically purged from voter rolls; in 2024 alone, that number was 4.7 million.
Before we go around looking for reasons to blame the outcome of the election (primarily) on what individual Democratic electeds and/or the Democratic party writ large did or did not do (which, trust me, I have no interest in defending per se), let's please not lose sight of the effect of outright voter suppression and disenfranchisement that has been core to the Repub's playbook since Bush v. Gore in 2000, and has ONLY accelerated under Shelby v. County and the January 6 Big Lie to undermine what free and fair elections we still have.
Solutions will always be inadequate, if we don't recognize and address ALL the root causes of the fascist takeover underway, not just the pet causes, which the media/punditry/consulting class adulate.
Tr*mp and MAGA are a truly, unpopular minority (polls tell us that, but polls don't get to the heart of just how much they are an aberration, as Mike so eloquently explained in today's Substack Live). It is literally a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. The media sane-washes and normalizes the horrors we're seeing, but that makes them no less horrific: abductions, human trafficking, and imprisonment in foreign concentration camps. Seriously, this is where we are?
We must not forget WE—the people who are FOR the freedoms to decide if/when/or how to start or grow our families, to earn a living wage, to read and learn about the truth of our past, to afford healthcare, to realize our personal dreams, and to love who we love—WE are the supermajority and WE have the agency and power stand up and fight back.
While insightful, the essay on the "anti-MAGA majority" overlooks crucial variables impacting the Democratic Party's struggles. It fails to adequately address the internal failures of Democratic consultants, whose often generic and out-of-touch strategies have yielded diminishing returns.
Furthermore, the analysis neglects the deterioration of the Democratic brand itself, which, for many, has become synonymous with an out-of-touch elite, especially coastal elite.
Finally, the essay sidesteps the undeniable decline of state and national party infrastructures, weakening grassroots organizing and voter engagement. These omissions paint an incomplete picture of the challenges facing the anti-MAGA coalition.
I write this as a life long D, former elected and appointed state official in Iowa.
The Democrats Messaging Wise have been completely Lost since Citizens United. A lot of the problem is that its core Brand took a Hard Left Social Justice turn in 2010.
The goal is to decimate the middle and lower classes to keep them sick and destitute. Then they are malleable. I detailed the CBO data before the CR bill came out of committee. The CBO projected the deficit at $52 trillion in 2035 without the new CR bill. I detail how it will actually be $60 trillion. Think $3 trillion annually in interest. https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/over-budget-chaos?r=3m1bs
what a piece of complete garbage you have littered my inbox with. more biden bashing ignoring his accomplishments and the historically awful political environment he faced daily, more lazy bullshit blaming the dems while letting the idiot voters and hateful reoublicans off the hook as if they did not create endorse and enable everything that is now taking place, including the voter suppression and the years of republican rhetoric that won him the election. as if the voters who put him back in the white house are just “low information or “less engaged” and didn’t know goddamn well what they voted for. as if people don’t have the basic social responsibility to educate themselves enough to get off the goddamn couch and vote when our democracy is on the line. as if the people who who tried to warn a bunch of deliberately ignorant fools, didnt warn them loud enough or w/ the right words or focused on the right issues with the right amount of popularity in that days polls. . instead of using your platform to address one of a million issues happening RIGHT NOW that are costing/will cost people their lives, you are opportunistically whining about the past, patting your intellectually superior self on the back for having all the answers to the wrong questions no one is asking.
The liberals who disdain this country's voting population as permanently "center-right" are wholly mistaken. Were this the case, the Right would not be spending untold millions on voter suppression, gerrymandering, and undermining election integrity. The fault lies not with voters, but with a Democratic Party that will not advance an agenda of affordable housing, universal health care, debt-free education, and rigorous unionization, i.e., actually helping the multi-racial working class. Instead it stokes white male grievance politics to peel off support for the GOP, because it's led by people more aligned with their GOP colleagues than with its own base.
“the latest polling tells us less about Trump than it does about the catastrophic failure of not just Democratic campaign professionals, but also civil society and the media, to effectively inform voters of the consequences of the choice they had before them.”
I spent 30 years as a university professor (and many years before that as a student). The paragraph above is an incorrect - even if common - read of the situation.
As a teacher I learned early on of a crucial difference between “teaching” and “learning.”
“Teaching” - presenting information, suggesting connections and interpretations, offering exercises in thinking critically about what is seen, heard, or otherwise experienced - is something a teacher can do.
On the other hand, “learning” - internalizing and integrating what a teacher makes available - is something only the student can do. It is out of the hands of even the best teachers.
Teachers can facilitate learning, but they can’t learn for the student.
Last November close to 50% of the voting public made a choice. It was an informed choice: informed by 2017-2020, by Covid, by Jan 6, and by media coverage that was qualitatively superior to 2016 (even if it could have been better).
There are always students that refuse to learn. Blaming the teacher doesn’t shift responsibility. It does, however, make it more difficult to figure out the best way to move forward.
From this piece I gained better understanding what went wrong. I was empowered to call my representatives with more confidence and updated talking points.
I'm sorry for the world they are inheriting. I worked all my life to make things better in the future. When Trump was elected in 2016, my husband and I gave up and moved to France, where we feel much safer and more accepted. I passed the burnt-out torch. The rest of you will have to get your collective acts together if you care enough. However, Americans are among the most selfish and self-centered people I have ever encountered, and I have traveled around the world, tho never to East Asia.
Fortunately, we have no children, and most of our relatives belong on Mars with Musk.
The Democratic messaging framework has fundamentally collapsed, and the evidence extends beyond national politics. What happened nationally mirrors Iowa's transformation from a purple state to one where Republicans successfully rebranded Democrats so thoroughly that the party now finds itself on defense.
This isn't about a single campaign or isolated issue. The crisis runs deeper into the very architecture of how Democrats communicate. When my two sons, both in their thirties and well aware of my background as a former elected official, expressed their disenchantment with the Democratic Party, the scope of this messaging failure became crystal clear. One son had even worked for Obama's campaign, yet both felt disconnected from the party. Neighbors and friends echoed their sentiments.
Their concerns weren't rooted in specific policy disagreements but rather in the party's overall approach to messaging, the effectiveness of its messengers, and the channels through which it attempts to reach voters. The Republican Party succeeded in defining Democrats before Democrats could define themselves, creating a narrative vacuum that opponents filled with devastating effectiveness.
This represents a comprehensive failure across three critical dimensions: the messaging itself lacks clarity and emotional resonance, the messengers often fail to connect authentically with diverse audiences, and the means of messaging haven't adapted to how people actually consume information today. The result is a party that speaks but isn't heard, advocates but isn't trusted, and campaigns but doesn't inspire.
My father and stepfather both served in WWII. My half-brother was in the Air Force, and his son, my half-nephew, just retired from the Marine Corps--he was in military intelligence, which is an oxymoron. My maternal grandfather joined the Navy too late to serve in WWI. I have relatives who fought on the wrong side in the Civil War.
My father served on Guadalcanal, one of the worst battles in the Pacific. He was in the Army Air Corps at Henderson Field. He became very sick with asthma and was sent to Colorado Springs to recover his health, which is how I happened to be born there 3 days after Alamogordo, which was not all that far away from CS. My dad went back into the new Air Force and served in Korea and Vietnam, plus he was stationed in the Netherlands. He was not a combat person--he ran a warehouse--but he did receive the Bronze Star. He was a 6-ft, 1-inch platinum blond--I inherited his asthma.
My husband is a Mayflower descendant (1620), and my mother's family came to Virginia in 1660 from Maidstone, Kent. My husband's father's family emigrated to the USA from Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War because they would not live under the Germans--they were French patriots.
In 2018, after a lifetime of working for all the right things, my husband and I moved to Paris, France, one of the best decisions we ever made.
Much of my family lives in Texass and is MAGA. I wish Musk would take them to Mars with him.
Abraham Lincoln's sister married a member of my family, and other members of my family were in the first party of pioneers to successfully bring covered wagons across the Sierra Nevada to CA.
We all forget, or maybe aren't aware of two realities, that should ALSO be considered in terms of retrospective spasms when it comes to the 2024 election.
1) In 2024 (as in 2020 and before that in 2016), Tr*mp did not secure even 50% of the popular vote. More people voted for candidates NOT Tr*mp than for him. Which means despite NEVER once winning an actual majority of the popular vote in three elections, our flawed system has still allowed him to be put into the office of the Presidency...twice(!).
Further, when you consider the voting eligible population, and that over 30% did NOT vote in any three of those elections, you see that his share of the electorate has not only missed the 50% mark, but even the 33% threshold! What we do know, is that in three elections 12 million more Americans chose to vote for someone NOT Tr*mp. That's the clear (super) majority speaking.
Reference source: https://election.lab.ufl.edu/voter-turnout/
2) But, if that margin doesn't seem high enough given the naked racism, nativism, sexism and LGBTQ-hatred that are hallmarks of Tr*mp/MAGA's kleptocracy (a corrupt government of wannabe mob bosses extorting everyone from universities and law firms, to wholesale industries and countries), keep in mind that between 2020 and 2022, 19 million Americans were systematically purged from voter rolls; in 2024 alone, that number was 4.7 million.
Reference source: https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote/vote-suppression/voter-purges
Before we go around looking for reasons to blame the outcome of the election (primarily) on what individual Democratic electeds and/or the Democratic party writ large did or did not do (which, trust me, I have no interest in defending per se), let's please not lose sight of the effect of outright voter suppression and disenfranchisement that has been core to the Repub's playbook since Bush v. Gore in 2000, and has ONLY accelerated under Shelby v. County and the January 6 Big Lie to undermine what free and fair elections we still have.
Solutions will always be inadequate, if we don't recognize and address ALL the root causes of the fascist takeover underway, not just the pet causes, which the media/punditry/consulting class adulate.
Tr*mp and MAGA are a truly, unpopular minority (polls tell us that, but polls don't get to the heart of just how much they are an aberration, as Mike so eloquently explained in today's Substack Live). It is literally a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. The media sane-washes and normalizes the horrors we're seeing, but that makes them no less horrific: abductions, human trafficking, and imprisonment in foreign concentration camps. Seriously, this is where we are?
We must not forget WE—the people who are FOR the freedoms to decide if/when/or how to start or grow our families, to earn a living wage, to read and learn about the truth of our past, to afford healthcare, to realize our personal dreams, and to love who we love—WE are the supermajority and WE have the agency and power stand up and fight back.
P.S. Footnote #5 simply the pièce de résistance!
You are 100% correct, but it does not matter. The fix is in until the human race dies out, which I hope will be soon.
While insightful, the essay on the "anti-MAGA majority" overlooks crucial variables impacting the Democratic Party's struggles. It fails to adequately address the internal failures of Democratic consultants, whose often generic and out-of-touch strategies have yielded diminishing returns.
Furthermore, the analysis neglects the deterioration of the Democratic brand itself, which, for many, has become synonymous with an out-of-touch elite, especially coastal elite.
Finally, the essay sidesteps the undeniable decline of state and national party infrastructures, weakening grassroots organizing and voter engagement. These omissions paint an incomplete picture of the challenges facing the anti-MAGA coalition.
I write this as a life long D, former elected and appointed state official in Iowa.
Dems can't succeed in Fox universe
The Democrats Messaging Wise have been completely Lost since Citizens United. A lot of the problem is that its core Brand took a Hard Left Social Justice turn in 2010.
I live in France, where the Democrats would be a centrist party.
The goal is to decimate the middle and lower classes to keep them sick and destitute. Then they are malleable. I detailed the CBO data before the CR bill came out of committee. The CBO projected the deficit at $52 trillion in 2035 without the new CR bill. I detail how it will actually be $60 trillion. Think $3 trillion annually in interest. https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/over-budget-chaos?r=3m1bs
They knew, they were warned. Elections have consequences and they are finding out.
what a piece of complete garbage you have littered my inbox with. more biden bashing ignoring his accomplishments and the historically awful political environment he faced daily, more lazy bullshit blaming the dems while letting the idiot voters and hateful reoublicans off the hook as if they did not create endorse and enable everything that is now taking place, including the voter suppression and the years of republican rhetoric that won him the election. as if the voters who put him back in the white house are just “low information or “less engaged” and didn’t know goddamn well what they voted for. as if people don’t have the basic social responsibility to educate themselves enough to get off the goddamn couch and vote when our democracy is on the line. as if the people who who tried to warn a bunch of deliberately ignorant fools, didnt warn them loud enough or w/ the right words or focused on the right issues with the right amount of popularity in that days polls. . instead of using your platform to address one of a million issues happening RIGHT NOW that are costing/will cost people their lives, you are opportunistically whining about the past, patting your intellectually superior self on the back for having all the answers to the wrong questions no one is asking.
Wow, in-the-weeds but insightful guidance for Democrats if they’re listening, and they damn well better be.
This essay really spoke to me as someone who has a 57 year record of voting for democrats and recalls feeling only tepid enthusiasm for lots of them
The liberals who disdain this country's voting population as permanently "center-right" are wholly mistaken. Were this the case, the Right would not be spending untold millions on voter suppression, gerrymandering, and undermining election integrity. The fault lies not with voters, but with a Democratic Party that will not advance an agenda of affordable housing, universal health care, debt-free education, and rigorous unionization, i.e., actually helping the multi-racial working class. Instead it stokes white male grievance politics to peel off support for the GOP, because it's led by people more aligned with their GOP colleagues than with its own base.
“the latest polling tells us less about Trump than it does about the catastrophic failure of not just Democratic campaign professionals, but also civil society and the media, to effectively inform voters of the consequences of the choice they had before them.”
I spent 30 years as a university professor (and many years before that as a student). The paragraph above is an incorrect - even if common - read of the situation.
As a teacher I learned early on of a crucial difference between “teaching” and “learning.”
“Teaching” - presenting information, suggesting connections and interpretations, offering exercises in thinking critically about what is seen, heard, or otherwise experienced - is something a teacher can do.
On the other hand, “learning” - internalizing and integrating what a teacher makes available - is something only the student can do. It is out of the hands of even the best teachers.
Teachers can facilitate learning, but they can’t learn for the student.
Last November close to 50% of the voting public made a choice. It was an informed choice: informed by 2017-2020, by Covid, by Jan 6, and by media coverage that was qualitatively superior to 2016 (even if it could have been better).
There are always students that refuse to learn. Blaming the teacher doesn’t shift responsibility. It does, however, make it more difficult to figure out the best way to move forward.
From this piece I gained better understanding what went wrong. I was empowered to call my representatives with more confidence and updated talking points.
The MAGA crowd would immolate themselves on Trump's corpse rather than abandon their delusions.
I predict a 50% fall in the value of the dollar by the end of this year unless the super-rich absorb huge losses to maintain their power.
Not just that, but an Economic Depression will be declared by the end of the year.
agreed
As long as Rupert Murdoch and Trump are alive, there is no hope, tho the election of Leo XIV is good news indeed.
WRONG--they would all vote for Trump again if they could--and maybe they will be able to.
I'm sorry for the world they are inheriting. I worked all my life to make things better in the future. When Trump was elected in 2016, my husband and I gave up and moved to France, where we feel much safer and more accepted. I passed the burnt-out torch. The rest of you will have to get your collective acts together if you care enough. However, Americans are among the most selfish and self-centered people I have ever encountered, and I have traveled around the world, tho never to East Asia.
Fortunately, we have no children, and most of our relatives belong on Mars with Musk.
Readers motivated further sharing.
The Democratic messaging framework has fundamentally collapsed, and the evidence extends beyond national politics. What happened nationally mirrors Iowa's transformation from a purple state to one where Republicans successfully rebranded Democrats so thoroughly that the party now finds itself on defense.
This isn't about a single campaign or isolated issue. The crisis runs deeper into the very architecture of how Democrats communicate. When my two sons, both in their thirties and well aware of my background as a former elected official, expressed their disenchantment with the Democratic Party, the scope of this messaging failure became crystal clear. One son had even worked for Obama's campaign, yet both felt disconnected from the party. Neighbors and friends echoed their sentiments.
Their concerns weren't rooted in specific policy disagreements but rather in the party's overall approach to messaging, the effectiveness of its messengers, and the channels through which it attempts to reach voters. The Republican Party succeeded in defining Democrats before Democrats could define themselves, creating a narrative vacuum that opponents filled with devastating effectiveness.
This represents a comprehensive failure across three critical dimensions: the messaging itself lacks clarity and emotional resonance, the messengers often fail to connect authentically with diverse audiences, and the means of messaging haven't adapted to how people actually consume information today. The result is a party that speaks but isn't heard, advocates but isn't trusted, and campaigns but doesn't inspire.
My father and stepfather both served in WWII. My half-brother was in the Air Force, and his son, my half-nephew, just retired from the Marine Corps--he was in military intelligence, which is an oxymoron. My maternal grandfather joined the Navy too late to serve in WWI. I have relatives who fought on the wrong side in the Civil War.
My father served on Guadalcanal, one of the worst battles in the Pacific. He was in the Army Air Corps at Henderson Field. He became very sick with asthma and was sent to Colorado Springs to recover his health, which is how I happened to be born there 3 days after Alamogordo, which was not all that far away from CS. My dad went back into the new Air Force and served in Korea and Vietnam, plus he was stationed in the Netherlands. He was not a combat person--he ran a warehouse--but he did receive the Bronze Star. He was a 6-ft, 1-inch platinum blond--I inherited his asthma.
My husband is a Mayflower descendant (1620), and my mother's family came to Virginia in 1660 from Maidstone, Kent. My husband's father's family emigrated to the USA from Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War because they would not live under the Germans--they were French patriots.
In 2018, after a lifetime of working for all the right things, my husband and I moved to Paris, France, one of the best decisions we ever made.
Much of my family lives in Texass and is MAGA. I wish Musk would take them to Mars with him.
Abraham Lincoln's sister married a member of my family, and other members of my family were in the first party of pioneers to successfully bring covered wagons across the Sierra Nevada to CA.