Election 2024: The Post-Mortem, Part Four

And now, a look at the vote. 

Donald Trump won 31 states and 312 electoral votes, with Kamala Harris winning 226 electoral votes.  In case you haven't noticed, the Democrats got fewer electoral votes than they did in 2016.  That's because, unlike Harris, Hillary Clinton, who lost six out of seven swing states, still won Nevada.  This time, Trump took Nevada as well, sweeping every swing state.  Oh yeah, he also won the majority of the popular vote - the first Republican presidential candidate to do so in twenty years.  

Also, 80 percent of the nation's counties (or municipalities in Alaska and parishes in Louisiana) shifted more Republican.  Trump did better than Joe Biden in many jurisdictions and Harris did worse than Biden in many others.  So many counties shifted to Trump that in only Massachusetts and Hawaii did Harris carry every county.

Even most of the 19 states Harris won shifted more to the GOP.   New Jersey, where I live, supported Hillary Clinton over Trump by nine percentage points, and Biden carried the state by sixteen points.  Harris carried it by only five.  She only carried Virginia by a very slim margin.  

Also, Trump carried virtually every demographic group.  As noted in my previous post, he carried white male voters - not just out of the reasons I've already defined, but for lingering anger white men, including I myself, have toward the denigration of us for everything from colonialist genocide to slavery to manifest destiny to Pat Boone.  I had nothing to do with any of that, and neither did a lot of other white males (who are referred to as "white guys," that phrase meant to be a pejorative), yet we continue to be denigrated for these atrocities. Many of us are not racist or sexist or have not committed acts of bigotry, yet we're guilty of that charge until we're proven innocent.  If I had a higher intolerance for that sort of what James Carville calls ""jackassery," like many white men do, I might have voted for Trump myself.  I didn't.  But a lot of white men did, because of that anger, joining with the white men who are total jerks who were already with Trump.

But guess what?  A majority of white women voted for Trump, despite warnings that he would put further restrictions on reproductive rights and might criminalize it nationally altogether.  This is because many states have already codified abortion rights, and seven states voted to do the same this year, and Trump has promised not to sign a federal abortion ban.  White women decided that reproductive rights in states where abortion is legal would remain safe under Trump and voted for him out of concern for the economy.  So did Hispanics, whose votes Trump won 45 percent of, as well as a majority of the Hispanic male vote, and he drew more votes from black men as well.

The only demographic groups Harris solidly behind her were her own - black women - and Jews.  Given her marriage to Doug Emhoff, that's no surprise.  And on a semi-related topic, I have long been open to dating a woman of color, but I never aimed to limit myself to only women of color or women of a specific non-white race.  I always figured that if I ever dated and eventually married a woman of color, it would be by chance, not design.  I am now seriously considering dating black women only.  Because that way, I'll have a far less chance of dating a woman who voted for Trump.  

As a white man who was dating and marrying black women long before Trump entered politics, Trump-hater Robert DeNiro was clearly on to something.

Democrats have two years before the 2026 midterms to go through the numbers and see where they went wrong.  They might be even able do do that sooner, in time for the 2025 gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia.  If they're lucky.  Because if Trump terminates the Constitution as he's suggested, he's going to terminate the opposition next.