Democracy on the ballot

Democracy won, apparently. More than 73 million people voted for Donald J. Trump, who won 312 Electoral College votes and the popular vote, making him the 45th and 47th president of the United States. In the end, it wasn’t particularly close, and the exit polls from the night paint a pretty bleak picture for Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party. By now, you will have read most of the breakdowns — she lost ground with Hispanics, whites, blacks, married people, non-college-educated people, et cetera. In fact, the only demographic group that she gained ground with was college-educated white women — she even somehow managed to lose ground from 2016 and 2020 with black women, a stunning and impressive feat. Tim Walz lost his home district in deep-blue Minnesota.

And if you need any further data that shows how bad it was for Harris and the Democrats, look no further than New York City. Harris managed to underperform Biden’s margin there by sixteen points.

In many ways, Harris-Walz 2024 felt a lot like Kerry-Edwards 2.0. Phony optics attempting to appeal to blue-collar men, with both campaigns featuring widely-mocked hunting photo ops with clearly clueless candidates; ham-handed running-mate selections meant to target demographics the ticket thought they’d have problems with; flip-flopping on many issues and fear of taking any stance on other issues altogether; apprehension regarding strong stances on overseas wars for fear of alienating certain constituencies; lack of authenticity in who or what the candidate actually stood for, other than “I’m not the other guy.” Harris’s consultant-led candidacy is perfectly encapsulated in the reports of her unaired appearance on the popular TikTok show Subway Takes. It was such a disaster it went unaired, apparently because her staff kept interrupting to workshop different takes — after opting against using “taking shoes off on airplanes” as an example of the unacceptable, and the Muslim host balking at her suggestion that bacon is a spice, her consultants landed on the safest take: that anchovies on pizza are good, actually. A perfect campaign.

The outcome of the election could be a teachable moment for Democrats — that calling Trump voters racist, fascist and sexist might not be the best way to win people over. But if the after-action chatter is any indication, there will be very little introspection. Not much is being made of Democrats’ historic losses in various demographic groups — instead, the Biden and Harris camps have formed a circular firing squad. Left-wing institutions and think tanks, such as The View, have called Harris’s campaign “perfect”, with noted scholar Sunny Hostin blaming “uneducated white women” for their loss. (She also worries about internment camps being set up imminently by the Trump administration.) It should be noted this is the same television show where Kamala Harris professed that she couldn’t think of any changes she would make from Biden administration policies.

As part of the deep introspection happening in the establishment elite, there are also questions about the role media played in the election. Some in the media, to their credit, have acknowledged the irrelevance of their position in the hierarchy, with one mainstream journalist telling CNN’s Brian Stelter it’s “hard not to see this election as just a national repudiation of what we do.” On the other hand, there’s plenty of whining about the unfairness of it all. Writing for the former employer of journalist and noted truth-teller Stephen Glass, the New Republic’s Michael Tomasky says, “It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things,” laying blame at the feet of right-wing media.

Among the supposed right-wing media being blamed are podcasters like Joe Rogan and X owner Elon Musk. There have been a lot of calls now for the left to get their own Joe Rogan or Elon Musk. Unfortunately, they once had them. They were named Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. Rogan had always been a left-wing guy, endorsing Bernie Sanders for president in 2016. Musk trailed only Barack Obama in liberals’ admiration until 2018 — this is the man who gave us the first viable electric car and invested millions in solar energy to save the planet from global warming, not exactly a favored conservative cause. The policies and rhetoric of the Democratic Party simply became too much for them.

Never mind that all the mainstream pop-culture outlets are left of center and were all pulling for Harris — SNL, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, all the rest. The lesson of this election is that these old institutions matter less than ever. Jimmy Kimmel Live! clocks in less than a million viewers some nights, a fraction of the audience of dozens of podcasters.

There’s also a fundamental misunderstanding of what this new breed — the Joe Rogans and Theo Vons of the world — actually are. They’re nothing approximating “conservative” talk-show hosts — they more resemble the morning radio shock jocks of old than anything else. Normal, average, everyday guys (and plenty of women) listen to these shows, specifically because they aren’t political — and they aren’t lectured or talked down to because they hold views that are outside the liberal elite establishment consensus.

Will this election be a lesson to anyone? It will be to President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, who helped put some intellectual heft behind Trumpism, and now makes it feel like more of a coherent movement than ever before. They’ll enter office with a majority in the Senate, and as of this writing, most likely the House — and a strong mandate from the voters.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 2024 World edition.