Short, Brutish and Cruel: Five Takeaways from Tuesday’s Historic Election

Was This Last Time We'll Get to Vote for President?

Credit: Zoe Si for 'The New Yorker.'

Grieving over the grim result of Tuesday’s presidential election, Newsmakers harks back to an astute adage about living through hard times, famously uttered by the late John McCain.

“It’s always darkest,” the Arizona Senator liked to say, “before it turns pitch black.”

The tongue-in-cheek proverb by Senator McCain, a fierce non-fan of Donald Trump, seems an apt formulation for contemplation of the imminent White House return of the 78-year old convicted felon.

Endlessly aggrieved, increasingly unhinged, and reliably surrounded by sycophantic flunkies, the would-be autocrat soon will be positioned to carry out threats and menacing promises he harped on during the campaign:

Repudiating the independence of the U.S. Justice Department, via appointment of a servile Attorney General, to transform it into a weapon of Trump’s political and personal retribution
Betraying U.S. allies like Ukraine while kowtowing to dictators like Vladimir Putin, rewarding and encouraging bloody, unprovoked aggression against sovereign nations
Deploying the U.S. military, not only to quash legal political protests, but also to round up millions of migrant workers into camps, before deporting them, heedless of legal status
Wielding tariff increases by whim and impulse, roiling the global economy and fueling inflation, in furtherance of corrupt crony capitalism
Employing federal agencies like the FCC and the IRS to target and attack news organizations critical of Trump
Bullying and endangering non-Trump states like California, by conditioning federal aid for wildfire and other emergencies on compliance with his political caprices

And that’s before his Administration gets around to the right-wing extremism of Project 2025.

As Zack Beauchamp explained over at Vox:

Having won power democratically, Trump is now in a position to enact his long-proposed plans to hollow out American democracy from within.

Trump and his team have developed detailed plans for turning the federal government into an extension of his will: an instrument for carrying out his oft-promised “retribution” against President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and anyone else who has opposed him.

Trump’s inner circle, purged of nearly anyone who might challenge him, is ready to enact his will. And the Supreme Court, in its wisdom, has granted him sweeping immunity from his actions in office.

In other words, democracy was on the ballot Tuesday, and democracy lost.

How we see it. Historians, political scientists, and journalists will spend decades studying, dissecting, and debating the myriad aspects of Trump’s inglorious 2024 success.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but his primary motivation for seeking the presidency again was to stay out of jail. Escaping the scores of well-evidenced felony charges he faced, most stemming from his failed coup attempt in 2020, now is the first fruit of his victory.

Gracious, if disheartened, about the dread-inducing outcome of the election, Newsmakers salutes his political base — white Christian nationalists; greedheads lusting for more tax cuts while despising free breakfasts for school kids; misogynist bros, racists, and other deplorables; mooncalves who think this is all a hilarious reality TV show; innocent voters who don’t yet know they’re the marks in his long con — with the words of our all-time favorite, old cranky journalist:

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want,” HL Mencken said, “and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Here are five takeaways from the 2024 election.

1) It’s the fundamentals, stupid. Media drongos misspent an infinite number of words chronicling every twist and turn, public appearance and gaffe of the day, but in the end the candidates and their campaigns proved less important than one, foundational macro-factor that shaped the election: whether well or ill-informed, fewer than one-third of Americans believe their country is on the right track.

This dynamic is replicated by Western and other nations around the world, with voters sacking incumbents everywhere, blaming them for post-pandemic economic conditions that have included high inflation, amid waves of global, southern-to-northern hemisphere immigration.

Harris, apparently because her loyalty precluded it, never tried very hard to put distance between herself and Biden. The result: she ended up as the face of status quo incumbency., while Trump, astonishingly, ended up as the mantle of change candidate.

In a piece headlined “Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents,” the Financial Times on Thursday reported:

All over the world, government incumbents have been sacked this year, punished by widespread anger over post-pandemic economies featuring high inflation amid mass waves of immigration from the southern to the northern hemipshere; As the Financial Times reported Thursday: :

Economic and geopolitical conditions of the past year or two have created arguably the most hostile environment in history for incumbent parties and politicians across the developed world. From America’s Democrats to Britain’s Tories, Emmanuel’s Macron’s Ensemble coalition to Japan’s Liberal Democrats, even to Narendra Modi’s erstwhile dominant BJP, governing parties and leaders have undergone an unprecedented series of reversals this year.

The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the (Parliaments and Governments Data Base) global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records (emphasis added).

2) Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Harris deserves nearly zero blame for the Democrats’ loss; thrust onto the top of ticket barely 100 days before the election, she worked indefatigably, and with great dignity and good cheer to save her party’s sagging fortunes, and she left it all on the field. Every hot take that smugly asserts a particular reason for her defeat — Snubbed Palestinians! Disregarded Jews! Didn’t pick Josh Shapiro for Veep! Kept Tim Walz under wraps! Focused too much on women! Didn’t center women’s needs enough! — is just bushwah.

Because of (1), it’s likely that no Democrat would have defeated any Republican in 2024, but it would have been nice if Joe Biden had given the younger generation of Democrats the chance to try. Biden campaigned in 2020 as a bridge to the future, but after the Dems had a better-than-expected showing in the 2022 mid-terms, he and his insular coterie of handler/enablers decided it must have been because he was so beloved and doing such a swell job.

Starting in 2023, however, poll after poll after poll showed Americans overwhelmingly believed he was too old for a second term; but Biden’s arrogance, coupled with an apparent lack of candor among his kitchen cabinet, pushed him into I-alone-can-do-it mode. A legend in his own mind, he stumbled and bumbled against Trump before thoroughly humiliating himself before the world in the June 23 debate.

By the time he was forced out by his own party, it was too late for a proper primary process that might have sharpened Harris’s campaign skills — or surfaced a stronger Democratic contender — and she was left to clean up the epic political mess of Biden’s making. With her defeat, that mess now includes the ruination of his own legacy, which might have been revered if he’d stepped aside with grace and announced last year he wouldn’t run again.

House call. Trump has the Supreme Court in his pocket and Republicans have clinched control of the Senate, where a more MAGA-inflected membership will predominate and ram through whatever he demands, while the GOP is on the verge of securing hegemony in Washington if they can nail down a few more House seats.

There’s still a greater-than-zero chance Democrats pull out a semi-miraculous teeny-tiny majority, as vote counting continues in a handful of districts around the county (including four on the California Secretary of State’s “Close Contests” list). Regardless, Dems should be singularly focused, starting now, and for the 726 days until the 2026 mid-term election, on capturing the House. It’s their one and only chance for a shred of power during Trump The Sequel which, who knows, may find ihim deciding we no longer need to bother with pesky presidential elections.

(Here’s hoping Salud Carbajal, Santa Barbara’s Man in Washington, finds a few minutes to spare from his incessant pussyfooting with MAGA pals across the aisle on “bipartisan” baloney, to bring his well-developed fundraising skills to bear on this crucial and urgent effort. Once a mildly competitive district, the 24th CD now is deep blue, and for Salud, just elected to his fifth term, it’s way past time to stop acting like he’s in toss-up territory and start behaving like a grown-up. All hands on deck, to save democracy, big fella).

Laissez les bons temps roulez. Mindful of the sour mood among the national electorate, Newsmakers over the past few months repeatedly forecast this economic crankiness would extend to voters in Santa Barbara, and bring certain doom to any tax and spending measures on the Nov. 5 ballot.

We couldn’t have been more wrong.

Not only did local voters approve more spending by government, they did so overwhelmingly: city voters passed the Measure I half-cent sales tax increase, 63-to-37 percent, while the controversial Measure P bond measure for city college was okayed, 65-to-35 percent. More: three of five school bonds in North County local districts won, and county voters also went big for Props 2 and 4, two statewide bond measures of $10 billion apiece (as did voters statewide – another surprise).

Guess Santa Barbarans didn’t get the memo about post-pandemic inflation and the price of eggs.