Issue #831 The Choice, Thursday, March 27, 2025
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I’ve heard a lot about how Trump didn’t win a mandate in 2024, about how poorly he actually performed with not even 50% of the vote. Numerically speaking, that’s true. There was no landslide, and that’s worth noting. But it’s hardly the kind of statistic that we should take much comfort in because here’s something I haven’t heard our side talk about quite as much. From the Council on Foreign Relations:
“Trump flipped six states on his way to winning the Electoral College: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Every other state voted in 2024 as it did in 2020.
“Trump won 77,284,118 votes, or 49.8 percent of the votes cast for president. That is the second highest vote total in U.S. history, trailing only the 81,284,666 votes that Joe Biden won in 2020. Trump won 3,059,799 more popular votes in 2024 than he won in 2020 and 14,299,293 more than he won in 2016. He now holds the record for the most cumulative popular votes won by any presidential candidate in U.S. history, surpassing Barack Obama.”
And then there’s this:
“More than 155 million Americans voted in 2024: 156,302,318 to be exact. That’s the second largest total voter turnout in U.S. history in absolute terms. It is also just the second time that more than 140 million people voted in a presidential election.”
So, a lot of people voted, right? But guess who voted not quite so much? Yeah. Democrats. From The Week:
“Voters in traditional "liberal strongholds" failed to show up for Vice President Kamala Harris, said The New York Times. Those strongholds — cities and suburbs, along with traditionally blue states like New Jersey — gave Harris nearly 2 million fewer votes than Joe Biden won four years earlier, while Republican-dominated areas gave Donald Trump an additional 1.2 million votes over 2020. Turnout was also down among traditional Democratic constituencies like Black Christians and Jewish voters. "Many Democrats sat this election out," said the Times.
“Harris "tried to build it, but they didn't come," said The Wall Street Journal. "What really happened," political science professor John Aughenbaugh told WTOP News, was a "whole bunch of previous Democratic voters were upset with the Democratic Party."
If we are ever going to have any realistic chance of turning this thing around before it’s too late, we need to have a better understanding of what it is we’re trying to turn around.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, we as Democrats – meaning Democratic voters – need to take at least some measure of responsibility for the situation we’re in and quit screaming at the Democrats we elected to Congress for not doing more with the tools we didn’t give them. As the numbers show, Trump didn’t exactly steal the election from Kamala Harris.
What happened was more Trump voters showed up at the polls while more of us called ourselves angry at President Joe Biden, who managed to accomplish more for the country than anyone could have predicted or had a right to expect given the hand he was dealt.
What Biden somehow accomplished was on par with what FDR accomplished, except he didn’t have that comfortable Democrat majority in Congress. Biden’s Democrats were in the minority facing a Republican majority party of cowards and flat-out crazies and cult followers who had no intention of being reasonable.
And now those accomplishments are either already in the dumpster or en route.
I keep repeating this about what happened with Biden and Harris because it needs to be repeated. Over and over. We as Democratic voters need to own the fact that when facing the threat of handing over our government to a mentally unstable serial liar and sexual predator convicted on 34 criminal counts and facing a whole lot more (and that’s just for starters), “a whole bunch of Democratic voters were upset with the Democratic party” and just couldn’t get past the warped perception that Biden was too old (and boring) for the job – or that Kamala was not only a woman but a Black woman.
So, to summarize, when confronted with the greatest national crisis that most of us can remember, one of the worst in this nation’s history right up there with the Civil War, many of us pouted and punted. And so here we are. Complaining about the emergency that we ourselves are largely responsible for.
If you think your baby is ugly, just remember it’s your damned baby.
I’m not saying that the Democratic Party is blameless or a hapless victim in all this. Hardly. But we need to grow up as voters and understand this: as of now, there are only two viable political parties, and one of them isn’t really viable at all.
Alternative parties only serve as a distraction right now, and I know that’s hard to hear. But no candidate from the Green Party or any other side party is going to ever become president in our lifetime, nor will there be enough of them to wield any measurable influence in Congress. The amount of time and effort it would take to build a viable third party is time and effort we don’t have. If you don’t believe me, you might wanna take another look at how quickly MAGA has already torn down the country. The house is burning down, which means we don’t have time to invent water.
We need to work with what we have, and the Democratic Party is all we have. Last week I said power to the people because it’s up to us, and I meant that. We’re going to have to be the ones to shake up our leaders and raise up new ones and point the way. We need to take to the streets. Hell, we already are.
But that’s only Part One.
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Yeah but the election was outright rigged, by voter suppression, by Musk’s bribing of voters, of course by the electoral college, and that is only what we know. What was going on behind the scenes?
You said a whole word! And we still need to address the problem of literacy and how Republicans have targeted disaffected members of the Democratic Party! https://leslyejoyallen.com/2024/11/13/the-usa-literacy-crisis-this-election/