Weekly Grounding #71
Special edition on the election, Part 2
Weekly Groundings are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox on Fridays.
Each Weekly Grounding generally touches on a wide range of topics related to Handful of Earth’s broad focus on culture, politics, and technology. This week, however, I decided to publish Part 2 of a Special Edition Weekly Grounding on the election (see Part 1 here). I wrote my own initial reflections on the election earlier this week, which you can read here.
“The Shattering of the Democratic Coalition”
If any media outlet was vindicated by the results of the 2024 election, it was the
here on Substack. I shared more articles from this publication than any other in Part 1 of this Special Edition Weekly Grounding on the election, which was published before election day. This piece by sums up many of the trends that authors at The Liberal Patriot had already identified in the months leading up to the election, this time with the empirical support of Trump’s decisive victory.Teixeira writes: “Democrats cannot decisively beat their opponents as this election has shown once again. The party is uncompetitive among white working-class voters and among voters in exurban, small town, and rural America. This puts them at a massive structural disadvantage given an American electoral system that gives disproportionate weight to these voters, especially in Senate and presidential elections. To add to the problem, Democrats are now hemorrhaging nonwhite working-class voters across the country…The Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman. The priorities and values that dominate the party today are instead those of educated, liberal America which only partially overlap—and sometimes not at all—with those of ordinary Americans.”
“Time to Close America’s Bureau of Wishful Thinking”
Edward Luce offers an important op-ed at The Financial Times that gets at one of the core problems with Democratic campaign strategy: Americans hate to be told that they are “against democracy” if they don’t vote for one particular candidate. This seems like a basic point, but it is somehow lost on Democratic Party operatives, who continue to insist that election results that do not go in their favor mean that democracy is “under threat,” even when those results were achieved through a democratic process.
Luce writes: “Harris’s vibes and energy conveyed that she saw this contest as being about something far bigger than their economic circumstances; the future of the republic was at stake. Without overtly meaning to, she turned this election into a subliminal referendum on values. This was an error of wishful thinking. As I have written before, liberal America suffers from confusion between how the world is and how liberals think it ought to be. Just because something seems obviously right — defending the rule of law, decency towards asylum seekers, protecting women’s bodily autonomy and other critical freedoms that could stretch to paragraphs, all of which are at risk — does not mean others will see it the same way. If you want a person’s vote, you must take their worldview seriously. In the final New York Times/Siena poll, just 7 per cent of the likely US electorate said democracy was their biggest concern.”
“Poorer Voters Flocked to Trump — And Other Data Points From the Election”
Also at The Financial Times, this data analysis of voting patterns indicates some striking trends in the United States. The analysis shows that “For the first time in decades, Democrats received more support from Americans in the top third of the income bracket than from poorer groups”:
County voting data (which is more reliable than exit polls) indicates a continued shift of Latino voters away from the Democratic Party:
These trends held not just near the Mexican border, but across Texas in counties with majority Latino populations:
“The Story of Trump's Win Was Foretold in New York City”
The above Financial Times analysis also notes that “cities became less Democratic.” On this theme,
turns to data from New York City at the . He writes that “for all those profiles of Trump voters as exotic creatures in Youngstown, Ohio diners, almost no place has seen a bigger increase in Trump support than the five [New York City] boroughs…Trump received 27 percent of the vote in the Bronx yesterday, roughly three times as much as his 10 percent in 2016 or Romney’s 8 percent in 2012. The Bronx, which is only 8.6 percent non-Hispanic white. The Bronx, which used to break my Congressional models because it was so Democratic”:
Silver concludes: “The Democratic Party’s whole theory of the case is wrong. You’re going to read a lot of diagnoses over the next few weeks about why it was wrong or how it went wrong or what might done to correct it…For now, I don’t have the answers. But I do know this is a problem the party should have been prepared for, because there was plenty of evidence for it in polls and election data, evidence that was unskewed and denied at every turn. Maybe the first move should be going out to a diner in Queens.”
“Democrats’ Disastrous Gender Politics”
Darel E. Paul dissects the Democrats’ failed gender strategy in an column at Compact: “Already by mid-October, Team Harris was running low on joy. Democrats started playing hardball to close the gender gap with men. Barack Obama scolded black men in Pennsylvania for their lack of enthusiasm for the Harris-Walz campaign, explicitly accusing ‘the brothers’ of misogyny. In Michigan, Michelle Obama tried to shame men with abortion rights, rebuking those considering a vote for Trump for treating women as ‘just baby-making vessels’ and turning them into ‘collateral damage to your rage.’ In the waning days of the campaign, the Democratic super PAC Progress Action Fund targeted young men with ad buys on social media warning them—in graphic terms—that their consumption of pornography and emergency contraception was at stake. Democrats were right to be worried. White men increased their vote for Trump at most by one percentage point. Black men added around 12 points, doubling their support from 2020. Hispanic men shifted to the right by anywhere from nine points to a shocking 17 points.”
Paul continues: “The most impressive gendered result of the election has to be the response of young men. According to The Wall Street Journal, men aged 18 to 29 supported Joe Biden in 2020 by 15 points. In 2024, they favored Donald Trump by 14 points, an astounding 29-point swing in a single election. CNN found a much smaller Trump lead among young men of two points, but even this is a significant transformation. Democrats long believed that young people were their electoral Superman, weakened only by the kryptonite of indifference. If they could get these young voters to the polls, victory would be assured. This election just cast those illusions onto the ash heap of history.” For more on young men and the election, see
’s article, “Why the Left Has No Luck with Men,” at Unherd.“Young Women and the Election Issue that Wasn't”
On the topic of gender and the election,
offers an important analysis of why the Democratic Party failed to mobilize young women around the issue of abortion in sufficient numbers to win the election. She argues that “The liberal-left, after spending years promoting casual sex, prostitution, pornography, gender identity, and a kind of faux sexual egalitarianism that seems to say if we insist the sexes are the same sexually, they become the same sexually, lost women’s trust.”Berrelli continues: “The generation of women who grew up in a hard and fast continuum of Brittney Spears, to Kim Kardashian’s sex tape, to Pornhub, to dating apps are opting out. In a world were high school girls are asked for anal before their first kiss, women have to seek out EDMR therapy after one summer on dating apps, and there is little if any material necessity to attach oneself to a man, sex with men was starting to feel like self-harm. These young women grew up being told that male and female sexuality are exactly the same, the more sex with men you had the more liberated, fun, and interesting you would be. They ran the experiment and it failed. The crisis of masculinity in young men has been much written about, but the corresponding crisis in young women has been ignored. Girls raised on Disney movies and boy bands were met with Andrew Tate obsessed gamers instead of their prince charming. 2010s era sex-positivity has died a death, celibacy is rising to rates not seen since the medieval period, and much to the shock of the medical establishment young women are stopping hormonal birth-control in droves. We are in an era of hetero-pessimism, and while young men are pissed, young women are quietly resigned.”
“Why ‘the Left’ Didn’t Buy What the Democrats Were Selling”
At A Beautiful Resistance,
evaluates the Democrats’ failure to persuade leftists to vote for Kamala Harris as the lesser evil candidate. He writes that the traditional leftist beliefs in “better wages, affordable housing, an end to US-funded slaughters…will persist despite every attempt to uproot them, especially against liberals narrating them as mere consumer preferences. Consumer preferences can be changed, while beliefs aren’t so easily uprooted. Preferences affect what you buy, but beliefs affect what you do. That is, beliefs have consequences.”Wildermuth concludes: “Harris and the DNC refused to listen to what people actually wanted, thinking — like all capitalists — that the right publicity and advertising would suffice to convince people to buy what they were selling. They failed to understand that some of us actually believe the things we say we do and that we refuse to betray our deepest values no matter how much we’re threatened.”
“Baby, You're a Lost Cause”
At
, writes that “In the case of the hideous, genocide-denying presidential election of 2024 AD, black music and culture have been the scapegoats for the unapologetic insincerity of the democratic candidate. When that failed, we were told to worry solely about our abortion rights, after having been made to watch babies and mothers bombed and displaced almost daily for over a year in Gaza, with help from U.S. tax dollars, while said candidate was incumbent Vice President. We’re asked to dissociate so that our so-called freedoms become more important than divine justice. When we refuse, we may be villainized by the exact type of neoliberal identity politicking shill who would fear real integrity, the one that might benefit from us pretending we don’t know how to think in complete sentences, or contradict ourselves on purpose to get closer to universal truths. It’s important to watch this fail; internalize some of the shame. I hope it’s the final effort at coercing and infantalizing black people to such a degree that arts that should be sacred are outsourced to utter minstrelsy.”Holiday continues: “I don’t remember one moment of wholehearted conviction about anything coming from Kamala, but she mined the convictions of unassuming decent people who took her greens-in-the-bathtub approach at face value and thought they were going to get a free Beyoncé show as consolation for self-delusion. Now when Kamala concedes and the spell lifts or buckles, faint and pseudo as it was, will those who pretended there was passion behind this charade feel it was worth it to lie to themselves about what love is? Do you love yourself enough to admit when the demagogs are lying to you, not even in a pretty way, in a futile, frivolous borderline personality disordered way?
Did you read anything particularly insightful on the election? Feel free to share in the comments.