In 2020, Joe Biden won the US presidential election with a margin of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. More than 81 million people voted for him and his running mate, Kamala Harris, and they secured 4.5% more of the popular vote (and 7 million more votes) than did Donald Trump and whoever his running mate was that year (I dare you to remember). I do not recall anyone declaring it a landslide victory for Biden, and the general feeling was that he’d won by the narrowest of margins, setting aside the fact that Trump refused to acknowledge Biden’s victory.
In 2024, with 97% of the national vote tallied, Donald Trump won the US presidential election with a margin of 312 to 226 in the Electoral College. Assuming that roughly half of the 3% of the vote that remains to be counted went for Trump (perhaps generous, given that Blue states seem to be mostly left counting), then roughly 78 million people voted for him and his running mate J.D. Vance, and they secured ~ 2% more of the popular vote (and what should be roughly 3 million more votes) than did Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Many commentators, including many on the left, have declared it a landslide victory; decisive; a commanding mandate.
What the hell is wrong with us?!
I posit that we have become so used to Democrats winning decisive popular vote victories, and yet still losing the Electoral College and thus the presidency; or Democrats soundly winning both the popular vote and the electoral college, but anti-democratic Republicans still refusing to acknowledge the election outcome, that a Republican winning the Electoral College along with a narrow popular vote margin reads as a crushing victory. That in spite of the fact that something like 10 million Democratic voters appear simply not to have turned out this year; in spite of the fact that the Republicans have spent decades (generations really) trying to engineer a vote in their own favor in the face of overwhelming demographic realities to the contrary through gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter disenfranchisement, and a whole host of other tactics which are a matter of public record, and which many proponents of our president-elect will, of course – in Orwellian doublespeak – claim have been pursued in defense of democracy.
Short and sweet today – please, stop building this man up. He is an unpopular, unhealthy, unhinged old man; politically weak; rudderless, save for his own disgusting and ferocious self-serving-ness; and we should oppose him, his movement, and everything he and it stand for before we unwittingly enable them to fully dismantle our institutions and set us on the course of illiberal democracy.
Our task is to build a new consensus that centers public goods and popular welfare and to (re)build a broad coalition – already there in outline beneath the surface of all the vitriol and misinformation fueled by Twitter, Fox News, et al – around such a broadly popular agenda. Trump enters office as the most widely hated, if also the most intensely loved, politician in generations, and there’s no reason he can’t exit office as a sad and ugly footnote: His future significance rests in our hands in the present.
Climate / Change 