Superb article "Don't Blame the Democrats" -- Part I

Dan Benbow, Commentator, “Raw Story”, 5/26/25

As soon as it became clear that Donald Trump would win the 2024 election, I braced myself for an onslaught of bad-faith, blame-Democrats-first narratives — from Kamala Harris supporters.

Despite the sea change in power (courtesy of our winner-take-all electoral system), the election was close.

Trump won with a meager 31.7% of eligible voters. Unlike Barack Obama and Joe Biden, he failed to get a majority of those who did vote.

Holding the Senate was an impossible task because Democrats held contested seats in three deep-red states (West Virginia, Ohio, and Montana). But Democrats won four out of five swing-state Senate races (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin) and fought Republicans to a draw in the House.

In short, the 2024 election was not a mandate.

But that didn’t stop media charlatans from denouncing the Democrats.

Ruy Teixeira, a once-progressive opinion writer who has spent decades in elite Beltway think tanks, said, “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.”

TV host Bill Maher, who’d said he was certain Harris would win, said Harris lost because of an article in Scientific American that purportedly trafficked in “wokeness.”

The implication is that the Democratic Party is out of touch with everyday people.

This is a nifty little self-defense mechanism for Democrats who aren’t willing to see the MAGA social pathology for what it is.

Shifting blame to “the politicians” or “the consultants” in the Democratic Party gives a get-out-of-jail-free card to relatives and neighbors and co-workers who are handmaidens to fascism (however unwittingly).

Alienation from people one interacts with, or is intertwined with, is avoided through denial. No messiness. No compartmentalization. Plaster on a fake smile and call it a day.

The purveyors of blame-Democrats-first narratives, most of whom have never so much as run for student council, suffer the conceit that they have more insight into winning strategies than Harris’s senior campaign advisor, David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 landslide win.

The assertion that Trump won because of Democratic failures rests on the notion that voters are rational actors.

The major impact of uncontrollable events (economic cycles, COVID, foreign interference, foreign crises, the frames the media chooses to hype) is minimized in favor of the theory that if Candidate A just uses the right messaging, they can appeal to voters’ innate goodness and high-minded desire to do the right thing by their fellow citizens. Easy peasy.

In addition to being a naïve view of human nature, this belief has little relevance to the 2024 election because Harris ran a pretty effective campaign.

Her rollout was smooth and surprised the Trump campaign.

She consolidated party support quickly.

The Democrats had an energetic and unified convention that aggressively targeted working voters.

Harris vivisected Trump in the debate he didn’t chicken out of.

She raised tons of money for ads and organizing, had a much bigger (in-house) field operation, blanketed swing states, and had her political surrogates do the same.

Harris downplayed her race and gender and picked a gun-toting, white male everyman veteran as her VP so as not to threaten moderate white voters.

She mitigated Trump’s false messaging on immigration by actively endorsing a bipartisan plan co-authored by Republican senator James Lankford.

She mitigated Trump’s false messaging on crime by casting the election as a choice between a felon and a prosecutor.

While Trump closed the campaign by fellating a microphone, ending a town hall meeting to dance for 39 minutes, and hosting a pre-election Madison Square Garden event rife with racial slurs and echoes of an infamous 1939 pro-Nazi rally, Harris went through the whole campaign without a substantial gaffe.

The most obvious explanation for Harris’ loss, the one the media ignores for fear of sacrificing eyeballs (and more importantly, dollars), is that tens of millions of American voters are bigoted and/or politically illiterate.

Divorced from objective reality

We no longer live in a Lincoln-Douglas debate nation, where civic-minded audiences patiently listen to nuanced three-hour arguments about substantive issues.

We live in a country with a long history of anti-intellectualism where the average IQ is 98 and 54% of our citizens ages 16 to 74 read below a sixth-grade level.

We live in a country of short attention spans, shrinking sound bites, stuporous consumerism, and cellphone-clutching zombies.

We live in a country where students at elite universities whine about reading requirements.

We live in a country with mass disinformation funnels that systematically weaponize ignorance by spoon-feeding lies and distortions 24-7 through Newsmax, Fox, One America News, Sinclair Broadcasting, right-wing radio, the Daily Caller, Breitbart, social media, the Manosphere, and a zillion other platforms.

We live in a country where a critical mass of our citizens is divorced from objective reality.

37% of Americans believe the earth was created in the last 10,000 years and one in five still believe in Biblical literalism.

One in four religious voters believe that a man found liable for sexual abuse, who cheated on his first wife with his second wife, his second wife with his third wife, and his third wife with a porn star, unprotected, was “chosen by God.” Never mind his 34 felony convictions and multi-million-dollar civil penalties for business fraud.

America has the highest per capita fossil fuel consumption in the world, but the very existence of climate change — which threatens human civilization — is denied by 28% of our citizens. 42% of Americans don’t even grasp the direct role human activity plays in rising CO2 levels, which has been public knowledge for four decades.

Our president is so hostile to the scientific method that 75% of scientists in a recent Nature magazine poll said they were open to leaving the U.S.

In such a country, where half of adults can’t name all three branches of government, the average voter has little understanding of how a bill becomes law or how their representative votes day in and day out. They don’t know what’s happening in D.C. beyond headlines, let alone how it’s happening, why it’s happening, obstacles legislation will face in the courts, or the full human impacts of a law once it is implemented.

In this environment of widespread political illiteracy, many voters shrink complicated issues down to oversimplistic, shorthand impressions — vibes or feelings — instead of using rational, evidence-based analysis.

This was clear in the way voters viewed the economy, the decisive issue in the 2024 election.

As happened across much of the world during the tumult of COVID, many voters wrongly assumed that correlation is causation, that incumbent governments were automatically to blame for the state of the economy.

While Biden was president, inflation rose 21.2%, the steepest increase since the oil shocks of the ’70s and early ’80s. Yet inflation barely outpaced wage growth, which was 19.4% during the same period.

Republicans claimed Biden’s stimulus spending was a major driver of inflation, but this was speculation, not hard fact. Mainstream economists feel that Biden’s deficit spending — which was roughly half of Trump’s — may have moved things around the margins, but not to a large degree.

U.S. President Joe Biden, flanked by U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein