"What Went Wrong?"

The Democrat Leadership, such as it is, is trying to figure out the answer to this question.

In times gone by, people who had the job of planning a campaign for a Party, could hope for a definitive answer.  They had gone to college, and they had been taught that there was such an answer.  But what has emerged in this election—from polls and interviews, and all sorts of ways, is that the voting population cannot be herded into corrals like that; there are too many slivers of attitude to take account of. 

To add to the confusion, Trump made millions of completely untrue statements, and what is more, got very angry when one moderator called him on it ("We know for a fact that Haitians in Springfield have not been eating pets ...").  Trump said it was very unfair that the pet-eating statement was challenged, but Kamala Harris wasn't challenged on any statement she made. 

So now, Trump supporters have to be split up into groups: (1) those who believed that Haitians ate pets.  (2) Those who did not believe that Haitians ate pets.  (3) Those who did not believe ... but who thought it was unfair to fact-check Trump in real time.  (4) Those who believed that Haitians ... but who thought the fact-checking was fine, and so on, and so forth.

You can easily see that these groups of people are very different sorts of people, and Trump was completely loosey-goosey, talking to them.  A scientific calculation about what to say was inconceivable.  Their only common denominator was that the government and the laws were decided by college-educated lawyers, and they wanted no more of that. 

 There are a lot of people who think the "learned language" that Congressmen and Senators use is difficult to understand.  Obviously, some lawyers intentionally use hifalutin language to confuse uneducated people.   But often, when a speaker is being very careful, he or she uses cautious language that goes over the heads of normal people.  So the suspicions of uneducated folk is easy to understand.  Trump found it easy to persuade these people that he's on their side simply by talking slowly, frequently repeating himself, and exaggerating what he would do (throw people in jail,  etc.)  So,  many of his followers are probably thinking, "He just says stuff like that all the time, for the sake of entertainment.  But knowing Trump, he might throw some people in jail—for the sake of entertainment, of course.

 What's going to go wrong for everybody is that, intentionally or not, Trump has endorsed a culture of cheating.  Cheat on taxes.  Cheat on marriage.  Cheat on elections.  Cheat on declaring your assets.  Trump thinks he can surf the rough seas of anarchy.  But he can't. 

Added later:

To an enormous extent, this election was all about talk.  Trump promised lots of things, lots of things he'd do, lots of things he'd be.  Lots of things to beware of, with a so-called progressive in the White House.  Meanwhile, Kamala Harris warned about all the bad things that will happen if Trump gets another four years in the White House.  It was all about promises and warnings.  Trump was boasting about his achievements.  He stole many of Obama's achievements, and took credit for them.  He boasted about the size of his inaugural crowd back in 2017, but in fact it was a small crowd, as Democrats proved with photographs, but the Maga folks would believe anything that Trump told them, and distrusted anything the Press reported. 

So, there was sadly very little actual achievement that voters could go on.  All of Biden's achievements were painted as 'failures', and amazingly hung on Harris.  Meanwhile, all of Trump's actual failures were painted as glorious achievements.  In the face of a tragically gullible bunch of voters, there was little or nothing the Democrats could do. 

Traditionally 'bad' things were painted as 'very, very bad', especially socialism and communism.  Traditionally good things, such as honesty and order, were painted as suspicious.  And finally, Trump and his friends at Fox declared that it was 'wrong' for a wife to vote differently from her husband.

As we reported earlier, Democrat theorists are doing an analysis, a post-mortem, on the loss of the election. 

But should we trust their reasoning?  The Democrat Leadership was largely shadowy figures in the background, who seldom showed themselves, for this precise reason, I suspect, because they feared being tagged with a probable loss. 

What to do going forward?

Trump is going to create massive chaos.  But his army of gaslighters are going to do two things: (1) Blame Biden / Harris, and (2) Paint the disasters as actual glorious triumphs.  The Maga crowd will eat it up.  In ordinary times, the actual performance of the administration was a counter to the wild claims of its PR machine.  But these days, the 'News' has been coopted into the PR machine itself.  And what's more, everything that the Dems say is painted as PR from the other side.  The frenzied complaints of progressive media sources—late night comedians, etc—are successfully dismissed as mere noise and propaganda. 

The Democrat theoretians will now create a careful analysis of what went wrong, but we will be hard put to believe them.  For us, belief is in short supply!

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