Kevin, I do not want to argue this point further. I stick by my opinion that the campaign missed many opportunities but I acknowledge that there were also other factors in her loss. I believe she could have overcome them or would have had a better chance to do so – you don’t. You could be right. it doesn’t matter now.

Ellen, I hear your frustration, but I strongly disagree that the story here is somehow VP Harris using the “wrong strategy”.

Her strategy was to reach out to everyone. That includes voters of all types, from Republicans who did not like Trump to progressives, to younger voters who had never participated before. And each time she reached out to a different group, someone would say that this group was exactly the WRONG group for her to reach to. And the critic was just as likely to be on the Left as to be an Angry Right Winger.

We can all cite anecdotes of what this or that person said, and it won’t change the basics here.

It’s absolutely true that many Americans willfully blinded themselves to the catastrophe of the Pence White House, whether it was in terms of the vicious bigotry, or in terms of their attack on Middle Class Employees while enriching the wealthy, or in terms of their packing of our judiciary, or in terms of their deliberately sabotaging the ability of agencies like the CDC to function. And in addition to the economic effects of tantrum tariffs, and the world turning their back to this country in revulsion, we had the final year where Pence and Little Trump’s bungling resulted in the COVID pandemic killing over a million Americans.

It’s unbelievable that those many Americans chose to set aside any thought of right and wrong, and any thought about laws meaning anything. Little Trump committed numerous outright felony crimes in his tantrum over being the loser of the 2020 Election, including trying to pressure local officials into throwing out legitimate votes, while simultaneously demanding that they “find” him invented votes so he could say he won. Little Trump stole numerous complete classified documents and flaunted them in front of his dinner guests in Florida. He stole federal campaign funds and gave them to his fixer, and then committed felony fraud in trying to hide whee they’d actually gone.

VP Harris made an excellent case that Little Trump was not a serious person but that he posed a very serious threat to our democracy. Millions of American voters decided that they didn’t care, and that they’d rather vote for a convicted felon anyway. That’s a shocking choice for anyone, and the shock is compounded by realizing just how many people took this unfortunate step.

Unfortunately, this was likely the final waystation.

People keep posting nonsense memes saying “It’s going to be okay”. One has to wonder if those people have actually read Project 2025, or have read the Republican Study Committee’s annual budget proposals. Or if they’re aware of the Far Right movement to pass a Fetal Personhood law designed to be a back door Nationwide Abortion Ban.

We’re past the point of hoping that the Dems can figure out a way to reach voters who have already drunk the Kool Aid from Angry Right Wing propaganda outlets like Breitbart, Glenn Beck, Fox, Newsmax, etc. The 2026 Midterms are almost certain to be a disaster for the Dems on the order of the 2002 Midterms.

We can agree that the Dems will need to spend time rebuilding and regrouping. It will probably be another 8-12 years before they can mount a successful presidential campaign again. But that assumes that the Angry Right Wingers surrounding the new Vance White House aren’t looking to dismantle as much of the government as they can before then.

This is going to be an extremely dark time, and an extremely violent one. And nothing about what acting president Vance and his childish tantrum spokesman are planning is “okay”.

I’m sorry but I disagree that she ran a good campaign. I think she almost flawlessly executed a flawed campaign strategy. The strategy was to reach out to Trump-hating Republicans rather than to low-propensity younger voters. I was fine with her reaching out to Liz Cheney and the other never Trumpers but I don’t think it did the good they hoped for and I never thought it would.

I have spoken with people who thoroughly disliked Trump and didn’t want to vote for her because they didn’t believe Harris was going to change anything really for the better. They wanted a Bernie Sanders populist. Simply put, she did not excite them. They thought, “we got through the Trump years OK (never mind the needless deaths and family separations) but once Biden got in office everything got worse.”

I even chatted with a liberal who probably voted for Harris but who said to me in the spring, when Biden was still the candidate, “But Ellen, wasn’t Trump better on the economy?” I explained to her why he wasn’t. But people remember they could afford more things when Trump was in office. I’m not defending this thinking but there are a lot of people struggling to get by who did not see Harris as someone who was going to make their lives better.

The mood of the electorate all over the world is sour and looking for change. She and Walz were great change candidates but it seemed like they abandoned that tack when Plouffe took over. That’s when she dropped the “I know his type” and Walz inexplicably made Vance look good at the debate. I don’t think it was a coincidence that her poll numbers started to slip around then. I liked Walz and I thought he was a fine choice.

I am not discounting any of the other reasons brought up here but I think she could have overcome them, just as Barack Obama did. He was not a woman but he did run on a popular platform: ending the war and Obamacare.

All that said, it is beyond depressing that so many Americans could look to such awful, unethical, predatory, amoral and anti-American people to run the country. I hope that the Democrats will be able to reckon with that and figure out a better way to reach them.

Wow Kevin, you have nailed it as usual. I praise VP Harris for her campaign, and her message. Anybody that says it was “this” or “that” is full of sh!t. IMO it all boiled down to racism, misogyny, and a lust for revenge by the right. We are truly in a dark place and I fear for the future.

It’s truly disheartening to see the usual backbiting and castigating after an election loss, particularly one as heartbreaking as this one.

To be fair, VP Harris actually ran quite a good campaign. She didn’t just reach out to Republicans. She reached out to everyone. She spoke to Palestinian protestors. She met with progressives and she met with conservatives. She worked to create the largest coalition she could, thinking that this would be the way to ensure she had the support of the widest group of Americans. And at every turn, she was sniped at by Angry Right Wingers and sometimes by Left Wingers. She was told that she was unqualified. She was told that she only had her position because she slept her way to the top. She was sneered at with the most racist and misogynist material anyone had seen since Dick Nixon attacked Helen Gahagan Douglas.

When she reached out to voters to discuss her career as a prosecutor, DA and AG, she was regularly castigated for having actually gotten people convicted of various infractions in California, particularly around marijuana. When she talked about her principles, Angry Right Wingers said she was “way too left wing”. When she talked to Republicans like the Cheneys in hopes of getting some of the votes of the Nikki Haley contingent, Left Wingers condemned her for talking to Republicans. No matter what she did, she was told she was wrong.

And she was running against an unrepentant convicted felon, a childish tantrum-thrower who was unable to admit in public that he knew he was the loser of the 2020 Election. One could be forgiven for thinking she was far more qualified than a convicted felon.

We should also keep in mind that in actuality, the Biden White House was far from a disaster, and the economy we have as a result is far from a disaster. Inflation certainly went up in 2022, as a direct result of the Pence White House’s bungling of COVID, which not only generated the supply chain issues that led to the inflation, but also killed over a million Americans. Border crossings and asylum requests at the border certainly increased big time, but that was because migrants had been brutalized under the Pence White House’s vicious policy of separating families and throwing the parents in the Mexican desert to wait indefinitely. But in spite of these things, the Biden White House led the country out of the pandemic, restored the economy and improved it, and frankly got a lot more done in terms of spearheading new initiatives than even the Obama White House at times. (With the exception of the ACA, of course).

But throughout the Biden White House’s tenure, we heard a steady drumbeat of Angry Right Wingers sniping at them. We heard that inflation was just horrible, with no context about how wages have risen. We heard that the whole economy was a disaster under President Biden, when that was never true. But it was repeated nearly every day for almost 4 years now. We heard a steady drumbeat about a fantasy “open border” that has never existed. We heard regular snipes at President Biden’s family, and regular assertions that President Biden was somehow a secret criminal in cahoots with his son over…something. We heard regular snipes at VP Harris, referring to her in the most misogynistic of terms. The Right Wing has learned the basics of propaganda – the idea being that if you repeat a lie enough times, people will be fooled into believing it. So it isn’t surprising to see that the approval rating of the Biden White House is far lower than one would think it should be, given their track record.

What happened on Tuesday was frankly shocking. This wasn’t the low-turnout election of 2016, where the difference was made by how many active mainstream Dem voters didn’t show up across the swing states. This was a high-turnout election, where the difference was made by how many voters across multiple lines did show up and chose to actively support an unrepentant convicted felon. Supporters of VP Harris (and previously of President Biden) did show up in record numbers, and they worked tirelessly to phonebank, to knock on doors, to talk to every voter they could. VP Harris’ ground game was noted for being more than thorough. And for all that, the Angry Right Wingers were able to bamboozle enough people into buying their lies that they were able to overcome the odds.

Not every person who voted for Little Trump was actively trying to vote for a convicted felon. But by supporting him, they nevertheless did vote for a convicted felon. And they made a statement that the American people no longer believe in right and wrong. And they made a statement that the American people no longer believe that laws have any meaning. And they made a statement that the American people are fine with hatred and bigotry. The world is already reacting. Europe is pulling away from us again, and will likely ignore the Vance White House as long as it exists. And the rest of the country that still does believe in right and wrong is appropriately concerned about a nascent fascist movement taking over the US government again.

There are too many on the Left who are taking this moment to tsk-tsk, tut-tut and poo-poo VP Harris and her campaign. To listen to some, she should never have reached out to Liz Cheney and that was the death of her candidacy. To listen to others, she should have condemned Israel because supposedly she was too partial to the Jewish community. To listen to others, she lost because she didn’t pick Josh Shapiro to be her VP because she was hostile to the Jewish community. And none of these is necessarily the reason that the American people chose to embrace hatred and viciousness. To be honest, each is a rabbit hole. And they’re the sort of complaints that line up perfectly with the mean-spirited gloatfest now coming from the Angry Right Wingers. It may feel better to say “I told you so”, but it does not help the situation nor does it really tackle the deeper problem here.

America is now facing an extremely dark time, one that is far more dangerous than the first time Little Trump was able to get access to the White House. Because this time, he’s announced in advance that his goal is to seek revenge against those he feels are his enemies. He’s openly spoken in terms of violence, and in terms of punishing “the enemy within”, and in terms of getting “retribution” for being held to account for his felony crimes. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the mayhem that will erupt when his fans act on his cues about how they don’t need to obey basic laws. He’s promised to pardon the insurrectionists who attacked the US Capitol for him on January 6. So not only will he be able to weasel out of the prison cell where he belongs, but he’ll be able to spring all the goons who tried to kill members of Congress and who actually got multiple people killed and badly hurt in the process. Once he does that, what stops a MAGA fan from robbing his neighbor or assaulting a neighbor? If laws don’t apply to Little Trump, why should they apply to his fans?

We can look forward to Project 2025 being enacted in its entirety, along with the full agenda of Congressional Republicans in the “Study Committee”. People apparently forgot that the 2017 GOP Tax Transfer expires in 2025. With their majorities, the GOP will be able to not only make the Tax Transfer worse for Middle Class Employees (say goodbye to the SALT deduction, for example), they’ll finally be able to ram through their “reform” of Social Security and Medicare for everyone under the age of 59. Here’s the short version – the benefit will be lowered to a flat $1200/month and it will be means-tested to disqualify anyone who has held a decent job for much of their life. Say goodbye to the Department of Education and multiple other departments that tried to make a difference in citizens’ lives. We can look forward to the Supreme Court tossing out Obergefell and Brown v Board at its earliest convenience. And we can look forward to criminal punishments for women seeking reproductive care being given the thumbs up.

On the other hand, perhaps we should just look ahead to the 2026 midterms. After all, maybe after two years of utter fascism and viciousness, the voters and supporters who worked themselves to the bone to get the first female President elected only to be punched in the face will surely want to jump in again, won’t they? Or will they throw up their hands and give up?

It’s honestly difficult to see a silver lining here. And it’s more difficult than that to see how American democracy can survive this kind of abuse. But on the other hand, the American people have just said in a fairly loud voice that they don’t care about that.

If you’re going to blame Kamala, I think you’re going to have to assign greater blame to Joe Biden. He chose Kamala as his VP and didn’t much set her up for success. He didn’t follow up on the suggestion he made before he was elected that he might be a one-term President. Although Biden didn’t break the law like Trump, his biggest flaw, like Trump’s, was frankly a selfish attempt to cling to power.

Beyond depressed this morning. Only the thought of my wife and child is motivation to put one foot in front of the other. Not sure I can do 4 more years of this.

I resigned from the Democratic Party years ago, when the Senate Democrats failed to filibuster the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court (and look where that got them). I had been thinking of returning in 2016, when I thought Hillary Clinton might win and I was thinking about it again this year.

Even if Kamala pulls out a miracle, I will not be rejoining.

The NY Times now gives Trump a 93% chance of victory. As far as I’m concerned she snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

I hate to say this but I think Kamala is going to lose. I’ve been saying it for weeks… she blew it. Instead of being a change candidate she was the candidate of embracing Republicans. I’m all for bipartisanship but a) that is not motivating to people who are struggling and looking for change that will make their situations better and b) I have long been doubtful that there were enough Republicans who would actually vote for her.

Also, the number one issue for voters was the economy and she didn’t really deliver a strong message on that.

I think David Plouffe had a lot to do with it. She was doing great until he took over and the emphasis went from “I know his type” to “I’m going to put Republicans in my cabinet!”

It’s not over yet so I am hoping I am wrong.

There were no texts left for me in the Wisconsin shift. The moderators warned that would happen because the pool of people to contact would get smaller.

Fingers are crossed!