Schadenfreude

(“ A gleeful delight in another’s misfortune”)

I wanted to dip my toe into the losers’ woes this morning so I tried the two most likely sources, Daily Kos and Politico, and was rewarded. First up, Daily Kos, confidently predicting that the Democrats own their blacks and hispanics, so there was no need to worry about a Trump victory, even as the vote count piled up in his favor (and don’t tell this expert, it it appears that Trump will also win the popular vote “Preserve the Electoral College!”)

Daily Kos November 05, 2024 at 10:59:13p EST

Even when they win, Republicans are losers—and have been for 20 years

…. Fast forward to 2020, and the landscape has changed dramatically. In 2020, despite Donald Trump winning the white vote by a large margin—58% to 41%—he lost the presidency to Joe Biden.

And that shows the daunting challenge that the Republican Party faces. The past two decades have seen a significant shift in voter composition, especially among racial and ethnic groups. The once-dominant share of white voters has steadily declined, from 77% in 2004 to just 67% in 2020—a warning signal for a party that has heavily relied on the white vote, according to an analysis from writer Myra Adams.

These electoral shifts not only signal a demographic transformation but also highlight the Republican Party's struggle to adapt its message and policies to a broader—more diverse—audience.

Part of the GOP’s conundrum surely stems from an agenda that is increasingly out of step with popular opinion. Take, for example, the issues of gun reform and abortion rights. Voter sentiment leans heavily in favor of more progressive policies on these topics, which puts the GOP at odds with a substantial portion of the electorate.

Even Trump acknowledged his party's uphill battle for the popular vote during a rally in Virginia on Saturday. 

“When you have New York, Illinois, and California, you have automatically, it’s like ridiculous, automatically goes to a Democrat, it’s tough to win the popular vote because they’re three big states,” he said. 

Despite his win in 2016, Trump’s failure to secure the popular vote against Clinton and later against Biden in 2020 marks a failed Republican electoral strategy. As the party looks to the future, it must confront the reality that demographic changes and shifting public opinions are reshaping the political landscape in ways that may not favor them.

And then we have this live report, from Politico. By now — 9:30 AM Wednesday — I’m sure the mainstream media’s up and howling, but this excerpt from earlier, as the magnitude of their figurehead’s loss became apparent, is just delicious.

POLITICO 11/06/2024 01:50 AM EST:

Democrats sink into despair after Trump win

Democrats are living their nightmare. Again.

As Election Day gave way to Wednesday, Democrats were reckoning with the reality that the party was in for a repeat of 2016. Donald Trump was outperforming his 2020 margins across the map and had won key battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Georgia. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, was struggling to match Joe Biden’s margins across broad swaths of the country, from light-blue counties that swung towards Democrats in 2020 to deep red ones where Trump has continued to grow his leads.

With each successive swing state that fell to the former president, Democrats’ ever-present anxiety gave way to shock, despair and, finally, acceptance: Harris was going to lose.

“Really never fully took in that this could happen again,” said one former Democratic Party official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “It is beyond any words I can use to describe.”

The warning signs for Harris began cropping up even before the results from most states started rolling in. Exit polls showed Trump making inroads with Black men in North Carolina and in Georgia, which the Republican wrested back from Democrats not long into election night. Harris also underperformed nationally with Hispanic voters and young voters compared to Biden in 2020, exit polls found. Those surveys even showed so-called double-haters — voters who held unfavorable opinions of both candidates — breaking for Trump.

Then Trump started running up the score across the map. With more than 2,500 counties reporting at least 95% of the vote, Trump has outperformed his 2020 margins in roughly 92 percent of them, according to a POLITICO analysis of preliminary results from the Associated Press. And Trump made gains even in deep-blue areas like his former home of New York City. Harris, meanwhile, was lagging Biden in key counties he won four years ago — including Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County, which includes the president’s native Scranton.

“He expanded his base a little and they came out,” said Neil Oxman, a Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist. And that, combined with Harris underperforming Biden, “is the difference in switching a state.”

With each minute that Harris’ potential paths to the White House narrowed, the mood within her campaign and among Democrats more broadly grew grimmer.

In an attempt to assuage anxieties, Harris’ campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, circulated a memo, obtained by POLITICO, to staffers late Tuesday night that said: “We have known all along that our clearest path to 270 electoral votes lies through the Blue Wall states. And we feel good about what we’re seeing.”

Barely two hours later, Harris no-showed her own party at her alma mater of Howard University, where the mood was already souring. A clip of Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” which the vice president had used as her walk-out song at campaign events, was greeted with groans. Attempts to start “Kamala” chants fell flat.

As former Rep. Cedric Richmond, a co-chair of Harris’ campaign, came onstage to disband what Democrats had hoped would be a victory celebration, some members of her campaign were still holding out hope that ballots yet to be counted would break her way. But others had begun bracing for defeat.

“We still have votes to count, we still have states that have not been called yet,” Richmond said. “We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken.”

But “you won’t hear from the vice president tonight,” he told the dejected crowd. “You will hear from her tomorrow.”

Beyond Washington, Democrats were rapidly losing faith that Harris could keep the party’s bulwark intact.

It “feels more like 2016 than 2020,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat.

“That’s what’s troubling,” he added. “Those of us that had hoped for a resounding repatriation of Trump, we’re left to hope for a nail biter through the Blue Wall.”

And some Democrats’ calls to not despair — “everybody fucking relax,” said Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, “there’s still a ton of votes to get through” — were falling on increasingly deaf ears. In a callback to the beginning of Harris’ campaign, one Democratic operative wondered: “Is it brat to lose an election?”