Trump's Numbers Didn't Improve
Does that make it better or worse? Plus, a few other questions.
Dear Friends,
How are we doing? Are we spending more time online though we know we shouldn’t? Have we started mentally lodging our recriminations? Are we posting Nikki Giovanni poems? Are we newly suspicious of our neighbors? Have our priors been confirmed? Are we mouthing ‘oh fuck off’ to folks telling us to roll up our sleeves? Are we mouthing ‘oh fuck off’ to the disaffected, nothing-matters crowds? Are we taking fast-fleeting pleasure in the obvious-seeming hypocrisies of others?
I can’t tell you what’s right to do or feel right now. That goes for Harris voters as well as the portion of my subscriber list that – from right to left – either voted for Trump or made a point of staying home. But here are a few things I’m thinking about.
Despite the electoral romp, Trump’s numbers are currently on pace to land very close to his 2020 vote count (~74 million), an election he lost by 7 million votes. Does that make it better or worse?
Like 2016, he won the key battleground states, and unlike 2016 and 2020, it looks all but certain that he will win the popular vote and become the first GOP presidential candidate to do so since 2004. Does that make it better or worse?
This paragraph (gift link) from Annie Lowrey:
Prices spiked more during the Biden administration than at any point since the early 1980s. In some categories, they remain unsustainably high. Home prices have jumped an astonishing 47 percent since early 2020. This has made homeowners wealthier on paper, but has priced millions of people out of the housing market. The situation with rented homes is no better. Costs are up more than 20 percent since COVID hit, and have doubled in some places. The number of cost-burdened renters is at an all-time high.
Does it make it better or worse that some people were perhaps swayed to vote the way that they did out of a sense of financial desperation?
Do I wish Harris, Biden, and/or more Democratic surrogates had screamed to the high heavens that they were maybe one Senate vote away from extending an Expanded Child Tax Credit that would have helped families weather inflation and prevent food scarcity and child poverty? Yes.
Do I wish that Harris, Biden, and/or more Democratic surrogates had screamed to the high heavens that they were maybe one Senate vote away from passing a Build Back Better program that would have enacted universal pre-K and expanded health-care access? Yes. Do I have access to their internal polling about the best responses to the issue of inflation? I don’t.
I know the time is right for the stewards of the take economy to tell us what went wrong and why. There are some smart opinions out there – about party blind spots and collective callousness. But having just asked some totally fruitless questions, I guess I would urge everyone to take a minute and simply ask the people in their lives how they’re doing.
Love,
Adam