Steve M (No More Mister Nice Blog) is right

Learned helplessness is not helpful, and the rationale for learned helplessness is not even based on reality. I would honestly be breathing a lot easier if Harris had won the White House and ideally the Democratic Party held the Senate and regained the House. That did not happen. Trump squeaked out a win in terms of popular vote and really had a so-so showing in terms of the electoral vote. To put things in perspective, Biden's performance in 2020 was also relatively speaking so-so, and aside from Obama in 2008, so-so victories are about all that we've seen this century when it comes to Presidential races. The US Senate ended up about how I was expecting it to go, and about the way that actual professional analysts had expected. A GOP mandate would have meant sweeping Senate seats in the same swing states Trump won. Aside from Pennsylvania, where Casey lost just barely, Trump proved to have no coattails. And if you paid attention to the polls, one thing that was consistent was that swing state Senate candidates were outperforming first Biden and then Harris throughout the duration of this campaign cycle. Losing Tester in Montana and Sherrod Brown in Ohio sucked, since they were effective Senators and were good at being plain-spoken. But they were in states that Trump was going to win anyway, and many analysts had already written them off once we got within a couple months of the election. If this had been a catastrophic election for the Democratic Party, we should have seen the GOP's House majority expand. Instead, it contracted just a bit, and came actually pretty close to flipping to the Democrats. If we look further down ballot, in many state legislative and local elections the Democrats held their own. We may have lost some ground in traditionally blue states, but in our swing states, for the most part, we really didn't suffer any significant setbacks. Even in my little corner of a red state we had an okay enough night. Democrats in Arkansas saw a net gain in state legislative seats for the first time since the early aughts, I want to say. In local races, our candidates actually gained votes relative to prior equivalent electoral cycles. That didn't necessarily lead to victory in most cases, but it tells us that not only did we probably hit rock bottom in 2020 but that we are starting to fight our way back. 

The above is an observation I have made in various ways on the blog in mid-November and then just a little over a couple weeks ago. It bears repeating. We did not have a cataclysmic election night. Was it disappointing? You bet it was. Should we be worried about what a Trump presidency will do to our democracy? Hell yes. But did we lose in a landslide? Hell no. We held our own. Now this would be the moment where I would hope the pundit class and our Democratic leadership would stiffen their spines and fight Trump and their GOP counterparts tooth and nail every day until Trump is out of office. So far, I am seeing little evidence of that, which is concerning. This is not the time to obey in advance. This is the time to make it clear that there will be a lot of broken ketchup bottles in the White House dining room for the duration of Trump's upcoming term. If there is any soul searching to do, I would say a lot of it comes down to speaking much more clearly about kitchen table issues that affect all of us who have to work for a living, do more outreach in rural areas (maybe not with an eye on winning for now, but to make life more difficult for the GOP), and speaking more clearly with working class voters (the vast majority of whom are not unionized). We still do well enough with union members, but even back during the peak of labor union power, you were always going to have GOP union voters. I should know - I was related to one back during my childhood. I'd probably tell Democratic candidates to avoid phrasing that makes people cringe, such as latinx (if I never hear that term again, I will be grateful, as would apparently a majority of my Hispanic counterparts). 

For the purposes of this post, I will assume we will have free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028. Steve M. is right that Trump will most likely do a lot that is consequential and consequentially stupid. His first term was one where he inherited an economic recovery that had finally kinda sort started feeling like a recovery, and in which there really were not any pressing domestic or international crises. Obviously the pandemic would change things, and Trump demonstrated how enormously badly he handles an actual crisis. This time, Trump is inheriting a solid economy, but one in which inflation and high interest rates remain problematic, and in which there are major wars happening in Europe and the Middle East. These are the sort of crises where one intemperate misstep could badly escalate already catastrophic situations. Trump will figure out how to mess up. He may be many things, but I will never underestimate Trump's uncanny ability to demonstrate that he truly is dumber than a bag of hammers.

I forgot some of my history, but Steve M. rightly reminds us that after LBJ's actual 1964 landslide, the GOP did very well during the 1966 midterms. Nixon would be President as a result of the 1968 elections. What happened? Actually a whole lot. There was obviously some racial animus that reared its ugly head after landmark civil rights legislation got passed. Conservatives who hated the Great Society programs LBJ championed reacted by voting out incumbent Democratic Senators and Representatives. And of course those who were draft age were not exactly feeling that great about a Democratic Party that had led the US into the Vietnam War quagmire. Oh yeah - crime was actually really going up and there were a lot of riots going on at the time. So yeah, with free and fair elections the balance of power can change quite a bit. We will have to see how the landscape looks once we head into 2026. We'll know a hell of a lot more then. Obviously, much of what I am saying right now is probably no longer valid if some form of "competitive autocracy" a la Hungary or Turkey is imposed upon us. But that is another topic that can be explored another time.

In the meantime, maybe stop the pearl clutching and think carefully about what it would take to succeed when we won't be going up the hill backwards as we did this year. The Resistance may be tired but is also battle-tested and battle-hardened. That will matter. This is the time to fight like hell, let everyone know about it, and make Trump and his GOP toadies regret the moment Trump ever darkened their door.