CSotD: Election Returns
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We won’t get through all the emerging political cartoons about the election today, but here are the bookends: de Adder sees it as the monster returning, referencing Poltergeist, the 1982 horror film about a gateway opening up to the other side, while Garrison cites the Magnificent Seven, in which a group of heroes come to the rescue of poor peasants.
It’s fair to say that most reactions fell somewhere between those two.
There were a lot of Statues of Liberty being betrayed or having their torches snuffed out or walking off into the sunset, though it wasn’t like the response to 9/11, when we had a bushel basket of nearly identical weeping Liberties. Still, a discouraged statue was a popular motif.
I’m citing Dave Whamond‘s take, because he also ties in the Handmaid’s Tale. That came up several times as well, but the combination is interesting and I like the sense of vandalism in having Emma Lazarus’s words crossed out with spray paint.
Note that the Statue does not seem defeated or beaten up. She stands tall, her torch upraised, her face determined. It’s as if she herself made the decision to exchange her crown for the handmaid’s headgear, which fits in with the idea that this was the result of an election, not a coup.
Which brings us to this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Pedro X. Molina — Counterpoint
The most amusing surprise in the election was that the rightwing was all prepared to cry fraud and contest the results, but had the wind taken out of their sails by their victory.
There has been a rumor of a rumor bubbling up from the other side, where it has been noticed that far fewer Democrats voted this time around. Nobody is volunteering to be sued by Dominion Voting Machines, but they are wondering aloud at the sudden drop.
However, a look back at voting patterns over the past several presidential races shows that the anomaly was last time, not this time. Here are the Democratic voting patterns in this century:
2000 — 50,999,897
2004 — 59,028,444
2008 — 69,498,516
2012 — 65,915,795
2016 — 65,853,514
2020 — 81,283,501
2024 — 68,092,002*
*current count
What Democrats may want to focus on is why so many people turned out for the 2020 election.
If they attribute it to an intense desire to get rid of Trump then, they had better work towards a repeat in 2028. It won’t happen by itself.
I don’t think it’s necessary to be quite as cynical as Bob Englehart, whose explanation of the outcome makes it unclear where he stands, or, at least, whether he sees any hope for a reversal.
As a straight, white person myself, I’d observe that we’ve had a relatively successful track record of f***ing with racists over the past several decades and I’m not convinced that this setback requires decent folk to roll over for them.
Though I’m willing to concede that, had the Civil Rights Act been put up to a referendum in 1964, it might well have failed.
Particularly given who we weren’t allowing to vote in those days.
Not to mention the fact that, four years later, George Wallace captured five states and 46 Electoral College votes. And he didn’t have Fox News or rightwing talk radio networks to boost his campaign, either.
Still, it’s not as grim a picture as Clay Bennett (CTFP) offers here.
At the moment, the split appears to be 50.7% for Trump and 47.7% for Harris, which is not as close as some polls had predicted but still shows that nearly half the country should be drawn with that blue crayon.
Tommy Siegel offers a realistic view, if not an entirely comforting one, and that little girl is going to have to be very patient and work hard herself if she wants to ascend to the life her mother and grandmother have enjoyed.
Clay Jones doesn’t hold out as much hope as Seigel does for all the little girls who may have been inspired by Harris’s campaign, though Heather Cox Richardson offers a historian’s framing which should keep us all from total despair.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
And there you have it, as if the three had conspired to form a three-panel cartoon.
It’s a truism that “kitchen table” issues matter, and voters often ignore macroeconomics to pretend that personal and governmental budgets are set the same.
Meanwhile, one of the points repeatedly made in media of all persuasions this year was that people were concerned about inflation and the price of groceries.
Very little coverage concerned whether their worries were well-based, and you had to turn to the business pages to realize that inflation was well under control and grocery prices were more subject to industry decisions than to governmental policy.
And as Davies points out, inviting Trump in to fix grocery prices is opening the door to a whole lot of changes which have nothing to do with the price of eggs.
This anonymous, uncredited piece popped up on Xitter, and it’s best to assume such things are phony until proven genuine.
However, even as a work of fiction, it presages what companies must be thinking at the moment: If the new government sparks a trade war, imported parts and supplies are going to suddenly become much more expensive.
Trump continues to explain tariffs in a way that makes absolutely no sense, repeatedly claiming they are paid by the exporter. Whether he is an idiot or a liar doesn’t matter: Tariffs will raise prices not only on imported goods but on things made here with imported components.
Christmas bonuses will be the least of it. People will pay more for the things they buy, and they may find themselves being laid off as businesses see declines in sales.
The best scenario would be for Trump’s asinine economic plans to hit the fan before the midterms in 2026, inducing voters to reverse his Congressional majorities.
In the meantime, Dr. MacLeod reminds us that 47.7% may not be a majority, but it’s a healthy number.
While Pedro X. Molina offers this encouragement, which takes on additional credibility when you consider that he is in exile from a government much more repressive than this one.
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