Here is what I feel I missed and part of it goes to what you are saying, the thought that Trump was a weak candidate and there was no possible way he should have picked up votes. Totally agree with this. I don't think Biden would have beat him though, I think Biden would have drawn fewer votes than Harris. 

Perspective here though for a second. When Biden had the bad debate and then some nut took a shot at Trump, this basically, for a period, transformed Trump from a weak candidate to the person that was likely going to win the election. Biden was, in that moment, in a horrid position and looked like a sure loser. 

This was obvious to pretty much everybody. So, this was the point where the Democrats knew they had to change horses. It was late in the process, but they knew they were going to lose with Biden. I think that was an accurate assessment. Dread had set in. 

Now, Harris did reenergize the Democrats and interest but let's be clear, this was basically at the point where the game was in the fourth quarter and they were down three scores. In other words, it was an uphill climb to get back in it. 

Now, she did do this, she brought the team back, made it a neck and neck race and then several things seemed to be going wrong for the Trump campaign. So, the illusion, and I will now call it that, was the Democrats were in the game while Trump basically spent the last month and a half imploding. He was doing one idiotic thing after another. It looked like Harris was going to pull it off because she had all the momentum while the Trump campaign was stumbling. I was caught up in that too. 

My position was, there was no way that Trump would have accrued more votes since he had lost in 2020. Just did not seem possible...and the truth was, he did not. 

He got about 75,000 votes in 2020, he got the same number of votes in 2024. Harris got more than 5 million fewer votes than Biden. 

What happened? Well, the registered voter pool is what it is. That is all you have just those people to pull votes from. Andi can tell you what they try to do is organize and pull in new voters, but new voters tend to be pretty unreliable. 

What happened was Trump did lose voters from 2020 to 2024, but he did pick-up voters that we did not expect he would get, Muslims, union workers, suburban voters, college voters. All because Trump made promises he did not intend to keep and basically people wanted change from Biden. Yeah, the Israel thing was in play but so was inflation and grocery costs. Maybe the thing the Democrats failed at was not articulating well how they were going to address those things. I mean, I thought they did do a good job addressing inflation, grocery prices were being stubborn but I think they were dealing with it, people just seemed not to "feel" it. And that is the nature of dealing with a large population, it is hard to please everybody and hard these days to get through to all of them. 

Here's the thing though, the end result was a wash. Trump did not have a blowout win. It just did not happen. I agree he should not have won at all, but he had his hardcore base and the votes he lost, he regained from voters we just did not think would vote for him. 

Look, I missed it. I clearly admit I missed it. Lots of us missed it. But the voter pool did not increase for Trump. It shrunk, but he ended up gaining some votes because of some strong issues that really upset people. Inflation, consumer costs, Israel, and to a lesser degree Ukraine. When you are playing with small margins, that's enough to squeak out a win. It really is. 

I don't think we are dealing with the number of asshole racists increasing or there being suddenly more people that would join groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, those people don't change and they are who they are. 

I have not really rehashed it because it now does not matter that much because now we have to deal with the fallout. I do think Democrats should try some new directions, the old guard has a lot of problems and sure, people have lost faith in them. We saw that in 2016 and probably that problem has increased, not shrunk. So, yeah, address it, change, play offense where you can while we play defense to protect democracy and our institutions. Don't let them fall. 

I guess I am left in the same spot I have said I am in, when will people that voted for Trump realize he is not going to do the things he said he was going to do? He never had any intention to do those things. He started right off trying to continue with angering people with a culture war, he thinks that keeps them dumb and distracted. 

While I do feel things have grown dark, there is the problem, his voters will be pretty angry once they realize he is going to help himself, help his rich friends, but they will be left to suffer. 

Because calling it the Gulf of America and declaring there are two sexes will not lower food costs or make their lives better. Declaring they are going to destroy people's health insurance, remove programs that lowered prescription drug costs, while saying they are going to instead put $500 billion into one of Musk's pet projects is not going help the people that voted for Trump. He is pissing all over them...it ain't raining.