The following editorial originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune:
There are lots of ways of defining the liberal elite — assistant deans, network anchors, public health officials and, yes, legacy newspaper journalists — but there can be no question that Tuesday saw a wholesale rejection of their dominant value system. America didn’t just elect a craven candidate whom the highly educated had deemed unacceptably dictatorial, fascistic even, but the nation did so in such a way that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s agenda now will largely be unfettered, thanks to Republican majorities in the Senate and quite possibly the House.
And, adding insult to injury for Democrats, it’s likely that the result of the election also will deliver Trump from his myriad legal challenges.
The party that had been saying democracy was on the ballot found that democracy had risen like an orange tiger to bite it in the neck.
Democratic Party nominee Vice President Kamala Harris failed to outperform President Joe Biden in a single state. On CNN late Tuesday, they even were struggling to find a single county where that was true.
“Donald Trump is going to be our president,” Hillary Clinton thus found herself saying Wednesday, no doubt though gritted teeth. “We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.”
For some on the left, that kind of largesse toward a convicted felon will be impossible. That we can understand. But the results are the results.
As a bleary America awoke Wednesday to a new political reality, armchair quarterbacking as to why Harris and Tim Walz lost was already underway. We have our theories, too.
Harris, as we noted here many times, failed to answer, in a clear and direct way, questions about what she would do as president, an essential thing to do if you want voters to be able see you in the job. The problem to our minds was not just that her handlers kept her removed from tough questions, but also that her answers were inadequately coherent when she finally emerged from the shadows.
Trump, palpable flaws and all, was known; Harris remained unknown. The gauzy biographical movies from the Democratic National Convention were not enough.
A majority of voters clearly were uncomfortable with the Democrats’ switcheroo after the party belatedly discovered that Biden was unfit for another term as president. In essence, the party bosses then told voters to fall in line, quiet down, ask no questions and demand no further choices. Americans, it has now been confirmed, did not care for that.
Not having an open contest for the nomination was a foundational mistake, and those of us who attended both Republican and Democratic Party conventions could see that the former was more open and friendly than the far tenser and more controlled latter, notwithstanding the eloquence of many DNC speakers and the bloviating candidate rambling in Milwaukee. Democrats tried to push Harris onto the nation because they sincerely believed she deserved to be the party’s nominee and they wanted to make history, but that is just not how democracy works. As the party now knows.
We’ll point to a couple of other factors. One is that the Republican Party has become a party not of business and nonprofit leaders, now mostly Democratic Party members, but of the working class and the lower middle class. Elites throughout history have found to their cost that there are very many of those folks, even if we don’t hear from them all that much.
This is a tough lesson for Democrats to learn, but it explains, especially, the pivotal defection of some Black men to Trump just as it makes the point that many U.S. citizens of Latino descent don’t necessarily approve of a border that is easy to cross without authorization. And they voted accordingly.
Take, for example, the decision by many voters of Puerto Rican descent to ignore insults hurled their way by an appalling comedian at Trump’s New York rally. Democrats had pushed the narrative that those aggrieved voters would move the needle because they thought racial identity would trump all. But they failed to see the condescension inherent in the belief that those voters would care more about a comic than their own economic worries.
Now, thanks to the toughest of nights, Democrats better understand.
