The state of the 2024 Election
A dive to the almost final results
The pulverization of the mall shopping experience is, in fact, one of the ways by which the fossil fuel economy has been ebbing for some time. For 30 years, planes have been consuming less fuel to get from point A to point B. It is now no longer the fastest way but the most efficient way and that burns less fuel. What it means is that the squeezing of parts of the transportation sector has not been noticed: we may wish that the Teamsters supported Kamala Harris, but the truth is that the Teamsters have gone from a middle-class lifestyle to a barely subsisting working class. This means that the Teamsters are not going to support a Democratic Party that offers them a working-class life when they were used to a good deal more.
This means that the retail cost when the supply chain is broken gets passed along to the consumer because the capital class is not going to take a cut, the working class has already been cut already, and the working class as a consumer is footing the bill. the middle class is able to rearrange figures to spend more on necessities, such as utilities and food, but the working class has fewer options. this is especially true since housing for the working class and lower middle class has been going upwards.
This is not a large change but it is significant and leads to the present state of affairs where the Republican Party has almost unlimited power.
What does this have to do with the Presidential election of 2024?
When looking at the final totals for the presidency, the gap between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is not large however the message that the Harris campaign was promoting was about the defections from the right wing of the party, and left the working class to defect just enough to leave those voters with no place to go. instead of talking about solid change, she offered the barest minimum. And again the working class and lower middle class has been the fault line.
This means that on the top level, Harris secured 73,803,704 yielding 48.2% while Trump attracted 76,481,798 and 50%. While this is not the election it is the raw numbers which we can reason as to how large a loss the Democratic party suffered. the answer is that Biden won 51.3% on 81,283,501 while Trump in 2020 took 74,223,975 on 46.8%.
Which means:
Total Democrat Total Republican
2024 73,803,704 76,481,798
2020 81,283,501 74,223,975
-7,479,797 2,257,823
We can see that Trump totaled 2.2 million votes more but that Harris brought a decrease of 7 1/2 million votes. this means that the shift rightward was real and cost three Senate seats and the presidency as a result: Brown in Ohio, Casey in Pennsylvania, and Tester in Montana. there was also the lack of a shift in the House of Representatives. But this is largely because North Carolina’s legislature approved a right-leaning shift for their House greeting three seats. this meant that there was far from the old house plus +3 from the North Carolina shift. This meant that the Democrats needed seven. And the New York seats gave the Democrats at least two more seats the calculus was that they needed 5, and they got at most 4 and could go down to a reduction of 1, if all of the brakes go against them in the House.
this means that it was not a defining election but the barest of shifts from the Democrats to the Republicans, largely on the fact that the Republicans were stronger in their safe seats, because three of their pickups including the already lost West Virginia seat, were in those areas whereas the Democrats picked up only in New York and lost one in Michigan and to in Pennsylvania.
Democrat Republican
North Carolina 3
Pennsylvania 2
Colorado 1
Michigan 1
7
Oregon 1
Alabama 1
California 2
Louisiana 1
New York 3
8
Taking the raw numbers, it is clear that Biden did not make the case for a Democratic style control, and that Trump made a slightly better case for Republican control. Harris had problems getting the party faithful to vote for her while the Republican apparatus made gains in key states, which was the point. from a strictly majoritarian stance, it was not as if there was a key shift in the electorate only a slight swaying which enabled the Republicans to control all three branches of government: Congress, Presidency, and the Supreme Court.
But we can go one step deeper: the apparatus of the media has started to move from X, though I will admit that as far as I’m concerned X is a windowing system at MIT on the Athena computer, to either Bluesky or one of the other competitors. this means that on the deeper level, we can see that there is a change in the site which drives the conversation. Since Elon Musk was a substantial backer of Trump this means that he cashiered some of his value as a site for direct forms of power. this is not bad per se, but must be recognized as a grab for actual power rather than control.
Now we must look at the campaign itself because it did not have two evenly matched competitors from two different sides of the coin. Objectively speaking Harris was assured, controlled, and competent while Trump was anything but, including glaciated the microphone and rambling to barely seated events. But he knew he did not have two when the election but merely needed to present himself as the other alternative and let Harris flounder on the wrong message and her “herness.” Trump knew that the voters he was courting did not care about democracy. But they did care that “a man was better than a woman for the presidency.” so he scratched his balls and said that he was a grunt male and the other grunt males, when given a choice, would flock to his message.
What this means is that the election was not a political shift bought a governing shift. these have happened before: with John Quincy Adams as a chosen president, Buchanan as the last of the antebellum Democrats, Andrew Johnson who was thrust into the role of the president as an opposition figure, and the second of Woodrow Wilson’s terms. Each one of these presidents had his mind fixed on a different kind of presidency than the public wanted.
We will see the test of this theory by the midterms: while the Senate should stay in Republican hands, unless there is a true meltdown, the House will be the place where if there is a Democratic swing, then that will be the House that it will show first. I did not say that elections were “fair.” This last one was not and there is no particular reason why the midterms will be any more fair than this one was. This is especially true because there is no check on the President doing what he wants to do. but a subtler change has taken place in the terms of debate, and this will affect the elections in more indirect fashion.
Patriarchy rules.
That's the polite way to say it.