Cover credit – Flickr CC
Editor’s Note: This editorial ran last week, but more than half was cut off due to a technical difficulty. This editorial was intended to run alongside former County Executive Steve Levy’s op-ed, which ran in full last week, cautioning conservatives to not overreach, namely in the form of the “Trump Dance” on sports fields and infusing religion into schools and government. We are running the full version of this editorial this week.
Eight years ago, the thought of voting for Donald Trump (R-NY) was so unpalatable to some, it was a non-starter conservation topic. For others, it was the uncertainty of just how many people supported Trump that election, that it was incredibly difficult to gauge the political moods of the country. This leads to what’s known as the Reverse-Bradley Effect, which occurs when the polling environment is so tainted that an upset occurs on Election Day.
Eight years ago, Republicans and conservatives – or anyone supporting Trump and conservative policies – might as well have been relegated to basement speakeasies with sheet metal doors and a viewing slot through which to utter a password.
Today, there is a newfound openness of being a Republican, a conservative, a Trump voter, or anyone who simply backs the President-elect and/or conservative policy.
The media is trying to insist that Trump does not have a “mandate” based on these results, since the popular vote margin is just over a million votes and Trump “only” captured a plurality of the electorate.
They’re trying to take this victory away from him since he was literally 0.01 percentage points from taking a majority – at least 50% plus one – in the popular vote.
Furthermore, they insist that since the GOP only held the House by a razor-thin majority, it negates the mandate he received.
Over the next several weeks, check in our Civics 101 column on Page 14. We’ll be doing in-depth analyses of how each state voted in this election. Getting under the hood and going through the numbers shows that the win was much bigger than some people think.
For instance, it’s common for losing presidential candidates to swing a few states in their party’s direction. John McCain (R-AZ) lost badly to Barack Obama (D-IL) in 2008, but he still managed to swing five Southern states towards the right. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) lost in 2016, but eleven states trended blue that year. When Trump lost in 2020, several states still shifted towards him, even deep-blue states like Hawaii.
Harris did not swing a single state, even the sapphire-blue District of Columbia, in her direction. This is the first time we’ve seen a uniform swing across the country in one political direction since 1976. On top of that, about 90% of all counties swung towards Trump, with the most dramatic shifts occurring in the Tri-State Area, the Rio Grande Valley, and Harris’ home state of California.
The only place that can award electoral votes where Harris swung to the left was Nebraska’s First Congressional District, worth just one electoral vote. She overperformed Biden by about one point there.
This is incredibly difficult to do, and yet, the media will downplay this into oblivion, provided they’re not frequently reminded.
There absolutely is a mandate for Trump to govern. He told the public exactly what he would do. On the other hand, Harris told the public to be “joyful” and brought hilariously out-of-touch celebrities on the campaign trail with her to tell the country that, under a Harris Administration, “every city in America could be like Detroit,” courtesy of the sage wisdom of Lizzo, a key endorsement every campaign jumps over themselves to earn.
And no, those comments were not parody, nor was the insistence of MSNBC that Queen Latifah’s endorsement of Harris was game-changing, with Joy Reid stressing that the musician “never endorses.”
It would have been funnier had Harris not had a realistic shot at winning the election.
But all of this gives new thrust under Republicans’ wings. No longer are they to be sequestered by their views and silence themselves to keep civility at a holiday dinner, or just to leave a conversation better than they had found it.
And what’s even richer: Democrats seem to be accepting of that openness, at least in some circles. The conversations we’ve observed show a more accepting dialogue, and some situations even see Democrats backing down, not because Republicans will ostracize them like they had been for almost a decade, but because some are realizing the gravity of Trump’s win. Some have contended that not this many people in the U.S. can possibly be “racist, sexist, etc.”
That said, the “Trump dance” is taking the world by storm, where athletes, newscasters, celebrities, and others are using it in lieu of signature showboating displays or other forms of celebratory expression. It’s interesting just how galvanizing a personality Donald Trump is, love him or hate him. We enjoy seeing the openness of the political environment, and it’s our sincere hope the pendulum – as far as political tensions go – can settle back in the middle.
However, we agree wholeheartedly with former County Executive Steve Levy’s (R-Bayport) op-ed last week on Page 7. Conservatives should be careful to not be hypocritical in navigating these newfound social mores. Conservatives loathed the fact that athletes used their time on the stage to make political messages. While doing the “Trump dance” after a touchdown probably isn’t akin to an entire NFL team “taking a knee” to protest the National Anthem, the point still stands. People don’t want politics in their entertainment and they especially don’t want to feel swayed by those who are deemed out-of-touch with the general electorate.
Our advice to conservatives, celebrate now, but make it a New Year’s Resolution to work on getting that pendulum back to the middle in terms of political tensions. Never give up on the values, the platform, and the ideas, and hold feet to the fire where necessary, but let’s not overplay our hand, lest we face the same reckoning Harris and company did this year.
