Some more Wednesday morning quarterbacking, this one from “Eight takeaways from the 2024 election” by Eric Bradner, Gregory Krieg and Daniel Strauss, at CNN Politics: “Trump made gains with nearly every demographic group compared with his 2020 loss, CNN’s exit polls showed. And his apparent near-mirroring of the 2016 map would indicate that he paid no political price for his lies about fraud in that election, his efforts to overturn it, or the criminal charges he has faced since then….Though several states are still tallying their results, Trump’s road to victory in 2024 appears to have been nearly identical to his 2016 win….Both campaigns had long been focused on seven swing states: the “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada….The final count could take weeks, but Trump also holds the popular vote lead. If that edge holds, he’d be the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote….The only segment of the electorate with which Harris made notable gains over Biden’s 2020 performance was with college-educated women — the voters who had propelled the party’s strong suburban performance in the 2022 midterms….Harris performed much worse than Biden among voters who said they thought abortion should be legal in most cases — even though the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in between the two elections….

Bradner, Krieg and Strauss continue, “With Harris’ loss of the presidency and with the Senate coming under GOP control, the House could become the party’s last line of defense in Washington….What that would mean is, simply, that Trump would be unable to pass much, if any, legislation and perhaps more importantly would find himself hamstrung as he tries to wind back Biden’s policies….Trump’s margins in rural America appear to have been simply too large to overtake….Trump’s campaign pushed hard to court men, and particularly men of color. CNN’s exit polls showed it paid off….Chief among Trump’s gains compared with his performance against Biden in 2020: Latino men. Trump won that cohort by 8 points, four years after losing them by 23 points. It’s a result that showed his campaign’s efforts to court those voters paid off — and that the late focus on a comedian mocking Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally didn’t cause the damage Harris’ campaign hoped it would. The gains were concentrated most heavily among Latinos under age 65….Trump also made gains in key places among Black men, more than doubling his 2020 performance in North Carolina….Nearly three-fourths of voters said they were dissatisfied or angry with the way things are going in the United States, CNN’s exit polls found. Trump won about three-fifths of those voters….Harris slipped compared with Biden’s performance four years ago among young voters, independents, moderates and union households….”

From “Democrats Botched the Election—Six Mistakes That Led to Trump Victory” by Kahleda Rahman at Newsweek: “If Biden had exited sooner, Democrats might have held a very brief primary contest to choose a candidate that represented a clear break with the current administration and appealed to enough voters to defeat Trump….Instead, Democrats coalesced around Harris, and she won the nomination without Democratic voters having a say, in a process that some criticized as undemocratic….The choice of Walz had also disappointed supporters of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who they thought could have helped Democrats win the election’s largest battleground state. Trump won Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes this year….Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Newsweek in statement: “It is important for Democratic and other elected officials to recognize that Vice President Harris’ steep drop in support in key states compared to President Biden’s 2020 victory resulted, in part, from the deep frustration and disillusionment that many young, Muslim, Arab, Black and other voters feel with the Biden-Harris administration due to its steadfast financial and military support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.”….Exit polling indicates Harris did worse with Latino voters than Biden did in 2020, with Latino men in particular shifting to Trump, who has pledged a mass deportation of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally….Social media may have also contributed to Trump’s victory….While the vice president embraced a digital-first strategy and limited interviews with traditional media, her campaign’s social media reach was likely dwarfed by the Trump campaign’s on X (formerly Twitter)….X owner Elon Musk spent months using the platform to amplify the Trump campaign’s message. He also hosted a $1-million-a-day voter sweepstakes in swing states….”It’s about time the Democratic Party come to terms with the fact that a vast majority of the American public lives in a media environment — from Fox to Twitter to podcasts — that functions as a Republicanpropaganda machine,” Matt McDermott, a Democratic strategist, wrote on X. “Ignoring this reality is no longer a tenable solution.”

In “Democrats keep forgetting the working class: As right-wing politicians scoop up the blue-collar vote, the left has its head in the sand,” Jamie Dettmer writes at Politico: “The former and now future U.S. president’s demagogue genius got him so far, but the Democrats offered him yet again the opening because they’ve increasingly lost touch with their traditional constituents: working class and lower-middle-income voters, who have very different preoccupations than those of most of the party’s leadership and activists. The Democrats have consistently failed to understand the reasons for working-class disaffection — let alone find remedies to offer them….The cleavage between Democrats and the working class has long been in the making, stretching back to the late 1960s when Richard Nixon assembled a resentful populist coalition of working- and middle-class voters with a blue-collar strategy based, in his words, on “character and guts.” In 1980, 47 percent of all blue-collar voters supported Ronald Reagan (44 percent of those from labor union households back­ed him)….Last year, when asked which president in recent decades had done the most for average working families, 44 percent named Trump compared to just 12 percent for Biden.” The article sees the same basic problem afflicting Social Democratic parties  in Europe.