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What I Got Right, What I Got Way Wrong, and What I Totally Should Have Known About the 2024 Election
Donald Trump and Republicans Win in a Rout
In the week before the election, I wrote two articles predicting that Kamala Harris would win in the 2024 election, not by a whisker but in a landslide. Boy, was I wrong! I wasn’t without reason for my predictions. I made the mistake of listening to what people said instead of watching what they did.
What I got right was predicting that the swing states would all tilt in the same direction. Past elections have suggested that all of them would break one way or the other. At the moment of this writing, they all moved toward Trump with races called in his favor in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He leads in Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona. I was right about it being a landslide but wrong about the winner. At no point will I suggest the election was stolen or rigged. Electing Donald Trump accurately reflects the will of the people who bothered to vote.
The list of things I got wrong is longer. I listened to white women voters explaining their votes before the election and in exit interviews. They voted in favor of all the abortion initiatives in several states, passing everywhere but Florida that required a 60% margin to pass a change, only 57% voted for the ballot initiative. Florida women will be protected whether they like it or not. While the majority of women voted for amendments expanding abortion rights, they also put back in place the politicians who took them away. Make that make sense.
In a related subject, I got it wrong that Republicans kept shooting themselves in the foot, racing to pass more restrictive abortion laws and suggesting national abortion bans. Republicans kept pushing the limits, going from 24 week bans to 15, to 12, 10, and even 6 in some states like Florida. The lack of exceptions has led to several deaths of women who couldn’t get healthcare because doctors and hospitals feared criminal charges.
I’ve read several post-mortems on the election explaining what Kamala Harris and the Democrats did wrong. Some focused on Harris not adequately explaining her positions, while Trump explained nothing. Harris was criticized for not differentiating…
