137 Comments

Thank you for being a touchstone to reality with your posts. I am appalled at the outcome of this election, and worried about the future my children will live in. I am most worried that all the guardrails have been taken away, there are no more checks and balances. I am worried about the people who will serve in the incoming administration, who are smarter than the orange man and just as bent on disruption. In that previous term, there were a few key people with ethics, but they will be kept out this time.

I also want to thank you and your wife for the positive change you have brought to your yard. We had a large part of our own suburban yard converted to native plants two years ago, and it is thriving with very little maintenance, supporting a nice variety of insects in particular. A little spot for peace in my life.

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I am a lifelong Democrat, having voted in my first election back in 1972. I have never voted for a Republican and never will. HOWEVER, for many reasons Republicans have been able to successfully exploit the feeling among many Americans, of all races and creeds, that our Party does not welcome and connect with Americans, both male and female, who do not have a four-year college degree, many of whom have been extremely successful in life without that degree or frustrated by their lack of success and visibility in our political system. Either way, fellow Democrats, in the coming months and years, I believe WE NEED TO RETHINK OUR APPROACH TO POLICY AND FIX THIS. The midterms in 2026 will be that first test.

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In 2020 Trump received 74.2 million votes. This year he received 72.3 million (at least to this point). The difference between 2020 and 2024 is the 13 million votes that Biden received and Harris didn’t. I’m not quite sure what to make of this. But I don’t think it suggests that Trump is winning hearts and minds, or that Trumpism is sustainable.

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While I appreciate the comforting citation from "Little Gidding," I'm afraid that Auden's "September 1, 1939" is more to the point.

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author

Or, 'The Second Coming' by Yeats ...

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"I know this too, Candide says. We must cultivate our garden."

Did you quote this, Mr. Fallows, knowing how evocative it is of "Being There," the 1979 film, Peter Sellers' last film, based on "Being There," the book by Jerzy Kosinski? (Further coincidence: "Being There" takes place in Washington, DC.)

Kosinski pronounced the film version of "Being There" a failure. Kosinski wanted "Being There," the film, like the book, to warn us of the danger we faced, entertainiing ourselves to death with television (The already poisonous precursor to the Internet and to Social Media.). But to the contrary, "Being There" the film was taken by its audience to be a romantic comedy.

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author

I did not know of that connection, thanks! (I saw the movie, back in the Carter era, and have read the Kosinski book.)

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I meant to include the Wikipedia links to the film and to the book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_There (the film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_There_(novel)

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14 hrs agoLiked by James Fallows

Very smart readers. However, one of the comments leads me to mention a conversation with a trump voter friend as we walked out of work this evening.

We *never* talk about politics but it was hanging heavily in the air and I wanted to hear his thoughts.

Long story, short: he voted for trump in 2016 because Hillary, but didn't like how he treated people. Voted for him in 2020 because there were no better choices, thinks there was hanky panky with the machines. Preferred Nikki Haley in 2024, but again, trump was the only one he trusted on the economy. To be clear, he does not like trump, doesn't watch his rallies because they're too mean and nasty, and he did not watch the debates. He does not read the paper, does not watch the news, does not read blogs, nor listens to podcasts.

He gets his information exclusively from one or two opinion segments on Fox News. He believes countless things that are fantastically wrong. He has nearly zero economic education. Over many years he has benefited directly, and materially, from social safety net programs, but doesn't realize it fully. (Imagine patiently explaining ACA = Obamacare.)

You get the gist.

Multiply him by tens of millions, each with their own weird single issue, and then try to figure out how to answer the dude who believes the one weird thing in such a way that he will suddenly say, "Ok, you get my vote."

We now live in a world where Joe Rogan > 60 Minutes, and repeating a lie 100 times a day > any detailed fact set.

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author

Excellent point and illustration, thank you.

More and more it becomes clear that the real "opposition party" in this election, and presumably those to come, is sheer disinformation. Nostrums like "it's the economy, stupid" used to describe elections. Now it would be, "It's 'perceptions' of the economy, stupid." As I've mentioned in other replies, Nick Lemann's great new piece in the New Yorker is all about this — the gap between what's been happening in the economy, and what anyone is aware of. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/04/bidenomics-is-starting-to-transform-america-why-has-no-one-noticed

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Meanwhile, the GOP members of congress who voted against Biden's infrastructure programs were using the actual projects in their ads over the past few months. They get dragged relentlessly on Xitter but nobody back home sees it. The only thing local voters do see is their congressman cutting a yellow ribbon.

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founding

One observation is how many columnists, pollsters, political advisors, and talk show guests espoused so many strong opinions that turned out to be so wrong. Reminds me of a truism: “Things are always less than what they seem."

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author

Phil, thanks. As you know from your writing like, it's always a balance between trying to say something with enough edge to move past, "The future lies ahead"—but doesn't assert or presume certainty about what is just unknowable.

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founding

So true. And partly our fault as we gravitated to those whose opinions reinforced what we wanted to hear.

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15 hrs ago·edited 14 hrs agoLiked by James Fallows

I commented for myself below and appreciated your insights and those of your readers as always...

.... but if I may, this piece by your colleague at The Atlantic resonated to me as finely tuned (alas):

What Trump Understood, and Harris Did Not

The former and future president got one big thing right.

By David A. Graham

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/why-trump-won/680555/

PS: I thought I would summarize his argument... Too many of our fellow citizens still think "something" is broken, often for contradictory reasons and whether fairly or not (mainly not), and Trump coopted "I will fix it" for the aspects of life most tangible to those people versus the abstractions and aspirations tied to "economics" and "progress". For what it's worth, I still think the invasive memes fertilized byw half-truths and vitriol are still important forces...

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author

Yes, thanks. And David Graham is great.

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16 hrs agoLiked by James Fallows

This year, it was more like Eyes Wide Shut. It was a willing refusal to see what was before our eyes.

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16 hrs agoLiked by James Fallows

I am grateful to have your sane and thoughtful voice as a companion in these troubled times.

Scrolling through the comments, one of my favorites was “Like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.”

Waking up to the grim news this morning, my first thought was—like Trump, I’m 78. I hope to be able to look back on the next four years, if I’m given them, as the most productive of my life.

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author

Thank you. After the past 24 hours of reeling at what has happened, it's time to dig in anew.

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16 hrs agoLiked by James Fallows

The American experiment is over, Jim. As a woman I’m already a second class citizen and under Project 2025 I’m about to lose Social Security, Medicare, and my vote. The only upside is that at 72 there is less of my life in front of me than there is behind me. Jim Brown is right: The world is f*cked and so are we.

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author

My view of American history, as I keep saying, is: the US is always in a contest between the trouble it gets into, and its struggle to get out.

This is the most serious setback for the American idea in many decades. It's much worse than 8 years ago, both for the reasons mentioned in this piece and because, this time, the Trump people know what they are doing. But in awareness of my kids and grandchildren, I don't know what the alternative is to continuing the fight. (Though, as mentioned, not sure that Deb and I can stand to do so in DC itself.)

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The difficulty is that there is nothing left to fight with. With this Congress and this Supreme Court there are literally no guardrails remaining. I don’t like gloom and doom but there is no point in being unrealistic. You’re right in that we’re in for a very rough ride but where are we when we get off? Gilead.

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Thanks, Jim. I just wanted to add one more to your what-ifs: What if John Roberts et al didn’t read an unambiguous provision out of the Constitution to protect Trump’s ability to run again and didn’t delay into infinity and beyond Trump’s legal reckoning on federal charges …

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author

Yes, excellent point.

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19 hrs agoLiked by James Fallows

The world is f**ked.

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author

It is a dark time.

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A bright spot today is the plantings in your front yard. I am grateful for your writing Jim, for Deb’s photo, and for the many thoughtful comments on this post

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author

Susan, thank you! (The planting crew is from a local operation called Love & Carrots, https://www.loveandcarrots.com/about We recommend them!

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19 hrs agoLiked by James Fallows

James, do you think it's more likely not that the country's character has changed but that Harris simply ran out of time for voters to know her in a campaign that started so uniquely late? Most legit polls registered momentum breaking for her in the last week or two, and even the Trump campaign gave indications that it thought it was losing ground. She was like a dark horse that comes out of the starting gate when the other horse is already turning for home. She ran very fast and well but ran out of track before the finish line cut her off. Had she had the traditional amount of time, from primary to Election Day, that momentum might have brought her in first.

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author

Of course I have no way to know. But my guess, and fear, is that the election could have run for another full year, and she would have run into the same barriers.

Related point: earlier this evening I was on a podcast with a successful female politician I have known for a long time. I told her that I'd been sobered by the apparent data-and-reportage evidence of Latino men breaking heavily in favor of Trump, on fundamentally misogynist grounds. (Trump "looks strong"; Harris didn't "seem right" in command.) I asked this politician, who like me is white, how she would weight this misogynist resistance to Harris, versus resistance to a Black/South Asian candidate. She said that of course it was both together.

So, alas, I don't think more time would have made much of a difference.

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I said in 2008 that this country would vote for a black man before they would a white woman. In 2016 they voted for a wrecking ball instead of a woman, and this year they did it again. We didn’t used to be this ignorant but we’ve always been this misogynistic.

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Thanks. That too is a very sobering assessment, aligning with the misogynistic doubling-down of Trump in the final weeks.

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19 hrs agoLiked by James Fallows

As ever, I'll be interested to see his reply. My thinking is that whatever they didn't know about Harris, they know well who Trump is and chose him. My sense is that if you make that choice you're not looking to be talked out of it.

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author

Yes, agree.

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19 hrs agoLiked by James Fallows

That's a good point. However, it would be interesting to know how many voters 'flipped' after talking with a canvasser or learning more about Harris, especially after Michelle's appeal to men who love the women in their lives caused them to see this choice from a different angle. The Guardian reported this on the morning of Election Day:

Posting this from The Guardian this morning -

Reporting from South Raleigh, North Carolina:

Lavar Turner, 46, who runs a burger joint, was also motivated to vote for Harris over Trump’s role in overturning the right to an abortion. Also like Johnson, he had problems deciding.

Initially he was tempted to vote for Trump, but he wasn’t sure. “So I sat and prayed about it, and as I was praying Kamala’s face came into my mind, and I knew she was the one.”

He went on to research her policies, abortion especially, and was convinced that was the way to go. “I don’t like them taking away women’s rights – without women, men wouldn’t be here.”

His wife, Beverly Turner, 51, had a more robust way of explaining her vote. “Trump can take his Project 2025 and shove it all the way up his ass.”

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author

That is interesting counter-evidence that more time might have built more support. My impression again has been that the KH campaign had *such* an extensive and impressive ground-game that they had reached anyone capable of being reached. But .. I don't know.

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founding

Excellent piece. Such a telling quote from Eliot - How many of us who have been explorers of the American electoral landscape are now "knowing" it as though it were for the first time. I know I am.

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author

Thank you, Rita. (And see you next week!)

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