Postmortem 2024

A commentary on the Presidential election and what it may mean for our future

I recorded the following commentary as a solo episode of my podcast, which is also released on X as a stand-alone 28-minute video. If you prefer audio to text, follow me on X @michaelshermer

The results of the 2024 Presidential election are in: Trump took 312 electoral votes vs. Harris’ 226, a clean sweep of the electoral college, and he also ran the table with the swing states and earned 3,096,959 more votes than Harris overall (75,666,494 vs. 72,569,535).

I was in Dubai the week of the election for a conference on the future, which seems apropos inasmuch as Trump is already changing the future of the country as he works tirelessly to put into place his agenda as outlined during his campaign. As I record this it remains to be seen how much change he can implement after he becomes President on January 20, 2025, but there’s a good chance it will be substantial.

In my previous commentary before the election, in which I upbraided those who threatened to leave the country if Trump wins (already many of them have changed their minds, such as Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, who sounded irritatingly perplexed that anyone took him seriously), I ended with two quotes, which I will repeat here with additional commentary, as they still apply. The first is from John Stuart Mill (call it Mill’s Maxim):

“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”

Our country needs both Republicans and Democrats, and the pendulum swings back and forth between them. As an exercise in quelling your anxiety if you are a Democrat and feeling the sting of the loss, let’s count backward from Trump’s latest victory to note how applicable is Mill’s Maxim:

Republican (Trump 2025-2028), Democrat (Biden 2021-2025), Republican (Trump 2017-2021), Democrat (Obama 2013-2017), Democrat (Obama 2009-2013), Republican (Bush 2005-2009), Republican (Bush 2001-2005), Democrat (Clinton 1997-2001), Democrat (Clinton 1993-1997), Republican (Bush 1989-1993), Republican (Reagan 1985-1989), Republican (Reagan 1981-1985), Democrat (Carter 1977-1981), Republican (Ford 1974-1977), Republican (Nixon 1969-1974), Democrat (Johnson 1963-1969), Democrat (Kennedy 1961-1963), Republican (Eisenhower 1957-1961), Republican (Eisenhower 1953-1957), Democrat (Truman 1949-1953), Democrat (Truman 1945-1949), Democrat (Roosevelt 1945-), Democrat (Roosevelt 1941-1945), Democrat (Roosevelt 1937-1941), Democrat (Roosevelt 1933-1937) and so on back into the foggy mists of history.

So, if you are a Democrat, don’t panic. There is a very good chance your party will be back in power after the 2028 election, if not the 2032 election. Look forward, not back. Don’t leave the country (Republicans will help you pack!), and for God’s (or whoever’s) sake, don’t shave off your hair or implement the “4B” protest program of no dating, no marriage, no sex, and no babies (although if you implement #3 you won’t have to worry about #4) (the b’s are Korean words from when this protest program was implemented during the #metoo movement). What are these people doing? Do you really think that Republicans are going to watch all those TikTok, Instagram and X videos of young women shaving their hair and foregoing men and think “oh dear, we better temper our plans with more liberal policies to save these women from themselves”? Hell no! It only reinforces their characterization of your party as a bunch of blue-haired, nose-ringed, tattooed, out-of-control screaming libtards who should be granted a Darwin award for taking themselves out of the gene pool before reproducing.

The second quote is from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in 1861, when our nation really was on the brink of actual Civil War:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

We really do need to strengthen our bonds of affection for people in the other party (or, dare I say, people in the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Constitution Party, or the Natural Law Party, not to mention independents and those who write in Mickey Mouse on their ballot). Hopefully there are no domestic battlefields in our future (or foreign battlefields for that matter, although that’s a separate issue), but there are hearts and hearthstones aplenty across this broad land to swell the chorus of our Union, and I do firmly believe that in addition to our inner demons, nature has vouchsafed us with better angels, and now would be the time to channel them.

Okay, let’s do a quick postmortem on the election itself. Here was my initial reaction that I posted on X the day after, and to which I still hold:

In coming days, everyone doing a postmortem to explain why Harris lost, what she did wrong, etc., keep in mind that Trump ran a winning campaign. I.e., it’s not so much that Harris lost than that Trump won. Analogy: The New York Yankees made some notable errors in the World Series, but the Dodgers clearly outplayed them. The better candidate/team won. And avoid deep-root-causism: Trump won because Americans are racists; Harris lost because voters are misogynists. Those are losing-side rationalizations. Also watch out for single causes: crime, abortion, immigration, inflation, wokeness, etc., are all factors, but no one of them can explain the outcome. On the other hand, be careful of overdetermined causal theories: not all factors matter, or matter equally, and most pundits are just talking out of their hats without even bothering to provide evidence or test hypotheses in counterfactual reasoning about causality.

Already we’ve been hearing: "if Harris had picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro instead of Tim Walz she would have won" or "Harris alienated Hispanics by calling them 'Latinx'" (polls consistently show that Latinos and Latinas do not like, nor do they use, the activists’ virtue-signaling neologism “Latinx”), or "if only Harris had gone on Rogan," etc. Maybe cumulatively these factors mattered to a certain extent, but overall Trump was just a vastly superior candidate and campaigner, seemingly preternaturally so. (I remain to this day utterly astonished at how an overweight, out-of-shape, fast-food eating, CocaCola-drinking, senior citizen can seemingly run circles around other candidates—I’ve never seen anything like it.)

Again, a baseball analogy: Yankee super star Aaron Judge says his error in Game 5 of the World Series "will stay with me until I die." Really? This is unnecessary guilt. If it was Game 7 between perfectly matched teams, and the error was in the 9th inning that cost them the game, ok; but that was not the case. The Dodgers vastly outplayed the Yankees. Likewise, Kamala Harris made some errors, yes, but Trump was a supremely superior candidate. Don't blame Harris so much as recognizing Trump's extraordinary campaigning abilities.

That said, Trump’s positive candidate and campaigning qualities were, in part, a result of Biden’s, Harris’s, and the Democrats’ positions on a number of key issues for which they could have done much better. I.e., here are some of the errors on the Democrat’s part on which Trump and the Republicans capitalized, from minor to major:

1. Podcasts. Harris should have gone on Rogan, especially after her disastrous town-hall meeting with Anderson Cooper on CNN, in which she babbled incoherently about the errors she made in life that she could not seem to remember, or on The View in which when asked how she differs from Biden could only sputter “nothing comes to mind,” which was quickly turned into a social media meme with her picture. Think about the power of that image: a picture of Kamala Harris with the words over her face “nothing comes to mind.” I watched all three hours of Trump on Rogan, and then of JD Vance on the same show. They both came off as much more likeable than they are on the campaign trail endlessly repeating political slogans and talking points. You can’t do that for three hours (well, maybe Trump could, but he didn’t on Rogan).

I had read JD Vance’s bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy when it was published, and I loved it. But after he shifted ever rightward when he ran for (and won) a Senate seat for Ohio, I began to dismiss him as a kook, an extremist, a woman-hating pro-life anti-abortionist, etc. But three hours on Rogan made me realize that he’s a really decent guy with whom I happen to disagree on a number of issues, but nevertheless a reasonable person with whom I could have a beer and talk politics. On abortion, for example, Joe is pro-choice and pushed JD on his pro-life stance, and Vance immediately acknowledged that the “autonomy” argument that women should have control over their bodies was totally understandable—even reasonable—even though in his case Vance places the life of the fetus over that of the mother.

I’ve been on Joe’s show seven times (for example, here, here, and here). He’s a stand-up guy who just likes to talk to people, get to know them, learn something from them, and have stimulating conversations, and he’s a master at it. If you queue up one of his episodes thinking this will be like a CBS 60-Minutes investigation with teams of researchers outlining key talking points and penetrating questions, that is not what this show is about, short of Joe’s producer, Jaime, pulling up articles and videos from the Internet in real time as the conversation unfolds—which is absolutely riveting when it doesn’t go the way the guest thought it would. When my Conspiracy book was published Joe and I got into a discussion about the JFK assassination and whether or not the so-called “magic” bullet was damaged enough to have gone through tissue and bone, and Jaime pulled up images of it so we could settle the issue right there. But don’t expect from the Joe Rogan Experience months of research on each guest. So, all that in mind, perhaps Harris’ character would not have been enhanced by tens of millions of people listening or watching her chat with Joe for three hours, but I suspect otherwise. Is it possible that inside that seemingly hallow shell of a candidate is a genuinely reasonable person with some good ideas on how to improve the country? We’ll never know now.

2. Trans Matters. Harris should have distanced herself from the radical trans activists by taking the position that every medical establishment in Europe and the UK, and some medical associations in some U.S. states have already adopted: no hormone treatments or surgeries for minors, watchful waiting for troubled teens suffering from a variety of issues like anxiety, depression, cutting, and suicidal ideation (for which they’re wrongly told that if they transition to the other sex those negative thoughts and emotions will magically disappear), and, to be blunt about it, she should have publicly stated that as a life-long Democrat, feminist, and defender of women’s rights, as President she would protect women’s privacy, women’s spaces, women’s prisons, women’s rape centers, and women’s sports from the men violating them by pretending to be women. Trans women are not women. They are men. Men cannot get pregnant, unless by “men” you mean “women”, and such distortion of language is so egregious that it only alienates potential voters. And Harris should have renounced her idiotic stance on the government funding sex change operations for imprisoned illegal aliens. How many of these are there? Next to none. And yet because she could not renounce this barking-mad trans ideology, it hurt her in the election. (See the special issue of Skeptic on Trans Matters that covers all this in detail.)

Related to this, our Skeptic Research Center data that we collected over the summer (3,000 people, randomly selected, and surveyed by a professional data-collection company called Qualtrics and that cost us nearly $20,000)—special thanks to Anondah Saide and Kevin McCaffree who run the Center and analyze the data (both are former graduate students of mine)—found very strong opinions by nearly everyone, including Democrats, against supporting the trans movement, especially transitioning minors and biological males competing in women’s sports. For example, while we found that just over 1 in 5 “very liberal” women say it is “true” that “men can get pregnant,” outside of the “very liberal” cohort, roughly 90% of Americans across the political spectrum agree that men cannot, in fact, get pregnant. (Duh!) When undecided voters hear that, their indecision goes away. Harris’ campaign should have paid attention to our data.

3. Economics. Harris should have countered Trump’s insistence that economically the United States is in a hell-hole and about to collapse. Nothing could be further from the truth, and all she had to do is repeat over and over and over again all the positive stats, such as the stock market being at an all-time high…nearly every week for the past year!, or the rate of inflation collapsing over the past year, or unemployment numbers at near-record lows, or how strong the dollar remains around the world. And more. And she could have lied—like Trump and every president before him going back to the Eisenhower administration—and said she planned to lower the deficit by cutting expenses and government waste. None of them (save Clinton) do it. Every party grows the government, and along with it the deficit, but she could have at least nodded to the problem of the run-away debt, or perhaps even invoked the trendy economy theory called Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that the government can print all the money it wants because it is not like an individual or a business. Yes, many economists think this is pure voodoo economics, but not all of them do, so Harris could have at least sounded like she did some research on the problem.

4. Immigration. I don’t need to say anything about this beyond what every one of her critics has said since she became the candidate: why didn’t she do anything about it when she was the border czar? Did she ever give us a cogent answer? I don’t think so.

5. Crime. Again, I don’t think Harris countered strongly enough Trump’s claim that crime is at an all-time high. That isn’t even remotely close to being true. Crime rates in general, and homicide rates in particular, peaked in 1993 and have been declining ever since…until Covid and the pandemic, when there was an uptick in 2021 and 2022, after when it started to come back down to the record lows it was pre-Covid. Maybe Harris didn’t want to come off as a wonky data nerd, but a couple of data graphs showing the declining sawtooth curve with the tiny uptick that went back down, might have helped. Humans are very visual primates, and research shows that people are more likely to change their minds about controversial issues if you show them the evidence in the form of visual graphs. Even Trump understands this, as when he was pointing to his favorite graph (on illegal immigration) when the assassin’s bullet grazed his ear, a graph he then used over and over to great effect.

6. Academia. I find editorial cartoons often convey messages even more effectively than Opinion Editorials, and this one shows a couple of student-age distraught liberals in a college cafeteria bemoaning the election loss, with the caption:

“I can’t believe that a year of us screaming at Zionists, taking over buildings, destroying college property, and burning American flags didn’t defeat Trump.”

These people are not liberals. They are illiberals, and liberals should call them out on their bullshit.

So…what do the next four years hold for our future? No one knows for sure (because the future is largely unpredictable), but at the very least we will see again what Trump did in his first four years, but maybe on steroids now that he has both the House (very probably—the count is still ongoing) and the Senate (along with the Supreme Court), but I remain optimistic that many of the changes will be a good course correction from the Democrats taking the country too far left (remember Mill’s Maxim). If you disagree and remain worried, here is something to think about: the 2028 election! Who will the Democrats run? And against who? Trump can’t run again (and, no, he’s not going to get a Constitutional amendment to overturn the current one that restricts anyone from serving more than two terms—implemented after the Democrat FDR reigned for 15 years), so maybe JD Vance? Or Tulsi Gabbard? Or Marco Rubio? Or maybe even Elon Musk? (Ok, that last one was just for fun—Elon can be President of Mars.) Focusing on the future and what could go right, rather than brooding over the past and rehashing all the things that went wrong, is a proven technique of Cognitive Behavior Therapy to improve one’s emotional state.

Finally, allow me to put a couple of items into perspective for the new Trump administration, prefaced by a reminder of how many times on this show I have criticized Donald Trump’s character, honesty, and integrity.

1. How bad can it be to bring the Ukraine war to an end by cutting a deal with Putin that ends the destruction of that country’s cities and the deaths of countless innocent civilians, while saving American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars?

2. How bad can it be to negotiate a deal with Israel that brings the war against the Hamas terrorists in Gaza to an end and stops the massive killing of innocent Gazans who are presently collateral damage for the IDF, while saving American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars?

3. What’s wrong with talking to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un or China’s President Xi Jinping? It is harder to go to war with people you are talking to, so why not see if Trump can do what no President before him has accomplished? Maybe he’ll fail, but maybe he’ll succeed. Who knows? Neither Obama or Biden has made much headway, so why not support the effort? In any case, like it or not, we’re going to find out.

4. How bad can it be, really, that Trump plans to purge governmental bloat, and now we have Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of DOGE: Department of Government Efficiency. Elon just tweeted that there are 428 government agencies and he thinks it can be reduced to 99. Does anyone know what they all are, much less what they do, short of the Government Accounting Office (hopefully they keep that one as it’s the agency that is suppose to monitor the government checkbook). With our deficit at over $31 trillion dollars, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to try to do something about it.

5. And then there are taxes and tax deductions. What’s wrong with allowing parents to deduct from their reported income the money they spend on their children’s education if they opt for private school or home schooling? I have paid private school tuition for both of my kids, and I pay my fair share of taxes to support public school education. Is it unreasonable for me to get a little break, in the same way that I am allowed to deduct the mortgage interest on my home loan, deduct the donations I make to charities each year, and the tax breaks I get for being married and having a dependent child?

Let me end this election postmortem with an observation from the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer, from his 2013 book Things that Matter:

“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.”

Let’s work together to get our politics right.