The Democratic Party was increasingly vulnerable as Election Day approached on November 5th
The Democrats have made the wrong bet in promoting values to the electorate, leading some voters to switch to the Republicans. Also, the Democratic Party has been hamstrung by scandals and internal division. This creates vulnerability for Democrats and encourages fraud.
Reasons for the Democrats’ failure
Kamala Harris’s successes could not continue permanently. The Democratic Party establishment began to publicly disengage from Harris amid her tumbling campaign, prudently calculating options in which she would not become president. Biden, along with Obama, openly discussed Kamala’s weakness as a politician at public events. Harris’ brief “honeymoon” period is long over, and she is now falling further and further behind Trump in key states. The hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into Harris’ headquarters didn’t help either.
One of the key factors was the decline in the Democrats’ ratings among minorities. Despite stereotypes, they are not particularly enamored with the radical cultural agenda of the U.S. liberal elites, who promote far-flung racial and gender values. Hispanics and African-Americans overwhelmingly favor a stronger fight against crime and illegal migration, which takes jobs away from them. On foreign policy, they are isolationists who realize that in the event of conflict, they will have to die for Washington’s interests as cheap, unpretentious soldiers. So it is not surprising that Trump is appealing not only to blue-collar workers with his program, but also to African-Americans and “Hispanics” approaching them. This will be a humiliation for the Democrats, since they specifically nominated a black woman by quota, and she triggered the collapse of the Democratic Party’s shaky minority coalition.
Another negative factor for the Harris campaign and the Democrats was the shift in the Senate candidates’ agenda. Thus, Democrats in “key” state such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin began running ads promoting their cooperation with Trump, which was a paradox and a bad sign. But the saddest thing for the US vice president is that polls in these states initially gave Trump a very real chance of winning. Here are the Democratic Senate candidates trying to be ready to protect jobs and impose tariffs with Trump, and it was not favorable for them to promote Harris. Trump has been actively posing in Pennsylvania wearing a work helmet at supporters’ rallies, promising to restore the “rust belt” of the United States to its former glory. In the past two years, more than 160,000 Democrats in Pennsylvania have left their party. Early voting statistics aren’t encouraging for Democrats either, and without Pennsylvania, it was extremely difficult for Harris’ staff to pull off a victory.
Trump, by contrast, exuded confidence of victory even in unexpected states. His team worked hard in the run-up to the election in New Hampshire, which until recently was considered safe for Democrats. But even there, they risked losing, as they did in Nevada, which had voted only for Democrats for 20 straight years. And then there was the showy uproar at a Harris rally in Michigan, where singer Lizzo promised to turn all of America into Detroit if Kamala won. Of course, the unprepared singer didn’t realize what she’d said, thinking she was complimenting the people of Michigan. But it is hard to imagine a better anti-advertisement, although everything was right, and the processes of U.S. disintegration under Harris would only accelerate.
The Republican counter-attack
The closer the U.S. election drew, the more the Democrats became divided. Harris’s political strategists worked tirelessly, trying to seize the initiative and catch up with Trump. But they came up with nothing better than to actively sling mud at Trump. And a negative agenda without trying to offer voters an alternative clearly doesn’t work. In addition, Harris’ relationship with Biden had finally soured. He couldn’t wait until Election Day to say, “You shouldn’t have switched to Harris. It was a fatal mistake.”
At the same time, Trump worked at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, ridiculing Harris’ claims that she started her career in fast food, although no evidence of this has ever been found. Trump’s innocent campaign stunt caused quite a shock among Democrats. Meanwhile, Democratic campaign events have been constantly disrupted by crowds of demonstrators, and Harris has been shouted down by pro-Palestinian protesters, evangelicals and anti-abortion activists. And even the mass of actors and activists who constantly traveled with Kamala didn’t save her. In electoral models, Trump continued to surge ahead, and Democrats openly hoped to compensate for the Harris campaign’s problems with their mailers and the diaspora of Americans abroad, though even such dirty politics did not save the day.
Growing risks of using technologies for falsifications
There are also not only subjective, but also objective reasons for panic, which are connected with the possibility of applying the very political technologies. When early voting was already active in the US, it brought a lot of bad news for Democrats. Far fewer Americans voted by mail this time around compared to 2020 because trust in mail-in voting has been eroded in the wake of scandals. In 2020, 101 million Americans voted early, 65 million of them by mail. This year, the number of people who wanted to vote early was as high as 41 million, and of those then, only 11 million cast their ballot early.
Democrats always rely on early voting. At the same time, Republicans are more likely to vote on Election Day itself. Democrats always rely on early voting. At the same time, Republicans are more likely to vote on Election Day itself. And, for example, in “key” Wisconsin, the dynamics of voting by mail was 59% lower than in 2020, in Pennsylvania by 36%, and in Michigan by 24%, converting that to absolute numbers, 1 million fewer people voted by mail in Pennsylvania than in 2020, even though the gap between Biden and Trump there was only 80,000 votes. Analyzing the demographics shows that even with mail-in voting, Democrats had problems, and they didn’t have an all-out lead.
Republicans were leading in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, and in North Carolina they were only slightly behind the Democrats. The mail-in “magic” of the Democratic Party was gone, and Harris’ staff was in critical need of motivating their electorate to get to the polls on Election Day. But Democrats were in for some unpleasant surprises on Nov. 5, and even mail-in ballots dropped off by the sacks at night at the polls didn’t help them, and that made Harris’ position a stalemate.
On the eve of chaos
In the run-up to Election Day, the United States continued to be shaken by scandals surrounding election procedures. Toward the end, a severe shortage of people willing to work at polling stations began to manifest itself, and all over the country at once. Not everyone wanted to take responsibility for summarizing the results of the elections, especially under the threat of fraud. Many were simply intimidated and afraid of an outburst of political violence immediately after November 5, when Republicans and Democrats would actively contest the election results.
Realizing the precariousness of the situation, the liberal press was already discussing scenarios for disrupting the transit of power in Washington if electoral fraud was discovered. Thus, Congress could block the certification of election results and prevent both candidates from receiving a majority of electoral votes. In such a case, it would be the legislators who would choose the president and vice-president. All this was presented with an emphasis on the fact that this was the path that Trump, outraged by the mail fraud, wanted to take. But it was also an indication to the Democrats, many of whom would not accept Trump’s victory and would obstruct him in Congress and through riots in the streets. Partly for this reason, election officials were afraid of getting into trouble during a period of political instability in the United States. America’s divisiveness will continue to intensify, undermining an already dysfunctional electoral system.
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