The Daily Parker

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens suggests that a holier-than-thou attitude from Democrats contributed to Tuesday's electoral disaster:

The broad inability of liberals to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback.

[Democrats'] mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.

The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues. You could see this every time Harris mentioned, in answer to questions about the border, that she had prosecuted transnational criminal gangs: Her answer was nonresponsive to the central complaint that there was a migration crisis straining hundreds of communities, irrespective of whether the migrants committed crimes.

Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?

My social media keeps blowing up with my friends catastrophizing and much rending of garments. These are the same people who believed, without doubt, we would win yesterday. I don't know how many people asked me "how do you think we'll do?" to which I had to reply "I don't know." Because I also talk to the other side, and I knew they really felt like we talked down to them all the time.

If a motivating factor for a lot of people, white and Hispanic men in particular, was feeling dissed and wanting to stick it to the liberals, antagonizing them was a pretty stupid thing to do. Moralizing at them was even worse. Because no matter how much the other side offends your morality, or how superior you feel to them, you still need to win the election.

Democrats, including me, have complained about the POTUSE engaging in identity entrepreneurialism. But the response to that cannot be our own identity politicking. And now that our side has gotten spanked, I hope we can finally move the party back to the center.

I'm off to the Bay Area today, so I'll have four hours on an airplane to think more about how we can learn from Tuesday and win the legislature back in 2026.

Some of these may be correct, but not all of them are:

• Rafael Baer: "The whole apparatus of voting for a candidate who might not satisfy your exact needs, and probably doesn’t embody all the values you hold sacred, but might at least make some half-decent decisions for the country as a whole over the coming years, feels oddly antiquated. It is alien to the click-and-collect spirit of digital commerce."
• The Economist: "Mr Trump’s victory has changed America, and the world will need to grasp what that means. America remains the pre-eminent power. However, without American enlightened self-interest as an organising principle, it will be open season for bullies. Countries will be more able to browbeat their neighbours, economically and militarily, without fear of consequences. Their victims, unable to turn to America for relief, will be more likely to compromise or capitulate. Global initiatives, from tackling climate change to arms control, have just got harder. For a time—possibly for years—America may do fine. Eventually, the world will catch up with it."
• James Fallows: "By the standards of any presidential race in modern times, Kamala Harris ran a very “good” campaign. By those same standards, Trump ran a very bad campaign. And none of it mattered. The Republican presidential candidate had won the popular vote only once in the past 32 years. Eight years ago, Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by three million votes. Four years ago, he lost to Joe Biden by seven million. Yesterday, our fellow Americans appear to have given him an absolute majority—as I type, over 51% of the total vote, and a margin of several million."
• David Frum: "Perhaps the greater and more insidious danger is not political repression or harassment, but corruption. Autocratic populists around the world—in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela—have assaulted institutions designed to provide accountability and transparency in order to shift money and influence to their friends and families, and this may happen in America too."
• Carlos Lozada: "Trump is very much part of who we are. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for him in 2016. Seventy-four million did in 2020. And now, once again, enough voters in enough places have cast their lot with him to return him to the White House. Trump is no fluke, and Trumpism is no fad. The Harris campaign, as the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it."
• Josh Marshall: "[E]xhaustion is the greatest threat to continued opposition to Donald Trump. There’s no one election that saves democracy. That whole construct is wrong. It’s the enduring question of what kind of society we want to live in and what we’re going to do about it."
• Daniel McCarthy: "Mr. Trump’s victory amounts to a public vote of no confidence in the leaders and institutions that have shaped American life since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago. Mr. Trump has shown that the nation’s political orthodoxies are bankrupt, and the leaders in all our institutions — private as well as public — who stake their claim to authority on their fealty to such orthodoxies are now vulnerable."
• Robert Reich: "If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do. All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty. We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny."
• Michael Tomasky: "If you go carefully through the exit polls and compare them to 2020, you actually see a fair amount of stability. Only one group of voters really stands out. Biden had won Latinos 65–32. Harris won them by only 53–45. And the biggest change of all is among Latino men: Biden won them 59–36, and this time, Trump beat Harris outright, 54–44. I kept wishing that I would see an ad by one of the prominent Black or Latino men who endorsed her that didn’t focus on praising Harris or even denouncing Trump in the normal, he’s-a-threat-to-democracy way. I wanted to see, say, LeBron James talking directly to young men of color about why Trump was not a tough guy at all; why he was a weakling and a bully, and explaining that a real man doesn’t lie or make excuses or disrespect women."
• George Will: "Enough has been said about the Republican Party’s eight years of self-degradation. More needs to be said about the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president. Before claiming to sniff Nazism on the other party (and its supporters), Harris’s party should deal with the stench of its antisemitic faction that is pro-Hamas and therefore pro-genocide."

Meanwhile, here in Chicago, voters elected only a couple of the Chicago Teachers Union candidates in our school board vote, as well as a couple of school-choice (read: taking public money for private schools) folks. I really disliked most of the candidates, including the one who won in my district. So that will be fun. Even though I don't have a kid in school, I do pay property tax, and I'm really tired of so much of it going to pay settlements for people beaten up or killed by cops and for a totally dysfunctional school district.

Update: Jonathan Pie has the acerbic British comedian view:

I'm not going to lie; this one stings:

We have a lot more data to gather to learn why we lost and why slightly more than half the electorate felt comfortable returning one of the least competent and most corrupt men back to the White House. Given this ridiculous person as our opponent, we have to acknowledge that we simply failed. I'll have a lot more to say about why over the next days and weeks, but the President's decision to run for a second term is probably the precipitating cause.

This sucks. Harris failed to win over enough voters to overcome a clownish demagogue. Her job from today until November 2028 will be to help the Democratic Party find someone else who can.

Right now, though, our first duty in protecting democracy in the United States is simply to accept that we lost and start preparing for at least two years in the minority. Being in opposition sucks; but notice, Republicans, how we're not storming the Capitol.

We can wallow in self-pity for the next 57 days, but come January 3rd, we need to be a disciplined, focused opposition party until we win the Senate back in two years and the White House two years after that. Resist the temptation to blame or point fingers; we Democrats have a long history of circular firing squads that we need to put behind us. We need to look at the data figure out what worked and what didn't, learn from our mistakes, and win the next election. We're not going to be in the desert for long unless we choose not to look at a map.

It's early, and nothing shocking has yet occurred, I'm actually watching The Bear. But some returns have come in. The Post has called West Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky for the XPOTUS and Vermont for Harris. Again, no surprises. Early (<25%) returns in several states have the XPOTUS ahead, but as we've seen many times, Republican precincts report early, on average.

But let's see the 8pm ET returns...and, in a shock, the Post calls Mississippi for the 1850s.

To be continued...

19:04 CST: Nothing surprising. Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma turn red, and Maryland and southern New England turns blue.

20:10 CST: Still no surprises. We knew we'd lose Joe Manchin's US Senate seat, and we figured we'd pick up the North Carolina governor's mansion. And, of course, everyone has called Illinois for Harris. All of the swing states are still swinging, with Harris leading Michigan and Pennsylvania, but the XPOTUS leading Georgia and N.C. The bigs have called Ohio for the XPOTUS.

In what I am sure will turn out to be a mirage, Harris leads in Kansas and Missouri, and the XPOTUS in Virginia.

And it looks like the Florida referendum legalizing abortion through the 24th week will fail.

Nothing yet in local races, except the Democratic candidate for Illinois Attorney General, Eileen O'Neill Burke, looks like she'll win.

21:09 CST: The map still looks a lot like it did at this time in 2020. By "a lot" I mean identical. We picked up Colorado and lost Utah, for example. All the swing states show the XPOTUS in the lead but, then again, so does Minnesota. So, no one knows nothing. I guess I'll post again in an hour, at which point we should have the West Coast states.

But the three that will decide the election—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—won't be called for days. The one thing that I have seen in the drill-down, though, is an even starker urban/rural divide, which is not good for the country in the long term.

22:02 CST: Wow, The Bear is fantastic. I see why it got all those Emmys. Oh, and we won California while they took Idaho. Still looking almost exactly like 2020.

22:07 CST: Just a reminder that four years ago, the AP didn't call Wisconsin until 3pm Central on Wednesday. And no one called Georgia, Pennsylvania, or Michigan for many hours after that. This clearly isn't 1980, 1992, or 2004. It's, well, 2020 again. So everyone just try to sleep and check back tomorrow.

23:01 CST: Welp, we lost the Senate, with Sherrod Brown losing to yet another ultra-right kook in Ohio. Whatever else happens this week, we really have to figure out why people prefer the ultra-right kooks to sensible moderates. I'm afraid I won't like the answer.

Still too close to call the big three. But I'm not going to wait up for it. I'm disappointed in my country, but not entirely surprised.

Polls are open, votes are being tabulated, misguided youth are casting ballots for 3rd-party candidates to "send a message," and I'm just doing my thing at work.

I've got NBC's hour-by-hour guide bookmarked, though. And you should bookmark The Daily Parker; I will very likely live-blog again tonight, though I have promised myself to go to bed before 11 CST (unlike in 2016).

And here's my starting point, which is basically the consensus map minus Iowa and Arizona:

I'm not worried. Look, the Roman Republic fell in 49 BCE, and it only took Italy about 1,995 years to return to democracy. So why fret?

(Oh, dear. Re-reading my 2016 live blog, I see I ended with this: "Millions of people who voted for Donald Trump tonight will expect their lives to improve, with America returning to the imagined past of 'Leave It to Beaver.' What happens when they're disappointed? Which Visigoths do they invite to sack Washington?" Well, now we know.)

If you read nothing else before tomorrow night, read Tim Alberta's epic reporting on the XPOTUS's colossally dysfunctional campaign and the infants who run it. My favorite bit comes right at the end, with a quote from Joseph Goebbels Stephen Miller:

Backstage at the Garden, in the blur of debate and indecision over damage control, it was Stephen Miller who pondered the bigger picture. (Miller did not respond to a request for comment.) According to two people who were present, Miller, the Trump policy adviser whose own nativist impulses are well documented, was not offended by Hinchcliffe’s racist jokes. Yet he was angered by them all the same: He knew the campaign had just committed a huge unforced error. He believed that Bruesewitz had done profound damage to Trump’s electoral prospects. And, in that moment, he seethed at what this lack of discipline portended for Trump should he return to power.

The irony, apparently, was lost on Miller. He and his colleagues would spend the coming days savaging Bruesewitz for his recklessness when really—as ever—the culprit was a man whose addiction to mayhem creates the conditions in which a comedian who was once dropped by his talent agency for using racial slurs onstage could be invited to kick off the closing event of the election without a single objection being raised.

“If we can’t trust this kid with a campaign,” Miller said to the group, according to one of the people present, “how can we trust him in the White House?”

How indeed.

Only 27 hours remain until polls close in parts of Indiana and Kentucky. Which means we're less than 27 hours away from the XPOTUS claiming he won, because that's how he operates. Even if he loses by 10 million votes, he'll still claim he won all the way until January 20th, and possibly even longer.

Of course, no one will know anything interesting until at least 7pm Eastern when polls close in Georgia and 7:30pm Eastern when they close in North Carolina. Arizona's polls close at 7pm Mountain, which is 8pm here in Chicago. And even though we know who will win California's 54 electoral votes—a fifth of the required 270 to win—no one can call the state officially until 8pm Pacific (10pm here in Chicago).

Other things to keep in mind:

• If the election is close, it will take longer to know the results than if it's a blowout for either candidate.
• Rural areas, which tend to vote Republican, have orders of magnitude fewer voters than urban areas, which tend to vote Democratic. This means that early returns always look better for Republicans than later returns. Expect the XPOTUS to harp on early returns and discount later ones for this reason.
• Pennsylvania can't even begin tabulating absentee ballots until tomorrow, and it will take them days to get through all of them.
• Arizona has super-long ballots this year, especially in Maricopa County (Phoenix), so counting will take a lot longer than usual.
• Georgia plans to release official numbers as early as 8pm Eastern tomorrow night, but Fulton County, which contains Atlanta, will take a lot longer.
• Milwaukee hopes to have provisional results around midnight, but again, counting could take days. And absentee ballots can continue arriving for a week.

Bottom line: until Wednesday lunchtime at the earliest, no one will really know anything if the election is close. So let's hope for a repeat (and a reversal) of 1980 and get a huge Harris victory tomorrow.

You've heard the expression "crossing the Rubicon," but you may not know the history.

In the Roman Republic, the Rubicon marked the border of Italy (read: the Home Counties/Eastern Seaboard), where it was illegal to garrison troops. In 49 BCE, Julius Caesar ran out of lawful ways to—wait for it—avoid prosecution for corruption stemming from his first term as Consul, and the Senate denied him the governorship of Cisalpine Gallus (read: the Midlands/the Midwest) which would have also granted him immunity. So he and his XIII Legion crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome to force the Senate to make him Dictator of Rome. It worked out for Caesar, but not for the Republic.

The ensuing civil war killed a good fraction of the Roman population and conclusively ended the Republic. Then just days before the end of that conflagration, Caesar had his unfortunate accident in the Senate. This led to Caesar's great-nephew Octavian becoming Emperor shortly thereafter, starting a 400-year slow-motion disintegration of Roman civilization. And the distraction of all this prepared the ground in Judea for a fundamentalist sect to break off from Judaism and go on to bury the 1500-year-old Greco-Roman religion in the archaeological dust.

The relevance of this history to current events is left as an exercise for the reader.

Revolution Brewpub, which opened its Logan Square brewpub in 2010 and featured in the (really bad) film Drinking Buddies, announced it will close on December 14th:

Almost 15 years ago, we threw open the doors of our Milwaukee Avenue brewpub and launched Revolution Brewing to the world. The brewpub is where the first Revolution beers were served and where we first brewed beers like Anti-Hero IPA which would change the shape of craft beer in Chicagoland. Today that chapter of our story starts to wind down as we announce that we are permanently closing the doors of the Logan Square brewpub, with our last day of service on December 14th.

You could count the number of other breweries in the city on one hand back in the day. Our experience definitely inspired others to take their shot and now there are close to a hundred different places brewing beer in the city.⁠

Our Kedzie Avenue production brewery and tap room opened just two years after the pub and that’s where our business thrives now and where we will remain fully operational and open to the public.

Sad news, but totally understandable. Since I started the Brews & Choos Project in February 2020, fully 24 breweries have closed, most of them because of the after-effects of the pandemic. I'm sad to lose Revolution on Milwaukee, but glad they'll stay open on Kedzie.

The sky above Chicago has nothing but sun this morning. It won't last—the forecast for tomorrow night points to July-like atmospheric moisture and epic rainfall—but Cassie and I will enjoy it as much as we can.

Maybe I should stay away from these news stories until the rain starts for real:

• Michelle Goldberg reminds all you Hannah Arendt fans that fascism takes time to establish itself, so we have perhaps a couple of years to emigrate if the XPOTUS takes power in January: "The transition from democracy to autocracy is a process, not an on-off switch."
• Jay Willis shakes his head that "Jeff Bezos doesn't understand that he is the problem:" "[T]he possibility that Americans might also not care for a rich guy leveraging his power to compromise political coverage in the middle of an up-or-down vote on fascism seems not to have occurred to him."
• Dylan Byers takes to Puck to muse about Bezos's side of the argument: "Ultimately, Bezos wants to own, and Lewis wants to manage, a paper staffed by a team that supports their vision for semi-nonpartisan, future-proofed profitability."
• Jeff Jarvis explains in the Columbia Journalism Review why liberals are infuriated with the media: "Journalists like to say they write the first draft of history. Too often that means they ignore history. Today I urge journalists to reread Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism so as to understand her historical antecedents."
• Inae Oh expands on why people not already in the bag for the XPOTUS might hate election coverage right now: "Trump’s menacing language—a constant for almost a decade—rarely draws the notice that Garbage-gate has received. To call this imbalance typical both-sidesism fails to adequately convey the failures of the media in 2024."
• Robert Wright congratulates Elon Musk on becoming America's first true oligarch: "Musk is far and away the most dramatic example of concentrated power. By virtue of his undeniable intelligence, creativity, and drive, he has wound up with an impressively diverse portfolio of influence."
• Micky Horstman, writing an op-ed in Crain's, wants public transit in Chicago that people actually want to use: "Other cities have figured out how to run a transit agency post-pandemic. Chicago can, too."

But after all of this, yesterday Jennifer Rubin made "the case for election optimism." So I'll end this post with her argument:

Americans need to retain perspective, muster up patience, let the vote counting proceed, avoid bestowing MAGA legal challenges credibility they do not deserve and insist on bipartisan recognition of the winner. We can do this, America.

Yes, we can.