People continue to argue about why the Democrats lost so strongly to Donald Trump. I write to argue that at least one of the reasons was the Dims' penchant for telling Americans that "things are good and you should be happy about it."
They continued to do this in the face of evidence that people believed things were bad and as a consequence they were unhappy. Telling someone they should be happy when they've told you they aren't isn't going to work. That is like trying to teach a pig to sing, you fail and it seriously irritates the pig.
Dims also made much of the argument that Trump once elected would be a dictator. It's an argument that could have had more credibility if we hadn't experienced four years of Trump wherein he was no dictator.
It can't have helped that the two parties had decided to speak for two different groups of Americans. Dims for the dispossessed, the disadvantaged, and the disgruntled. GOPs for the people who thought the country had been good but had recently lost its way. In 2024, nostalgia was a winning platform.
Add to all that the differences between a lackluster candidate who dropped out of a presidential primary before the first vote was cast and the most effective campaigner of this century so far, and in retrospect all the predictions of a razor thin win look like so much wishful thinking.
