I WAS WRONG LAST WEEK - UPDATED

The question on every Democrat’s mind this past week has been: how in the actual fuck did we manage to lose to that cognitively-impaired looney old guy spewing hate and lunacy?

Flailing for an answer led many to make wild accusations about what Democrats had and had not done, based on incomplete data.

I was one of them.

I have seen repeated headlines this past week about how the Democratic party and its political coalition have been “shattered” or are now in “shambles.” The complete results of the election that are now coming clear with the winners of closely-fought races being declared, does not in fact support these dire comments.

Top line: Donald Trump is being shown now to have beaten Kamala Harris by one to two percentage points.

The Blue Wall margins range from 2 points in Pennsylvania to slightly under 1 point in Wisconsin. We lost Georgia by 2.2 points and North Carolina by 3.3. The entire contest was won inside the margin of error that the polls had been showing since she entered the race. He did not exceed the projections. A win like he got was statistically probable four times out of five according to Nate Silver. It didn’t come from “nowhere.”

It was not a blowout like LBJ’s 44-state win over Goldwater in 1964, or Nixon’s 49-state-and-DC win over McGovern in 1972, or Reagan’s 49-state win over Mondale in 1984. We should also remember that after losing 44 states in 1984, the Republicans won in 1968; after losing 49 states and DC in 1972, the Democrats won in 1976; and after Reagan’s big win, the Democrats won a two-term presidency eight years later.

Nothing is forever in American politics.

“Deep dive” analytical pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post, and political-insider newsletters like Puck News, state as a given that the Democrats are in such disarray that it will take years - or more likely decades according to the more “serious” pieces - of rebuilding for the party to recover.

This is complete and total deep dark brown bullshit.

Any over-educated, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable low achieving upper-middle-class white boy masquerading as a “DC Democratic Consultant,” (or any grass roots lefty) who wants to accuse me of being in denial, or naive, or failing to recognize the gravity of the crisis, is merely continuing to prove he keeps his head securely up his ass, as he always has.

And yes, last week I was as guilty of this arrant crap as any other asshole who had convinced themselves that Kamala was going to win despite every problem the campaign faced.

In the immediate days after Election Day, I said that Trump’s win was “the most thorough defeat” of he Democrats since 1984.

Yes, I had my head up my ass. Fortunately, it’s not a locale I enjoy as much as others do, so when I pulled out for some fresh air over the long weekend, I managed to take a look at some factual news, and discovered that the sky had not fallen.

I was wrong.

None of that in any way diminishes the fact that we are in the middle of the greatest constitutional crisis sice the Civil War and that Donald Trump is the single greatest threat to democracy in the history of the country.

But bear in mind the fact that - unlike Hitler - Donald Trump is lazy, proudly ignorant, a lifelong incompetent who can’t manage anything as well as your average six year old, and a dumber than shit clownfucker. And since birds of a feather do indeed flock together, he is surrounded by clownfuckers.

But do remember what Billy Wilder told me 40 years ago: “When I returned to Germany twelve years later, all my friends who told me the Nazis were clowns, were dead. Killed by the clowns.”

As Charlie Sykes puts it so well, “Clowns with flamethrowers, still have flamethrowers.”

But we do not help ourselves prepare to face the greatest crisis of our lives by engaging in meltdown, spiraling into a demoralization that robs our energy to oppose Trump at every point and put this fuckwit on his enormous ass in 726 days.

These MAGAmorons are incredibly dangerous. But let’s remember a lesson an old friend no longer here once told me was the most important lesson he learned in boxing: when he climbedin the ring and look at his fearsome opponent, he would remind himself, “That guy puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like me.”

We just don’t have to beat up on ourselves in order to face them. Democrats are theoretically the smarter of the two species of hairless bipeds loose in America, so let’s start using the fact that Homo Sapiens is the evolutionary experiment in biological intelligence that can foresee the results of its actions, and modify its behavior accordingly. Theoretically.

If the “professional Democrats” had more self-respect, and a spine that was more solid than a single-strand overcooked Angel Hair pasta, they would be less likely to be nodding in agreement to Republican disinformation and claims from a press dedicated to portraying us in the most negative terms.

Remember: They’re Homo Sap. We’re Homo Sapiens. Act like it.

And also remember just how easy it is to fall off the path. I am going to discuss what we actually achieved, and the nature of the threat we face, in coming posts.

UPDATE: It doesn’t look like Trump will win a majority of the popular vote. Via Nate Silver: Updated estimate:

Harris 75.5m votes (48.4%)

Trump 77.8m votes (49.8%) other 2.7m votes (1.7%)

Total turnout 156.0m votes (vs 158.6m in 2020)

Trump margin +1.4%

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