Almost a Year After America's Biggest Electoral Mistake, Is the Reality of What Happened Finally Sinking In?

My afternoon commute home from work gives me a good forty minutes to listen to liberal talk radio.  It's a refreshing end to the day, and the program that's on as I'm driving home is actually called "Driving it Home with Patty Vasquez," on Chicago's WCPT.  One of the things I've learned over years of listening to "liberal talk radio," which I first discovered on a Pacifica network station in Houston, is that there's a personality involved in the programming which is missing in most talk stations.  The hosts and their guests share their feelings, they don't cover them up or put on the stone face to avoid revealing their feelings.  

Well that works for me.  As we have gone up and down this political emotional roller coaster, one of the most comforting things to me has been the reflection of some of the exact same feelings of frustration, anger, incredulity, fear, and occasionally hopelessness that has resulted from this country's biggest electoral mistake.  So the variety of guests Ms. Vasquez brings to her show tend to be a random sample of various levels of Democratic party politics in the Chicago area, and you get some real honesty from some of them.  

The emotional ride that's come along since last November has been reflected multiple times on the show, by the host, as well as most of her guests.  I find myself sitting in the car in my driveway long after I've arrived just to hear the end of an interview where someone has said something that just made an instant connection.  Her guests have expertise, but they also have personal experience and most of them are in positions where they can look around and give a pretty good analysis and offer some reasonable, and hopeful, solutions.  

So where are we, at this point?  What conclusions have I drawn from sharing similar emotional reactions to our common political experience? 

1.  There seems to be widespread consensus, after the initial emotional reactions of disbelief, grief, professional analysis and response to the events that have transpired, that for good or for bad, we must resign ourselves to the fact that Trump will be President for three more years of attempted destruction and dismantling of American Democracy.  

The Constitution has left us surprisingly few options to correct a major electoral mistake.  That's kind of strange, considering that the founding fathers who wrote it did not place much trust or faith in the electorate, but initially devised a system whereby the more elite, wealthy, formally educated members of society had an outsized voice in choosing who would serve in Congress, the Presidency and the judiciary.  

The options that were left, such as impeachment and removal from office, depended on a level of integrity existing in any kind of partisan, political party or movement that would have control, at least in part, over who gets elected.  That integrity no longer exists, which means that the party in power which first arrived at a critical crossroads moment of having to choose between doing the right thing and protecting their own political interests did exactly what Washington warned against in his farewell address, and gave up integrity for their own interests.  

Aside from that, there is no Constitutional way to get rid of a President whose election has proven to be a major political mistake.  The fact that someone so untrustworthy, dishonest, and incompetent made it to the White House is a corruption of the values that were in place when this Constitution was established and ordained as the law of the land.  The fact that, after four years of demonstrating that incompetence, and corruption, this unqualified bastard was re-elected is the sign of a serious deterioration of the social fabric of the population.  The inability of our public education system, the free press, and the religious institutions of this country to prevent someone as incapable, corrupt and inept as Trump from being re-elected is a clear sign of major deterioration of the kind of values necessary to preserve, and benefit from, American Democracy.  

I don't always agree with some of the experts I hear on Vasquez's show. Some of the more frustrating comments come from political educators, a political science professor at a local university, or a Democratic party analyst, who tend to be cynics, lack optimism and seem to have had their senses dulled by too much partisanship and not enough real world experience.  And there are a few who just don't seem to have any sense at all when it comes to considering Trump as under multiple felony criminal indictments, and as an existential threat to American democracy.  Seems those in educational institutions have a tendency to categorize everything into chapters, and they just don't really get that this is not politics as usual.  

Education, especially what is available in the public sector, is one of the instutitions that has failed to provide the kind of informed electorate necessary to avoid the election of demagogues and criminals.  So when I hear a professor of political something pontificating on causes of the problems and solutions for the future, I tend to be skeptical.  One set of midterm elections will be a temporary fix.  That will finish Trump, but what's to keep the remnants of the extremist MAGA GOP from nominating another anti-patriotic, anti-American values candidate like J. D. Vance, Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Marco Rubio, or some flaming racist bigot like Nick Fuentes? 

2. There is considerable confidence exhibited in those who are involved and engaged in direct resistance movements, expecially in the Chicago area, and in Illinois and the Democratic Party strongholds of the upper Midwest.  

One of the major contrasts I observe between Illinois Democrats and those in other places is the willingness to invest time and resources into resisting Trump.  I watched as Rachel Maddow, in a speech she made aired on MSNow last night, I believe, declared Chicago's victory over Trump on the issue of National Guard presence to reduce the crime rate, and to carry out his anti-American immigration reform.  It's not easy to gaslight Chicagoans with off the top of his head lies about crime statistics and law enforcement in the city.  The crime rate in Chicago is down, no thanks at all to Trump, thanks to the Biden Administration, the Pritzker Administration and the city council.  

What we saw here was the epitome of Trump ineffectiveness.  National guard, untrained for either law enforcement or as a support force for immigration authorities, piddled around for a month, spending taxpayer dollars, using up their employers' time off for service, and accomplishing little more than trash patrol.  Ultimately, the Supreme Court upheld the Constitution in declaring that the President had no basis for calling them out in the first place, and shut the operation down without any benchmark of success to declare.  Billions of taxpayer dollars will be spent on bogus executive orders that can't possibly achieve their objective, because the objective, based on a Trump lie, does not exist.  

The real problems are getting resolved by decisive leadership at the state and municipal level.  And as multiple guests on Driving it Home report, there's a sense of unity and cooperation that has been involved.  There appears to be a consensus which attributes things moving in the right direction to the most competent gubernatorial administration we have seen in Illinois for a long time.  

3.  People are getting involved and doing things.  No one here is sitting around complaining that we can't do anything because we aren't the party in power.  Almost every weekday, there is a guest on this particular show that comes from some active segment of resistance to Trump, in their own place and time.  

Every day that goes by will be a day that some American value or principle in the Constitution will come under attack from the Trump administration.  If we accept the reality that he will likely be there for three more years, then throwing up hands and whining about it will mean that regardless of whether or not the opposition succeeds in taking power out of the hands of the MAGA party, it will take much more money and effort to restore things than it would if the resistance keeps itself moving forward, countering bad moves with good ones where it can, and blockading as much damage as is possible.  

Every afternoon, I listen to a whole array of guests who are running for office, or already serving, on school boards, in the state legislature, on library boards, city councils, across northeastern Illinois, southeastern Wisconsin, in the Minneapolis area.  I invested time in both 2020 and 2022, as health permitted, to cross the state line into Wisconsin to knock on doors in Kenosha County to get out Democratic voters and elect Democratic candidates, and the needle moved to the left in both years.  I think that the success of Democrats in holding the governor's mansion, picking up legislative seats and turning the Wisconsin Supreme Court to the left, and keeping it there, has a lot to do with the efforts made by the Illinoisans, including a large number motivated by Driving it Home, in the southeastern part of the state.  

Holding many of these lower level offices and supporting those who are in them is a key to success for any resistance to MAGA power grabbing.  And promoting these normally obscure politicians is a big key to their success in being able to win and hold office.  

4.  Is there collective awareness that 2024 was a major political mistake, and that voters staying home over petty partisan differences is never acceptable.  

I think there is.  

In spite of the lack of conclusive evidence that Harris lost because she was a woman, or because she didn't have enough time to campaign, or any one of a dozen other excuses, the problem, reflected time and time again by the guests on Vasquez's show over the past year reflects the same problem that has plagued Democrats for decades, and that is the inability to discern the narrative, and then latch on to it and make it the theme of their campaign.  

It was affordability, inflation, prices going up and incomes stagnating, that was the theme which kept just enough voters at home to make the difference.  Three states, as it turns out, the same three that won it for Biden in 2020--Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, would have made the difference and we've heard, on the level, exactly what it was that kept people at home.  Every afternoon, just after 5:00 p.m. , callers and guests give their realistic perspective, and affordability is the theme that works its way to the top.  

Confirmation is coming in polling data that is showing a much bigget shift back to the right than the electorate took in 2024.  But in those very random conversations with callers and guests every afternoon, the confirmation is clear in that Democratic and anti-Trump politicians are experiencing success by travelling along those themes.  

I'm not hearing that the Epstein files are going to be some sort of silver bullet politically for Democrats.  If Trump's support from the GOP depended on his morality, ethics and integrity, he'd never be where he is now.  They don't care about any of that.  The bottom line is, as it has been for a couple of centuries of American politics, is how will what the government does benefit me personally in a financial way.  And the Democrats and Trump opponents seem to have lined up under something that resonates with the majority.  Keeping the ACA funded will be a huge factor, not whether Democrats win the midterms, but how many seats they will gain as a result of their support.  

I look forward to see how this political theme will generate success for the Democrats, enough to win the mid-terms, if we can stop the massive MAGA effort to try and cheat, and translate into the first real step taken to save the nation from disaster.