It's going to be a while before we get this one all figured out.
In the few days before the race, it appeared that Kamala Harris was completing an almost perfect campaign. She had raised plenty of money, her poll numbers were up, significant Republican names were deserting their party in droves, and it looked like she was going to pull ahead in most of the six essential, bell-weather states. All the leading names on MSNBC and elsewhere were gleefully congratulating themselves over the predicted Democratic win.
Donald Trump, the Republican opposition, presented every conceivable disqualifying factor imaginable to the candidacy. He was a convicted felon, with four additional felony criminal cases pending. He was a renowned womanizer, having bragged about his conquests on national television. He was a multiple divorced man, into his third marriage with two prior wives still living. Six of his companies had filed for bankruptcy. Many insiders have declared that he overstates his wealth by millions if not billions of dollars and he refuses to release his tax returns or allow any independent examination of his wealth. And he is an unrepentant liar with one published account indicating over 30,500 of deliberate and outright statements in his prior campaign that are plainly untrue.
From other instances of election history, any one of these flaws would have been determined sufficient to bury the candidate and drum him off stage without any chance for election. In this case, Trump possesses them all.
Despite all the positive elements to the Harris campaign, and despite all these detractions to Trump's go, the election wasn't even close. It was over by midnight, with a margin in Trump's favor of over four million votes. With about 90% of the total vote in, the current delegate count shows over 270 electoral votes for Trump and less than 220 for Harris. Those who determine such matters for national television announced before midnight that no matter how final vote totals are spread or what the final electoral vote turns out to be, Kamala Harris could not prevail. For the first time in many years, the Republican candidate was declared to have won both the popular and the electoral vote.
How did this happen? What went wrong? The Democratic poohbahs are beside themselves trying to explain. So far, there does not appear to be any consensus among the well-known prognosticators on any single cause for the debacle. The best that appears to be said is that any of three factors might explain or combine to explain the result:
First, Harris was essentially an unknown candidate to national politics. Her post as vice-president was not helpful, being entirely in the shadow of Biden. This required that she both introduce herself and establish her credentials as meaningful to the office of president in the time allotted. She had only four months to accomplish this objective. Trump, on the other hand, has been running for this office for eight years.
For those who regularly follow the news on MSNBC or CNN, or even Fox News, Harris's potential was well developed, despite her lack of national credentials. But the vast majority of potential voters do not watch these resources, seeing only the few minutes of news offered by the national channels, if that. Many do not watch the television news at all. For these voters, Harris remained an unknown person.
The second reason is the historical proclivity of the Democrats to get tangled up among themselves over negative issues bearing on their own candidate. In this case, this meant the development of objections to the position of the government – which included Harris as vice president – to participation in the wars involving Isreal in the Mid-East. This led the nosiest of potentially Harris voters to declare that they were either voting for some third-party candidate or staying home.
Finally, there is the unspoken and unspeakable discrimination of some voters against women, or against non-white persons of color, or against persons of any religion other than Anglo-Saxon protestant, being the so-called white WASPs. In this case, Harris presented all three problematic factors – being a woman, of color, married to a non-Christian. None of these factors were discussed openly, but all were apparent in on-line and private comment.
As to the whopping deficits in Trump's background, the best explanation here is that the Trump voters see Trump as agreeing with them on major issues, rather that they having to accept Trump, with his negative factors being simply ignored as not bearing upon the issues where there is agreement.
We are about to break history on an important number of fronts. The negative or unknown aspects of Trump serving as president have significantly increased since his first term, and we have no true history to look back upon to measure his performance or predict the outcome this time around.
So: hang on to your seats, everybody, every day will offer a new opportunity for adventure.