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There are any number of things that might have swung the election outcome, since the margins in key states were still small -- by which I mean low single digits. (The swing from D to R, relative to 2020, not so much.) Still, in that respect, as in Florida 2000, the outcome was overdetermined. We tend to pick the thing(s) to blame that are consistent with our priors. Like after 2000, people who hated Nader blamed Nader. What about Monica Moorhead? Her votes would have swung FL to Gore too. Bernie says what he always says, and of course he could be right.

To be sure, it does matter for policy who wins, since we usually get advances in small doses. We did pretty well in 2020-22, really better than we had a right to expect, given the weakness of Democratic majorities in Congress.

Those things don’t interest me. It’s for the pros and the party establishment for whom they work. They’re not interested in what you and I think. They will cover their arses in whatever way is most convenient. This time around, the target appears to be “wokeness,” which means elementary respect for all the varieties of LGBTQI+ and immigrants.

I did some volunteering, nothing heroic, to help prop up the Dems in Virginia, where we got clear if not overwhelming victories. Sure, the outcomes matter, but as a socialist, to me that is not relevant.

The overriding problem in the longer term is how to blow up the R's racial monopoly with class politics, raising the question of whether class politics even has a future. It seems to be getting hammered all around the developed world. A parallel concern is whether we will have any democratic politics at all, after DT's minions get done wrecking public sector institutions.

The Left, left of the most progressive Members of Congress, is too small to tilt any balances along the lines of those 3-point voting margins. Our comparative advantage is ideas for the longer term, to make elections like this unexciting because we have the working class decisively onside. I have no such ideas myself.

I'm interested in whether there can be a Working Families Party in Virginia. I've gotten to know a bunch of liberal Democrats where I live whom I think are ripe for that sort of appeal. There's more than one way to be a socialist.

The MAGAs will be setting all sorts of fires, each of which will beg for attention. If I had to cite three, they would be the war, the evisceration of the Federal civil service (upon which much else depends, including my little pension), and the brutal, mass detention of immigrants.

The U.S. is already at war. It is directly blowing up things in Yemen and provisioning Israel to blow up everything else. If the Iranians respond by hitting a target that looks like another 911, we end up in a pretty bad place. So I think reviving a peace movement is Job One.

A peace movement will be attacked the way it was by Nixon and the FBI, back in the day. There is a history of how to cope with that. A successful peace movement, if history is any guide, will tend to branch out into other areas, to relate itself to more diverse issues. Everybody can think of ways that could happen. The key will be paralyzing the incoming maniacs’ use of their most accessible tools: the abuse of the nation’s armed forces, either domestically or abroad, and of its law enforcement apparatus.

A few recriminations floating around are less then obviously well-founded. One is the purported elevation of the likes of Liz Cheney and “NeverTrumpers.” For the Harris campaign, it would have been political malpractice to leave those votes on the table. It would take a very dim appraisal of the electorate to imagine there were so few of them, but here we are. Who could have imagined that a lunatic screaming “THEY’RE EATING THE PETS!!!” on national TV could be elected president?

Whether a Bernie-style campaign would have been an improvement is not obvious to me, purely from a practical standpoint, even though it would have been something inspiring. If it was indeed the missing dimension, which I would like to believe because it means there is a future for class politics, I have to wonder why a stalwart fellow like Sherrod Brown could not win his race in Ohio, not exactly the wine-and-cheese capital of the U.S. I doubt that Jon Tester made any sort of fuss about pronouns. He’s toast as well.