2024 Election Postmortem
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Hello, everyone. It's Michael Shermer, and it's time for another episode of The Michael Shermer Show. This, a special solo commentary on, yes, the election. Ha ha.

I recorded a commentary before the election, and so I thought I'd follow up. I'm calling this Postmortem 2024. Well, the results of the 2024 presidential election are in. Trump took 312 electoral votes versus Harris's 226.

Clean sweep of the Electoral College. And he also ran the table with the swing states and earned 3,204,000 more votes than Harris overall. The overall count was 75,243,164, if you're counting for Trump, versus 72,037,991 for Harris. Again, 75.2 million versus 72 million. Okay, so there's our difference. I was in Dubai the week of the election for a conference on the future, which...

Seems apropos in as much as Trump is already changing the future of this country, as he works tirelessly to put into place his agenda as outlined during his campaign. As I record this, it remains to be seen how much change he can implement after he becomes president on January 20th, 2025, but there's a good chance it will be substantial.

In my previous commentary before the election, in which I uprated those who threatened to leave the country if Trump wins, already many of them have changed their minds, such as Trump's former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, who sounded irritatingly perplexed that anyone ever took him seriously. Well, I didn't. I ended with two quotes, which I will repeat here with additional commentary since they still apply.

The first is from John Stuart Mill. I call it Mills Maxim. Quote, a party of order or stability and a party of progress or reform are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life. Our country needs both Republicans and Democrats, and the pendulum swings back and forth between them.

So as an exercise in quilling your anxiety if you're a Democrat and feeling the sting of the loss, let's count backwards from Trump's latest victory to note how applicable is Mills' maxim. Here we go. Republican, Trump, 2025 to 2028. Democrat, Biden, 21 to 25. Republican, Trump, 17 to 21. Democrat, Obama, 13 to 17. Democrat, Obama, 2009 to 13.

Republican, Bush, 2005-2009. Republican, Bush, 2001-2005. Democrat, Clinton, 97-2001. Democrat, Clinton, 93-97. Republican, Bush, 89-93. Republican, Reagan, 85-89. Republican, Reagan, 81-85. Democrat, Carter, 77-81. Republican, Ford,

74 to 77, Republican, Nixon, 69 to 74, Democrat, Johnson, 63 to 69, Democrat, Kennedy, 61 to 63, Republican, Eisenhower, 57 to 61, Republican, Eisenhower, 53 to 57,

Democrat Truman, 49 to 53. Democrat Truman, 45 to 49. Democrat Roosevelt, 1945. Then he died. Democrat Roosevelt, 41 to 45. Democrat Roosevelt, 37 to 41. Democrat Roosevelt, 33 to 37. And so on, back into the foggy mists of history.

So if you're a Democrat, don't panic. There's a very good chance your party will be back in power after the 2028 election, if not the 2020-32 election. Look forward, not back. Don't leave the country. Republicans will help you pack, so don't do it. And for God's or whoever's sake, don't shave off your hair or implement the 4B program of no dating, no marriage, no sex, and no babies.

Well, you really only need three. If you're not having sex, you're not going to be having any babies. The B's, by the way, are Korean words from when this protest program was implemented during the Me Too movement. What are these people doing? Do you really think that Republicans are going to watch all those TikTok, Instagram, and X videos of young women shaving their hair and foregoing men and think, oh dear, we better temper our plans with more liberal policies to save these women from themselves? Hell no.

It only reinforces their characterization of your party as a bunch of blue-haired, nose-ringed, tattooed, out-of-control, screaming libtards who should be granted a Darwin Award for taking themselves out of the gene pool before reproducing. The second quote is from Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address in 1861, when our nation really was on the brink of actual civil war. Quote, "...we are not enemies, but friends."

That is such a beautiful quote.

we really do need to strengthen our bonds of affection for people in the other party, or dare I say, people in the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Constitution Party, or the Natural Law Party, not to mention the independents and those who wrote in Mickey Mouse on their ballot. Hopefully there are no domestic battlefields in our future, or foreign battlefields for that matter, although that's a separate issue. But there are hearts and hearthstones aplenty across this broad land.

to swell the chorus of our union. And I do firmly believe that, in addition to our inner demons, nature has vouchsafed us with better angels. Now would be a good time to channel them. Okay, let's do a quick post-mortem on the election itself. Here was my initial reaction that I posted on X the day after, to which I still hold. In coming days, everyone doing a post-mortem to explain why Harris lost, what she did wrong, etc.,

Keep in mind that Trump ran a winning campaign. In other words, it's not so much that Harris lost, but that Trump won. Here's an analogy. The New York Yankees made some notable errors in the World Series, but the Los Angeles Dodgers were clearly a better team. They outplayed them. So the better candidate, the better team won. I also advised avoiding deep root causism.

Trump won because Americans are racist. Harris lost because voters are misogynist. First of all, neither of these things are true. Of course, you can find isolated racists and misogynists, but the vast majority of Americans are neither. And we know this from decades of social science research and polling data. Those are losing side rationalizations.

Also, watch out for single causes. It's crime or abortion, immigration, inflation, wokeness, etc. These are factors, but not one of them can explain the outcome. On the other hand, I advise, be careful of overdetermined causal theories. Not all factors matter or matter equally, and most pundits are just talking out of their hats without even bothering to provide evidence or test hypotheses and

counterfactual reasoning about causality. Already we've been hearing, if Harris had picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro instead of Tim Walz, she would have won. Or Harris alienated Hispanics by calling them Latinx. Polls consistently show that Latinos and Latinas do not like, nor do they use, the activist virtue-signaling neologism Latinx. Or if only Harris had gone on Rogan, etc.,

Maybe cumulatively these factors mattered to a certain extent, but overall, Trump was just a vastly superior candidate and campaigner, seemingly preternaturally so. I remain to this day utterly astonished at how an overweight, out of shape, fast food eating, Coca-Cola drinking senior citizen can seemingly run circles around other candidates. I've never seen anything like it in all my years. Again, a baseball analogy.

Yankee superstar Aaron Judge says his error in Game 5 of the World Series, quote, will stay with me until I die. Really? This is unnecessary guilt. If it was Game 7 between perfectly matched teams and the error was in the ninth inning that cost them the game, OK. But that was not the case. The Dodgers vastly outplayed the Yankees. Likewise, Kamala Harris made some errors, yes, but Trump was a supremely superior candidate.

Don't blame Harris so much as recognizing Trump's extraordinary campaigning abilities. OK, that said, Trump's positive candidate and campaigning qualities were in part a result of Biden's and Harris's and the Democrats positions on a number of key issues for which they could have done much better. In other words, here are some of the errors on the Democrats part.

on which Trump and the Republicans capitalized, I'll go from minor to major, with the idea that in 2028 or 2032, the Democrats course correct on some of these issues. We need a good, just left of center or centrist Democratic Party, and we don't have that at the moment. One, Harris should have gone on Rogan.

especially after a disastrous town hall meeting with Anderson Cooper on CNN, in which she babbled incoherently about the errors she made in life that she could not seem to remember, or on the view in which, when asked how she differs from Biden, could only sputter, nothing comes to mind, which was quickly turned into a social media meme with her picture. Think about the power of that image. A picture of Kamala Harris with the words over her face, nothing comes to mind.

Unbelievable. I watched all three hours of Trump on Rogan, and then I watched all three hours of J.D. Vance on the same show. They both came off as much more likable than they are on the campaign trail, where they endlessly repeat political slogans and talking points. You can't do that for three hours. Well, maybe Trump could, but he didn't on Rogan.

I had read J.D. Vance's best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, when it was published, and I loved it. It's an amazing book. I highly recommend it. Audio, too. Even better. But after he shifted ever rightward when he ran for and won a Senate seat in Ohio, I began to dismiss him as something of a kook, an extremist, a woman-hating, pro-life, anti-abortionist, etc. But three hours on Rogan made me realize he's a really decent guy.

with whom I happen to disagree on a number of issues, but nevertheless a reasonable person with whom I could have a beer and talk politics. On abortion, for example, Joe is pro-choice, as am I. And Joe pushed him, J.D., on his pro-life stance, and Vance immediately acknowledged that the autonomy argument that women should have control over their bodies was totally understandable, even reasonable, even though in this case Vance places the life of the fetus over that of the mother.

Essentially, he made the same argument I've been making, although I end up going the other direction. That is, you have a conflicting rights issue in the abortion issue. The rights of the fetus, the rights of the woman, the mother, you got to pick. All right. But neither side is completely crazy. All right. And that's what Vance did. That's what three hours on Rogan does for you. You get to know somebody. I've been on Joe's show seven times. He's a stand up guy who just likes to talk to people.

to get to know them, to learn something from them, and have stimulating conversations, and he's a master at it. If you queue up one of the episodes thinking this will be like a 60-minute investigation with teams of researchers outlining key talking points and penetrating questions, that's not what this show is about.

Short of Joe's producer, Jamie, pulling up articles and videos from the Internet in real time as the conversation unfolds, which is absolutely riveting, especially when it doesn't go the way the guests thought it would. Like when my conspiracy book was published, I went on Rogan and Joe and I got into a discussion about the JFK assassination. Of course, he loves that topic. Who doesn't? And whether or not the so-called magic bullet was damaged enough to have gone through tissue and bone.

And there it was. Jamie pulled up images of the bullet so we could settle the issue right there. But don't expect.

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So all that in mind, perhaps Harris's character would not have been enhanced by tens of millions of people listening or watching her chat with Joe for three hours. But honestly, I suspect otherwise. Is it possible that inside that seemingly hollow shell of a candidate is a genuinely reasonable person with some good ideas on how to improve the country? She can't have gotten where she is by being a complete empty airhead. No way.

But we'll never know because she didn't do that show. Second, Harris should have distanced herself from the radical trans activists by taking the position that every medical establishment in Europe and the UK and some medical associations in some U.S. states have already adopted. No hormone treatments or surgeries for minors.

Watchful waiting for troubled teens suffering from a variety of issues like anxiety, depression, cutting, and suicidal ideation, for which they're wrongly told that if they transition to the other sex, those negative emotions and thoughts will magically disappear. They don't. And to be blunt about it, she should have publicly stated,

that as a lifelong Democrat, feminist, and defender of women's rights, as president, she would protect women's privacy, women's spaces, women's prisons, women rape centers, and women's sports from the men violating them by pretending to be women. Sorry to pound this, but it's just gotten out of hand. Trans women are not women. They're men. Men cannot get pregnant. Unless by man or men, you mean women.

And such distortion of language is so egregious that it only alienates potential voters. And Harris should have renounced her idiotic stance on the government funding sex change operations for imprisoned illegal aliens. How many of these are there? Probably not many. I couldn't find any numbers, but next to none would be my guess from what I've read. And yet, because she could not renounce this barking mad trans ideology, it hurt her in the election.

Related to this are Skeptic Research Center data that we collected over the summer. 3,000 people randomly selected and surveyed by a professional data collection company called Qualtrics, and that cost us nearly $20,000 to do. By the way, special thanks to Ananda Saeed and Kevin McCaffrey, who run the center and analyze the data. Both are former graduate students of mine.

found very strong opinions by nearly everyone, including Democrats, against supporting the trans movement, especially transitioning minors and biological males competing in women's sports. For example, while we found that just over one in five very liberal women, that's a category very, very far left, say that it is true that men can get pregnant.

Outside of the very liberal cohort, roughly 90% of Americans across the political spectrum agree that men cannot, in fact, get pregnant. Duh. When undecided voters hear that, their indecision goes away. Harris's campaign should have paid attention to our data. Three, Harris should have countered Trump's insistence that economically the United States is in a hellhole and about to collapse. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And all she had to do is repeat over and over and over again all the positive stats, such as the stock market being at an all-time high nearly every week for the past year, or the rate of inflation collapsing over the past year, or unemployment numbers at near-record lows, or how strong the dollar remains around the world, and more. And she could have lied, like Trump and every president before him, going all the way back to Eisenhower,

and said that she planned to lower the deficit by cutting expenses and government waste. None of them do it, except for Clinton managed to do it. Every party grows the government, and along with it the deficit. But she could have at least nodded to the problem of the runaway debt, or perhaps even invoked the trendy economic theory called modern monetary theory, which holds that the government can print all the money it likes, because it's not an individual or a business.

Yes, many economists think this is pure voodoo economics, but not all of them do. So Harris could have at least sounded like she did some research on the problem. And if you don't have time to read a whole book or academic papers about it, there's a new documentary film on Netflix about it. Well, I don't know if it's on Netflix, but I watched it on a plane on my way to Dubai. That really lays it out. 90 minutes has everything in there, including the critics. She could have at least done something like that.

Four, immigration. I don't need to say anything about this beyond what every one of her critics has said since she became the candidate. Why didn't she do anything about it when she was the border czar? Did she ever give us a cogent answer? I don't think so. Five, crime. Again, I don't think Harris countered strongly enough Trump's claim that crime is at an all-time high. That isn't even remotely close to being true.

Crime rates in general and homicide rates in particular peaked in 1993, and they've been declining ever since until COVID and the pandemic when there was an uptick in 2021-2022, after which it started to come back down to the record lows it was pre-COVID. Maybe Harris didn't want to come off as a wonky data nerd, but a couple of data graphs showing the declining sawtooth curve with the tiny uptick that went back down might have helped.

Humans are very visual primates, and research shows that people are more likely to change their minds about controversial issues if you show them the evidence in the form of visual graphs. Even Trump understands this, as when he was pointing to his favorite graph on illegal immigration, when the assassin's bullet grazed his ear, a graph he then used over and over to great effect.

Six, academia. I find editorial cartoons often convey messages even more effectively than opinion editorials. And one from The New Yorker shows a couple of student age distraught liberals in a college cafeteria bemoaning the election lost with the caption, I can't believe that a year of us screaming at Zionists, taking over buildings, destroying college property and burning American flags didn't defeat Trump.

Look, these people are not liberals. They're illiberals and liberals should call them out on their bullshit. So what do the next four years hold for our future? Well, no one knows for sure because the future is largely unpredictable. But at the very least, we will see again what Trump did in his first four years, maybe on steroids now that he has both the House and the Senate. Well, looks like he has the House, definitely has the Senate, along with the Supreme Court.

But I remain optimistic that many of the changes will be a good course correction for the Democrats taking the country too far left. Remember Mills Maxim. If you disagree and remain worried, here's something to think about. The 2028 election.

Who will the Democrats run? And against who? Trump can't run again. And no, he's not going to get a constitutional amendment to overturn the current one that restricts anyone from serving more than two terms implemented after the Democrat FDR reigned for 15 years. So maybe J.D. Vance or Tulsi Gabbard or Marco Rubio or maybe even Elon Musk. OK, the last one was just for fun. Elon could be president of Mars.

Focusing on the future and what could go right, rather than brooding over the past and rehashing all the things that went wrong, is a proven technique of cognitive behavior therapy to improve one's emotional state. Finally, allow me to put a couple of items into perspective for the new Trump administration. Preface by a reminder of how many times on this show I have criticized Donald Trump's character, honesty, and integrity.

How bad can it be to bring the Ukraine war to an end by cutting a deal with Putin that ends the destruction of that country's cities and the deaths of countless innocent civilians while saving American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars? How bad can it be to negotiate a deal with Israel that brings the war against the Hamas terrorists in Gaza to an end and stops the massive killing of innocent Gazans who are presently collateral damage for the IDF?

while again saving American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. And what's wrong with talking to North Korea's Kim Jong-un or China's President Xi Jinping? It's harder to go to war with people you're talking to. So why not see if Trump can do what no president before him has accomplished? Maybe he'll fail, but maybe he'll succeed. Who knows? Neither Obama nor Biden has made much headway, so why not support the effort? In any case, like it or not, we're going to find out.

How bad can it be, really, that Trump plans to purge government bloat? And now we have Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. But crypto people will know Doge for something else. Elon just tweeted that there are 428 government agencies and he thinks it could be reduced to 99. Does anyone know what they all are, much less what they do?

sort of the government accounting office, which hopefully they will keep, since that's the one agency that's supposed to monitor the government checkbook. With our deficit of over $31 trillion, maybe it's not such a bad thing to try to do something about it. And then there are taxes and tax deductions. What's wrong with allowing parents to deduct from their reported income the money they spend on their children's education if they opt for private school or homeschooling?

I have paid private school tuition for both my kids, and I pay my fair share of taxes to support public school education. Is it unreasonable for me to get a little break in the same way I'm allowed to deduct the mortgage interest on my home loan, deduct the donations I make to charities each year, and the tax breaks I get for being married and having a dependent child?

Let me end this postmortem with an observation from the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer from his 2013 book, Things That Matter. Quote, politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because in the end, everything, high and low, and most especially high, lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and effervescent of cultures,

Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away, close quote. So let's work together to get our politics right. All right. Thanks for listening. This is Michael Schirmer.