I hate election explanation columns. I had no intention of writing such a column for two reasons.

One is that the explanation for this election (and pretty much every other election) is too simple and concise to reach op-ed length.

The other — and the one justifying this column — is that no matter how many times people get told, they’re back next time with the same tired excuses (e.g. “it was rigged!”) and/or crowing (e.g. “America likes us — it really likes us!”) and/or fake, superficial soul-searching (“we didn’t EXPLAIN ourselves well enough”).

Let’s get the simple, concise explanation out of the way first:

Donald Trump won the election by getting, and because he got, 312 electoral votes, which is more than the 270 required to win a presidential election.

Kamala Harris lost the election by getting, and because she got, 226 electoral votes, which is less than the 270 required to win a presidential election.

Yes, it really is that simple.

Yes, it really is that concise.

And aside from one factor — the ability of the two candidates to enthuse their voters and get them to the polls — the reasons for the vote differentials are a dog’s breakfast of confusing details, each of which could have gone in other directions and changed the outcome.

To explain, I’ll look at Pennsylvania, a key swing state and in many ways a bellwether. Trump beat Harris there by about 140,000 votes out of about 7 million votes cast.

Why? Who knows?

Republicans thought Harris screwed up by not choosing governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate. They called her anti-semitic for passing him over, because he’s an Israel-supportive Jew. That may indeed have cost her some votes.

Democrats thought Trump had blown Pennsylvania after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at a Trump campaign event. Persons of Puerto Rican descent constitute about 8% of Pennsylvania’s population. That may indeed have cost him some votes.

Then there’s the US Steel situation. The Pennsylvania-based company wants to sell itself to Japanese buyers. Many Pennsylvanians, especially among the company’s 20,000+ employees, don’t like that idea. Both Trump and Harris oppose the sale, but protectionist voters seem to find Trump more convincing/credible on that issue.

It’s not that Trump explained himself particularly well to people on opposite sides of the issues. Nor did Harris fail to explain herself well enough to those voters. Voters disagree with each other. Someone wins, someone loses … and other than the vote counts, the “why” isn’t usually all that clear.

All we can really know is that, among those who voted, more than 98% supported some version of militarism and authoritarianism, which in turn implies that we’re never going to vote our way to peace and freedom.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

With 95% of precincts reporting nationwide according to Wikipedia (as of 4am on Saturday, November 9), it’s safe to say that the US presidential election is decided.

Donald Trump will presumably swear the oath and assume the office on January 20, 2025, having received votes from about 22.5% of the population.

Kamala Harris, having received votes from only about 21% of the population, probably has a more enjoyable life awaiting her as she re-enters the “private sector” after 35 years in various government positions. Her vice-presidential pension, being based on her time in and as president of the US Senate, comes to less than $20,000 per year, but she and husband Doug Emhoff share a net worth of at least $8 million. She won’t be missing any meals and she’ll have all the free time she wants.

All other candidates combined received votes from about seven tenths of one percent of the population.

The real winner of the presidential election, as usual, was None Of The Above.

About 57% of the population didn’t vote for ANYONE for president. Some of them had no opinion. Some of them had an opinion but chose not to vote. Some may or may not have had an opinion but just  weren’t allowed to vote.

So if you hear someone claiming a “landslide” or “mandate” for anyone but NOTA, well, now you know better.

Fewer than one in four Americans voted for Donald Trump, while more than one in five voted for Harris and a solid majority voted for neither of them.

Yes, we will end up with a murderous authoritarian in the White House for the next four years, but that’s business as usual and was always going to happen. The only question was whether the murderous authoritarian would be a Republican or Democrat. US elections are heavily rigged to produce one of those two murderous, authoritarian results, every time, without exception.

If you strongly preferred Trump to Harris or vice versa, you’re probably either ecstatic or depressed right now. I’m not sure WHY you consider the choice between a Ted Bundy and a John Wayne Gacy so important, though. You wanted a murderous authoritarian and you got one. Don’t be a sore winner, OK?

My sympathies definitely lie with the majority who didn’t pick one of your crappy candidates but who nonetheless find ourselves stuck with four more years of this serial killer circus.

See you in four years, if we both survive.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Unlike most advocates of tariffs in the Trump-Biden era, Alexander William Salter is willing to ask “Will Free Trade Bring Peace and Prosperity?” (The Wall Street Journal, October 29). The Rawls College of Business Administration academic even sees said peace as an admirable if uncertain goal, and acknowledges that the answer to the second half of the queston is probably yes.

Yalie JD Vance, and for that matter his high school social studies teacher debate opponent Tim Walz, could use some of that remedial Adam Smith 101. Vance puzzles over “the idea that if we made America less self-reliant, less productive in our own nation, that it would somehow make us better off.”  The “somehow” comes into focus when imagining US states taking Vance’s “we’re going to make more of our own stuff” mentality to heart, with New Yorkers attempting to plant vast tracts of orange groves while Floridians put up ersatz Appalachian ski slopes.

Yet Salter insists that while “tariffs … doubtless make us poorer … they can also make us freer.” The trivialization of free choice in the marketplace used to be the purview of those putting down schools of economics, from James K. Galbraith dismissing what he called the “freedom to shop”  to the book-length slam at Milton Friedman titled Not So Free to Choose. Restricting it makes us not so free, period.

Salter offers the conflicts embroiling the Athenian Golden Age and the modern United States as “counterexamples to the ‘capitalist peace’ hypothesis.” Those same cases were to Bertrand Russell exemplars of how “a recurrent product of commerce” is the need for merchants to cultivate a mindset of understanding “customs different from their own.”

The precarious balance between imperial and commercial power traced historically by Russell need not be left to happenstance.  If war persists even after “it became impossible to ruin others without imperilling one’s own investments,” as Emile De Laveleye noted regretfully in 1871, that devotee of free trader Richard Cobden was prescient to observe how “electricity had done away with distances” when it was newly generated by steam.

As to why “Europe’s economic integration didn’t stop the cataclysm of World War I,” it was the continent’s socialists who were the champions of internationalism at the time. Tom Mann noted in the March 1915 issue of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth that “the organized Social Democrats of Germany … singularly failed to practice the solidarity they had stood for;” Goldman’s autobiography stressed that non-participation by over ten million workers in that country alone would have had the effect of “paralyzing war preparations.”

Salter urges Americans “to weed out authoritarian rivals from critical supply chains.” The heavy-handedness that ultimately pushes them into rigidity and brittlenes is coming from inside the White House.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. The Future of Freedom Foundation Daily – November 9, 2024