This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 7 episode of "All in With Chris Hayes."
Since Donald Trump won the election, I’ve been basically hearing two different sentiments about where we are and what happens next, and, to my mind, neither one of them is rooted in a realistic view of what the election told us.
The first sentiment is one that President Joe Biden offered in his address to the nation: We’re going to be OK.
“We lost this battle,” Biden said on Thursday. “The America of your dreams is calling for you to get back up. That’s the story of America for over 240 years and counting. It’s a story for all of us, not just some of us. The American experiment endures, and we’re going to be OK.”
There is a better way forward — a path to be charted in the vast ground between “everything is okay” and “everything is screwed.”
That’s not going to persuade a lot of people in the pro-democracy coalition. I do not necessarily agree that we are going to be OK, or that the American experiment is going to endure.
We have to act to protect it and ourselves. And to be able to do that, you have to avoid falling into that other sentiment I’ve seen: total despair.
Across social media, I’ve seen lots of people saying things like, “Get ready to steel your spine for when they put you in the camps.” But when you tell people terrible things are unstoppable, you invite them to surrender to the terrible.
There is a better way forward — a path to be charted in the vast ground between “everything is OK” and “everything is screwed.”
To me, that really all comes down to understanding the fundamental lay of the land today. I can tell you one guy who definitely doesn’t understand that.
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump declared at his victory party in the early hours of Wednesday morning, noting that Republicans had won back control of the Senate.
While it is true that Republicans took back the Senate, it is not true that Trump got much of a mandate and it sure wasn’t unprecedented. But there are plenty of people on the left who seem to agree with him, who are online posting that it wasn’t even close and that it was a landslide, a total blowout.
It absolutely was not.
This was always polled to be a close election in a very evenly divided nation. And it was a close election that Trump pulled out, which was always an obvious possibility we basically talked about in every show. And he did win the popular vote, by a similar margin to the last time a Republican won the popular vote: George W. Bush in 2004 after the invasion of Iraq.
The basics of this election were that things just changed a little at the margins. The main thing that changed was that Americans overwhelmingly say the country is on the wrong track and they say that largely because they felt squeezed economically.
There is a lot to dissect about why that was the case. When Biden guided the U.S. out of a pandemic and a recession and tamed inflation while boosting real wages, industrial growth and infrastructure, it simply didn’t feel that way to so many American workers.
I’m as big a fan of Bidenomics as anyone — and I really continue to believe that it was substantively an enormous success, the best economic stewardship of a president in my lifetime — but it didn’t work politically.
We just got the verdict on it. It was, to many voters, just more of the same. That’s not a trend that is unique to the U.S.
Coming out of Covid, the entire world experienced a surge in inflation worse than any global bout in 30 years if not more. Voters absolutely hated it everywhere, from the U.K. to India to Poland to Argentina to Botswana to North Macedonia to South Korea and to South Africa, voters have punished incumbent politicians and parties in the wake of Covid.
According to U.S. economist Gennady Roodkevich, in all the major Western national elections that were held this year, incumbent parties all lost ground, most by double digits.
The Democratic Party was actually the most successful of those incumbent parties. They only lost 7% of their support.
There’s no denying that people everywhere around the world stopped, looked at where they were and said, "This stinks." Take that to heart. All the theories about what to do now and how to resist the worst MAGA plans and win people back to decency and democratic pluralism depend upon understanding and grasping the situation clearly.
Right now, the biggest task we have is persuading our fellow Americans and shifting public opinion. And doing it every time MAGA Republicans overreach and pick fights that are going to be disastrous for them. And they will overreach.
You heard Trump talk about a big mandate as if this was a red-wave election. It wasn’t. You’ve got lots of Democrats winning narrow, contested races in tough terrain. And you have a bunch of House seats uncalled and the balance of power yet to be decided.
Republicans might get a narrow trifecta in Washington. But the fundamental truth about the United States in the 21st century is that it’s basically a 50/50 country, in which, underneath the surface, this massive class realignment is happening.
In every given election, one side or the other gets a little better part of the trade that’s happening between working class and college-educated/professional class voters. Basically, that’s what happens in every election.
You heard Trump talk about a big mandate as if this was a red-wave election. It wasn’t.
Trump and Republicans got the better part of the trade in 2016. They lost some ground in 2018. Then Democrats benefited from the trade in 2020 and it worked pretty well for them in 2022, particularly in the suburbs. That’s the basic electoral structure.
Now, to be very clear, we do have to reckon with the information environment that this is all happening in. The most autocratic forces in our political culture are also able to manipulate public opinion through social media and misinformation in ways that are really scary. Ways that we have to really reckon with. That needs to be a big part of our conversations going forward. Indeed I’ve spent the last several years writing a book about it.
But this was not a walkover. We’re not looking at Ronald Reagan’s win in 1980, or Richard Nixon’s in 1972 or even Barack Obama in 2008. It was a toss-up race in a bad environment for incumbents. In a 50/50 nation that previously was ruled with a narrow but durable pro-democratic majority. I think it still has a pro-democratic majority in which a certain sliver of those folks just voted on other stuff.
America didn’t give itself over to Trumpism. We got this outcome because three out of 100 people switched their votes, in a nation that weathered a global pandemic and global inflation pretty well, but not well enough.
Yes, it’s disappointing but it’s plenty to build a pro-democracy movement on.