Anger was the storm that blew away Democrats

By Mike McGann, Editor, The Times @mikemcgannpa

Well, that could have gone better.

For a myriad of reasons, Democrats nationally and around the commonwealth got their butts kicked in a way many — including me — didn’t see coming.

Not surprisingly, finger pointing and angst are pervasive throughout the party right now as people want to assign blame for such a devastating loss, both with Kamala Harris and Sen. Bob Casey Jr. losing (apparently, the count continues but the math looks tough).

While there certainly may have been things Democrats could have done better, I see a lot of the issue being atmospherics — the circumstances (which, honestly a lot of us should have seen and noted) were awful.

For a lot of reasons, some legit, some not so, people are really angry. And it seems clear that voters really wanted to take that anger out on someone, in this case Democrats. It was a bit like a Cat 5 storm blowing through the body politic. As with a storm, placing blame is ultimately futile. The only job left is to pick up the pieces and work to rebuild, while weathering what is like to be another stormy four years of the Trump Administration.

And yet, I honestly think Democrats ran a pretty good race in general — but like a Texas Hold’em player holding an off suit 2-6 as hole cards, they needed a miracle from the river (the last card revealed) to hold off disaster. I think the joy and optimism that replaced the literal dread when Harris replaced Joe Biden on the ticket fooled a lot of us that there might be enough momentum to win.

Donald Trump literally had the trump card: people angry about a lot of issues, from the pandemic to inflation and corporate greed and wanted to express that anger by voting for Trump. And please, ignore the buzz about “missing votes.” The vote count tends to go slow, especially out west, but it appears turnout is roughly in line with 2020.

So, here we are.

It’s scary, because if Trump does half the things he promised during the campaign things will get ugly quickly. Deport 11 million immigrants? Hello, $8 tomatoes. Place tariffs on foreign imports from everywhere? 15% inflation, massive job losses and a deep recession if not worse. The list goes on, but you get the idea.

Fortunately (unfortunately, maybe) Trump tends to not follow through and seems to enjoy chaos for the sake of chaos, so between that and what will be numerous legal challenges, he may find implementing his proposals a lot harder than pushing them out during campaign rallies.

Hopefully, two years of chaos and division will allow Democrats to regain one or both chambers of Congress to act as a check to Trump in 2026. Until then, hang on, it’s going to be a wild ride.

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A semi-related issue was the lack of good local news outlets to report what’s going on in people’s hometowns. That sort of news matters, but it is increasingly difficult to make the business proposition of local journalism work. Mixed with the intentional spread of disinformation (some by foreign powers), it is proving a toxic combination for our democracy.

There’s a lot of reasons — people don’t like local pay sites and generally won’t pony up (which I totally get). We’ve lost a ton of local retailers to Amazon and the like, which means less options to advertise (and those small stores remaining are struggling to pay their staffs, let lone invest in marketing). Google continues to hose over small digital publishers, cutting ad revenue while locking in a monopoly.

The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, once a behemoth of a newspaper, will cease publication early next year — leaving only a digital edition. That should be an alarm bell: how many other print newspapers will survive the next couple of years? Can digital outlets find a revenue source to replace print? I don’t know.

There are no easy answers — I’d love to expand our coverage to where we were just a few years back, but reporters expect, rightly, to be paid. Our ad revenue basically keeps the lights on, right now — server costs, etc. To do more, we’d need more.

I’m open to suggestions, of course, but we need to find a solution to this nationally, or we’ll continue to see the spread of misinformation and disinformation as primary information sources.

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