Why She Lost

Occam's Razor tells the tale

Why bring this up now? Because data firm Catalist recently released an analysis of voting patterns of the 2024 U.S. election, revealing that 30 million people who voted in 2020 failed to show up and vote in 2024. Such drop offs are common, with them always being more than replaced by new voters, but this drop off was the largest in U.S. history, and this time they were not all replaced. Compared with the 2020 election, 3.2 million fewer people voted in 2024. Also compare this to how 27 million more people voted in 2020 than in 2016. It was the first time there were fewer new voters than drop off voters.

The year 2020 was a fucktacular shitnado of ass. As far as his first term goes, Trump was at his worst in his final year, and he utterly botched the Covid response. Covid was the reason Trump lost in 2020, but also because the Democrats ran a white guy. Trump grew his number of voters considerably over 2016, but Biden grew over Clinton significantly more. Trump increased his number of votes by another 3 million again in 2024, but Harris got 6.2 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020.

Harris lost support across the board. Regardless of age, race, or gender, Harris got fewer votes compared to Biden 2020. The one group she didn’t lose support among were “super voters,” the most engaged people who always vote. In other words, people who pay some fucking attention to politics and knew what goddamn nightmare Trump 2024 would be made sure to vote for Harris.

Why did so many more drop off, and so few new replace them for 2024? There is no single answer that explains the entirety of the reason, but there is one piece of information that explains most of it.

Before we get to that, the idea that the 2024 election was stolen has little merit. Moving forward, I expect American elections are at a high risk of being neither free nor fair, but cheating doesn’t explain Harris’s 2024 loss.

Part of the reason is that a lot of people were motivated to get out and vote for Biden in 2020 because of the shitshow they were experiencing under Trump. They wanted Tangerine Palpatine out, and got the job done. Alas, people have short memories, and the steady and stable Democratic leadership of the next four years made people complacent about how shitty things could be if Trump was allowed to return to power. The situation in Gaza and the leftwing smear campaign against Harris didn’t help either, but these things only account for a small part of the loss of support.

Did the Democratic Party make mistakes? Obviously, because they lost. Would they have won if Biden had stepped down much earlier and held a longer and more open leadership race? Quite possibly. But it’s important to note that the moment Biden stepped down and endorsed Harris, the support for her was massive, and she did secure the necessary delegates easily. She raised a shit-ton of money, and the party was united behind her. There was a real belief in the Democratic Party that she could win.

I want to bring up Canada for a moment.

In early January of 2025, due to failing support, Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his pending resignation. There was a quicky leadership race and Mark Carney won the Liberal leadership in early March. An election was soon held, and white guy Carney won against another white guy who was seen as a Temu Trump, a Poutine Palpatine.

See the similarities? There was a current leader who was struggling in the polls, so he bailed at the last minute and was quickly replaced and an election soon followed. The systems are different, but all this bullshit about how Harris was forced upon Americans is just that: bullshit. The Democratic Party gets to choose its leader, and it chose Harris, believing she could win.

Where they fucked up was in not realizing how fucking racist and sexist America truly is.

We can nitpick the little things, but that was the big thing. Biden won in 2020 because he’s a white man. Harris lost in 2024 because she isn’t either of those things.

I recently finished writing the first draft a new book titled Greedy Sexist Religious Bigots: A History of Humanity, which will be published next year. Those four things named in the title have been encoded into our DNA over dozens of millennia because they conferred a survival advantage. They were then further ingrained at the societal level as we built systems and institutions and power structures that forced avarice, misogyny, zealotry, and hatred to become pervasive in human populations across areas and eras, although to varying degrees.

The top five most racist countries in the world are Iran, Belarus, South Korea, Myanmar, and Israel. But when it comes to “Western” nations, the United States is by far the most racist. The only Western nation more sexist than the United States is Greece, and there are those who think Greece is only tacitly “Western,” included as a legacy because it helped give birth to modern western civilization.

A nation’s history shapes its destiny, and American history is really fucking racist and really fucking sexist. Obama is Black, but male, and so he won because he was compelling candidate, and people were sick of eight years of Republicans. Clinton is female, but white, and while she lost the Electoral College, she still received 3 million more votes than Trump. Harris, conversely, received 2.3 million fewervotes than Trump.

Saying Harris’s 2024 loss was because of Gaza, or the election was stolen by Musk, or there wasn’t a proper leadership race, are all just cover stories for the real reason.

Harris lost because America is too racist and too sexist to elect a woman of color as president.

Those who cannot remember the past … need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.